Rambert and (LA)HORDE are changing what it means to watch dance with ‘We Never Should Have Walked on the Moon’

They already worked together in May on Bring Your Own, where (LA)HORDE — the choreography trio behind the Ballet Nationale de Marseille — brought their movement to Rambert’s dancers for a spectacle at the Southbank Centre. But the London-based dance company and Marseille’s national ballet have not truly become one until now with We Never Should Have Walked on the Moon, a show inspired by a (supposed) quote from singer Gene Kelly to astronaut Buzz Aldrin, in which he said he “never should’ve gone to space”.

With, this time, both dance companies performing as one collective, We Never Should Have Walked on the Moon will also take place at the Southbank Centre. Programmes might be available, but rather than guiding you through a traditional black-box theatre experience, they instruct you with titles, times, and stages for you to choose your own adventure — which performances you want to see, and maybe even take part in. It’s probably not encouraged to walk right through the middle of the performance, but if you feel so compelled, that’s your decision to make.

“We are giving you possibilities, and by giving you possibilities you can actually dismiss or indulge the way you want to go,” says Rambert’s Artistic Director Benoit Swan Pouffer. “But whatever you choose is not wrong. If you want to see the same piece twice, or if you want to run around between them like a maniac, you can! Suddenly we’re empowering the audience — you’re the decision maker and that’s what makes this different.”

With the rise of Artificial Intelligence, and its inundation in our everyday lives and social media feeds, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between the real and the fake. Nothing has escaped the overuse of new technology — not even art, something that seems so innately human. The only way to experience art, dance and to feel something truly real nowadays is to do so in person. Not just to see it, but to feel it. 

“We spend our days and lives on our phones and we flip and we switch and we like, but to what extent?” Pouffer continues. “I think nowadays people want real life, because what we see on our screen, we don’t know if it’s been tinted, or changed, or edited to a point that it’s not real anymore. The only way to make it real is to be present and see it with your own eyes.”

‘Moon’, as the director dubs it, is not only a live performance, but it offers the audience a sense of autonomy that is missing from digital spaces. We can choose the things we engage with online to a certain extent, but here the audience member is the curator. And with the average screen time for adults in the UK passing seven hours a day, these experiences are more valuable than ever.

“You can really feel it,” Pouffer says. “There’s nothing that can screw your vision or approach to it because you see with your own eyes the sweat rolling off the dancer. “For me, this performance is kind of a tribute and a platform for audiences to experience something different.”

This performance isn’t just unique in this way, though; but also the way in which (LA)HORDE and Rambert have approached dancing as a whole. Unlike more traditional — and often elitist — forms of dance, like ballet, the dancers perform in a way that strips back the movements into something that those who don’t speak the language of dance can still understand and relate to.

“Firstly, understand your audience and who you want to touch, and then know how to understand your craft,” Pouffer explains. “For my dancers, I know exactly what they like, what they crave and what they consider good or bad. So I make sure the level is to their expectation but also that my story is clear. For [the company’s recent show] Peaky Blinders, it was having a bit of voice over to lead you through the story, but not hold your hand all the way through.” 

In We Never Should Have Walked on the Moon, however, the storytelling relies solely on the dancers’ bodies. “For Moon, it’s a bit more concept driven,” the choreographer says. “The subject matter is the body, and how in this age the body is important because of how much it can communicate. We don’t speak the same language, or live in the same country, but we all have a body. If I’m limping, you know I’m hurt. If I’m hunched over, it might spark something in you emotionally.” 

The dancer’s movements look as much like roller skaters, basketball players or boxers as they do highly-skilled dancers. In that sense, their body language and positions are human in a way where we can all relate on some level. “I feel like ballet can be so elitist and so many people feel so excluded from it, but the work we do with (LA)HORDE is so pedestrian, it’s very human,” says Seren Williams, who’s danced with Rambert since 2021. 

Despite We Never Should Have Walked on the Moon already having been choreographed and performed by (LA)HORDE in France, Rambert dancers were presented with the unique opportunity to contribute to the piece, influencing the original choreography with their unique attributes. “I don’t think we were trying to copy and paste what they did, plus we all have very different bodies approaching different roles, so naturally it’s going to look very different to the original,” says Williams. “They encouraged us to embody it in the way we wanted to.”

Another aspect that can’t be replicated (or rehearsed) is how individual audiences will engage with the show. “I don’t think there will be a physical boundary between the dancers and the audience,” says Williams. “We might have people who will want to walk right through the middle, and we’re going to have to navigate that which is kind of exciting — breaking the boundaries of traditional theatre to an extreme level where they’ll be able to see the sweat dripping off us.”

To Pouffer, it matters much less what the audience does than how they feel. And this thought process not only pushes the clean-cut lines of what dance is ‘meant to be’, but attracts a new kind of contemporary crowd from varying backgrounds. “(LA)HORDE surprise me,” he says.” Some people may say, Oh they’re not refined. But they’re pushing the boundaries as far as what’s considered dancing. [We’re in an] age of content. A piece they created uses TikTok dances. Who thinks of that?”

We Never Should Have Walked on the Moon goes beyond personal experience, then. In actuality, it’s less about what the audience sees as much as commentary on society. And that is why the two companies have for the first time ever, fully merged to create ‘Moon’ — the ultimate commentary on human connection, reality and the democracy of dance.

Rambert and BALLET NATIONAL DE MARSEILLE, under the direction of (LA)HORDE, join forces to transform the entire Royal Festival Hall and the wider site of the Southbank Centre with the UK Premiere of We Should Have Never Walked On The Moon (3 – 6 Sep). This large-scale project is made possible with the support of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels.