Welcome to the Age of Content

In a cultural landscape obsessed with individualism and personal brands, LA(HORDE) offers a radically different model: one of shared authorship, mutual trust and collective vision. Formed in 2013 by Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer and Arthur Harel, the Marseille-based trio forged a unique path across choreography, film and visual art. For them, working as a collective was never a strategy; it was a necessity, a shelter, a way to confront the art world’s structures and expectations together.

Over the past decade, LA(HORDE) has become known for its high-intensity, politically charged works that question power, identity and the role of the body in digital culture. Now leading the artistic direction of Ballet national de Marseille, they’ve proved that a modern national dance institution can be transdisciplinary and subversive. 

Their latest production, Age of Content, considers the negative impacts of social media. Across four ‘chapters,’ the show looks at 20 years of digital spaces. It begins with dancers, all wearing the same face and Juicy Couture tracksuits, fighting one another as if vying for the prize of ultimate influencer. The next sequence sees dancers moving across the stage like Grand Theft Auto avatars, before finding their humanity. The third explores hypersexualisation on social media, before the final scene – an eruption of energetic jazz and contemporary, mixed with well-known TikTok moves, is a manic cycle punctuated only by Cardi B’s WAP dance. The result is an assault on the nervous system: anxiety inducing and exhausting, eliciting the same physiological response as doomstrolling. It’s enough to make you want to throw your phone in the Seine. 

LA(HORDE)’s ability to create a technically impressive and entertaining performance, one that also holds a mirror up to its audience, makes it one of the most vital and interesting artist collectives at work in France today.

What made you decide to work as a collective? 

LA(HORDE) In the start it was really out of need: need for shelter, to not face the art world alone, to emancipate oneself within the group. You could hide a little bit behind the persona of the group itself [in order] to be able to speak about subjects that you were maybe too shy to talk about or explore. It was giving us a sense of anonymity. We trust each other so much that we can really create a safe space. 

How do you maintain that cohesive conversation between each other while embracing individual perspectives?

LH First off, we are in constant exchange because we’re always together. Even when we’re working on current affairs we’re always like, “Have you seen this movie?” “What do you think about this?” Or: “Let me tell you about this show.” This is constant, so the subject we’re going to explore naturally emerges. 

I love to make an analogy. You know how archipelagos are built? There is magma under the crust, it’s constantly there. This is the same for us – creativity is not an on and off button, it’s always there. But then we have formats to create things that make it an actual eruption happening at a certain time and date, and this will create an island. When we look back, we see that we had several eruptions and this is all our work. This is why there is never really a moment when we make a decision about what we’re going to talk about. It’s very rare that we can identify what was brought by who. 

It sounds like a process that would really strip you of ego. 

LH Totally, but ego can save your life. There is the ego that makes you stand up for yourself, but then there is the wrong ego when you want to look at yourself too much. For this part it’s definitely freeing us. 

What inspired the idea behind ‘Age of Content?’ 

LH We’re very present on social media and how we display our work on social media is also different, but there is a ‘promotion’ because you need to get people in a room. This led us to be very aware of different channels available for artists today and then as an audience, because we’re not native – the internet started when I was something like 15, and for the rise of social media, I was in my early 20s. It was something I really saw growing. Before that, you had TV for the news, the VCR and theatres to watch movies… There were very specific situations to watch these things and you had an object linked to certain moments. Now, with this [holds phone] device, we have this new word that is “content.” This is so depressing, because “content” is empty. Now you don’t even know if what you’re watching is AI or not. But you watch news, fake news, documentaries, silly people falling, genocide, starving children, a girl talking about her Birkins, skincare, healthcare, how to get thin in 30 days, calisthenics, health…. And everything is at the exact same level. I know that I can still decipher and recognise, because I inherited this from different specialisations for that stuff – I knew which page in a magazine was dedicated to advertising. And this? [Points at phone] Are we developing our critical thinking enough to understand how it has completely suppressed the formats? 

I think we wanted to go through it and understand what it would look like to decipher an existential crisis while doomstrolling in a multiverse. This is exactly how we built this show. Sometimes we were even playing a bit like scientists. We were like, okay we have this big scene where people are fighting – we’re working with stunt men and women from cinema – but we thought, what if, in the fight, we get this [piece of]  contemporary culture that is Juicy Couture? It was really layering things to create new meaning, but also to grasp this feeling of something that is ever-growing. We were also feeling bad about it in our own experience. How many times have people said, ‘I’d love to get off social media, it gives me anxiety’? It’s a very unhealthy space. I think we needed to, not just identify, but study it. To understand what it was doing to us. 

Did you get to an understanding? 

LH As lucid as you can be, there is something at work that is deeply rooted in our subconscious.

How do you stage a dance that comments on digital identity when ours are so fragmented? 

LH In what way is it fragmented for you? 

We have different parts of our identities that we show on different platforms – Facebook is for family, Instagram is work, TikTok is unhinged and unfiltered… 

LH Ah, it’s interesting how you show up online. Similar to the world, you don’t behave the same way when you’re going to the doctors or after work. I don’t know if it has so much to do with identity as individuals, but definitely it has to do with identity because the show starts with dancers wearing the same mask. It makes them look all the same. 

Is that commenting on this idea of an ‘Instagram Face?’

LH Yes. The phenomenon of Kim Kardashian. I don’t even know if she is a phenomenon herself or if she’s a symptom of society. All these horrible phrases that her husband was saying like, ‘Stop wearing so many things, your body is the accessory.’ Wow, let’s really go back on everything we fought for with one fucking sentence. There’s a whole shift. And it really worked. Do you remember how we were making fun of BBLs 10 years ago? Now it’s absolutely everywhere. I’m not judging at all, I look at this as a phenomenon and try to understand how it’s linked to capitalism. I’m all good for people feeling better and doing whatever they want, but there is a sense of conformity, of trying to fit a standard, that I don’t think is actually empowering. It’s not this transformation to signify difference; on the contrary, it’s to start to all look the same. This is one of the aspects that we wanted to explore. 

About the fragmented worlds, this is exactly like the doomscroll. It’s super fragmented. This is our most fragmented show ever. It’s four chapters that are going one after the other, but you can still follow the thread. 

Except the social media thread never ends unless you decide. Whereas the performance has to end at some point. How do you decide when to end?

LH Exhaustion. 

So the same ending as doomscrolling. 

LH Yes. I think we’re talking about acceleration as well. It was funny, we wrote the show three years ago. Elon Musk was not getting into the American government, but he was a huge reference. As a libertarian, he had this narrative where he believes in accelerationism – to go very fast from one system to another – which is super brutal and violent. His ego is not in the right place and he wants to see the rise and fall of civilization. I understand, I love to learn about this in history books, but he actually wants to witness it, which is completely megalomaniac. 

Who is your Mastermind? 

LH There is one person we always quote: Pina Bausch, because she said “I’m not interested in how people move, but what moves them.” I think it’s simple but fucking deep. Then, in terms of theatre, we’re crazy for Romeo Castellucci. This one made us cry, collectively. I remember people around us were like, ‘Look at them, they’re crying.’ We were sobbing, all the fluids coming out of the nose. He is a proper Mastermind. Then, for sure the mind of Audre Lorde, Wittgenstein, [Stanley] Kubrick. I cannot pick just one.