Invited in 2023 by the Festival de Marseille to create a large-scale piece for around 100 amateur male and female dancers, Aina Alegre has created PARADES & DÉSOBÉISSANCES, a participatory project inspired by large popular events—celebrations, parades, processions—and by ritual gestures drawn from her choreographic research conducted over the past decade. She draws on her Catalan origins and the collective energy of Mediterranean feasts to imagine a monumental dance, anchored in rhythm and performed by around a hundred participants.

Inspired by these festive rituals, Aina Alegre conceives of crowds as an ephemeral community and a living architecture, offering a new carnal and festive memory to public spaces and heritage locations.

After Marseille, the choreographer recreated the piece in different contexts and cities: in 2024, at the Palais des Sports in Grenoble; in 2025, in Annecy and Lyon, as a wandering performance in public spaces with 200 participants, in collaboration with Bonlieu Scène nationale and the Défilé de la Biennale de Lyon. In 2027, the piece will be recreated in Barcelona in collaboration with the Mercat dels Flors and other Barcelona partners.

The number of dancers, the gestural and sonic power, as well as the dialogue between space, architecture, and choreographic composition, contribute to the unique dimension of PARADES & DÉSOBÉISSANCES.

“This piece will be performed in other contexts and architectural settings, creating new choreographic variations on the same work thereby generating a community of dancers who have shared this experience in several cities and countries. What interests me about this project is to form a collective body while leaving room for diversity, as well as becoming one with different architectural heritages, confronting the work with the public space, in order to give a new memory, a new energy to these places/spaces/heritages through a collective, powerful, and joyful dance.” Aina Alegre