Leïla Ka on Tour: Three Short Forms, One Powerful Voice

With the support of Teatroskop and the French Institutes in the region, acclaimed French choreographer Leïla Ka brings three of her most powerful short dance pieces to audiences in Slovenia and Turkey this September.

Each work carries its own urgency, form, and rhythm, yet all three resonate with Leïla Ka’s distinctive choreographic voice—rooted in hip-hop, shaped by her experience with Maguy Marin, and reaching toward questions of identity, vulnerability, and resistance.

Bouffées
Standing still, facing the audience, five women wipe tears streaming down their cheeks.
What grief do they carry? Does it even belong to them?
In Bouffées, Leïla Ka imagines how to tend to “the incurable”: to welcome it in order to transform it into a force of power and a rekindling of life.
1st Prize – Danse Élargie 2022, Théâtre de la Ville, Paris

C’est toi qu’on adore
They are two but could be a hundred, or a thousand.
Together, they launch forward—off-balance, ill, or momentarily joyful—into a fight against a vague adversity.
Heroines who are at times invincible, at times tragically vulnerable, they persist, fall, and rise again, driven by a life force that keeps them standing.
C’est toi qu’on adore is a cry of hope where the body expresses its most vital impulse.

Pode Ser
Pode Ser (“maybe” in Portuguese) explores the difficulty of being oneself. It speaks of limits, aspirations, and the confusion of being in the world and only oneself.
Leïla Ka engages alone in a raw dialogue, through various choreographic languages, in search of the multiple identities that make up a person.
Having entered dance through hip-hop and performed in Maguy Marin’s May B, she confronts the self, the other, and society in a relentless internal struggle.
Initially danced by Leïla Ka, Pode Ser has been performed over 200 times and was passed on to Anna Tierney in 2022.

Regional tour supported by Teatroskop Grants 2025.