The art world, and with it dance, is rethinking some outdated notions of who should have access to the circle of artists, who should be represented in the works, on the stages, and what themes of hitherto underrepresented minorities should now appear.

At Jean-Paul Montanari's Festival Montpellier Danse, three works exemplified how choreographers react to these changed expectations, expectations that are not always clear, in which roles or functions and in what number of subjects of the story they are formulated.

Even if there are only a few actors who prominently raise demands, and the majority of society rather lazily acquiesces to these demands rather than joins them - it is interesting to observe how dance reacts to this.

How history repeats itself is reflected in the most striking work, Ohad Naharin's choreography "2019".

How someone who has long been denied access to dance expresses himself in a choreography without dance, as it were, can be seen in Nacera Belaza's "L'Envol", while Noë Soulier's "First Memory" shows the highest degree of abstraction in that it dissects everyday movements, interrupts, alienates, rhythmically organized, makes interesting through repetitions.

Oppressive black

Perhaps the problem with contemporary dance is that it no longer seems to have an opinion about its means, since the audience also seems to like each of them.

Since it is more important who is speaking and less what, how concretely and how discursively one speaks, aesthetic judgments become less important.

Looking at Nacera Belaza's play "L'Envol" - "Flying Up" - one gets stuck in the throat when trying to classify her play.

The auditorium at Studio Bagouet in the Agora, the home of contemporary dance in Montpellier, is cramped and oppressively quiet, and the darkness is oppressively black.

Electronic sounds set in, a dull thumping, above which a malicious high-pitched whistling buzzes.

A motionless, dark figure becomes vaguely recognizable,

that mysteriously floats from here to there in the dark.

It is all a sensory effort to ward off the noise, to penetrate the darkness, but the image of the figure fades.

Later, the nerve-wracking sound continues throughout, faintly brightening every now and then.

Individual people in dark, veiling clothes stagger, striving in a circle around the stage.

The choreographer Nacera Belaza writes in the program booklet that she was concerned with the state of falling, she was fascinated by imagining the feeling of falling without resistance, the freedom, the fearlessness, the point at which the fear of death collides with the futility of fighting him.

Born in Algeria in 1969, Belaza is a self-taught dancer, a minimalist whose introspective work is characterized by the fact that her family never allowed her to learn dance techniques.

When the girl was four years old, the family moved to Reims, but things didn't improve for her as a result.

At the age of 27 she left her family.

The absence of colors, of brightness, of music, of interaction in "L'Envol" is difficult to endure.