A little bit of the moon

ImpulsTanz Festival [ENA] The performance A little bit of the moon is a quietly luminous duet that treats collaboration itself as its central subject, rather than as a mere means to an end. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Rabih Mroué, both long‑established figures in their respective fields, step into the studio not to chase the current lunar hype of orbits and landings, but to ask slower, harder questions.

How can two artistic universes—Belgian post‑minimalist dance and Lebanese theatre experiment—meet, listen to each other, and build a shared space in a world marked by hostility and noise? From the outset, the piece feels like the trace of a long conversation. You sense that it has grown out of years of exchange about life, art and politics, and that what appears onstage is not a neatly scripted result, but a live continuation of that dialogue. Movement, text and music emerge in overlapping strands: sometimes De Keersmaeker’s precise, looping geometries lead, sometimes Mroué’s spoken reflections or theatrical interventions pull focus, and often they share it, negotiating timing and attention in real time.

The overall tone is intimate, exploratory, more like watching two people think together than like being presented with a finished thesis. De Keersmaeker’s choreographic presence is recognisable in the way lines, circles and walking patterns inscribe the space. Yet here, those structures are softened, opened to interruption by speech, anecdote or silence. Mroué brings his own language of minimal gesture, deadpan humour and political allusion, but he, too, allows it to be disrupted by the demands of dancing with another person. The duet thus becomes a kind of “third space”, where each artist’s habitual tools are slightly de‑stabilised in order to accommodate the other. This mutual vulnerability gives the work its emotional charge.

The title—A little bit of the moon—suggests modesty, a refusal of grand cosmic claims. Rather than offering sweeping metaphors, the piece stays close to small acts: standing beside someone, sharing a rhythm, offering or withholding touch, listening to a phrase before answering. In a time when public discourse is increasingly polarised and performative, these gestures of careful partnership feel quietly radical. Dance, music and poetry function not as decoration, but as ways of marking and sustaining the act of being together despite difference.

What stands out is the work’s resistance to spectacle. There are no explosive climaxes, no virtuosic displays designed to dazzle. Instead, the piece invites the audience into a slower, more contemplative mode of watching, where nuance matters: a shift of weight as someone decides to stay instead of leave; the cadence of a sentence that reveals doubt as much as conviction; a shared breath that syncs two bodies, if only for a moment. In that sense, A little bit of the moon feels deeply out of step with the heroic narrative of “conquering” space. It offers, instead, a modest proposal: that in a “increasingly spiteful world”, a small, carefully held pocket of dialogue—between disciplines, between geographies, between two people—might be its own

It should be a form of resistance. As a meeting between De Keersmaeker’s Rosas and Mroué’s theatre practice, the piece doesn’t seek to reconcile all differences or produce a seamless fusion. Its strength lies in showing the seams: the pauses where translation is needed, the asymmetries in experience, the shared laughter when something fails and is tried again. That “little bit” of the moon, then, is less a celestial object and more a metaphor for a fragile, reflective light the duet manages to carve out: not large enough to illuminate everything, but enough to see each other by.