A Kid-sized Dance Exhibition

Charlotte Imbault

Danser, the plainly but aptly named exhibition currently showing at the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie in Paris, takes an action-based approach to dance. Immersive, joyful, and interactive, the exhibition is geared towards younger visitors, aged 4 and up. On a Sunday afternoon in January, CN D Magazine wandered through the various spaces to hear what visitors had to say.

Even before you enter the Cité des Sciences in Paris, the Danser exhibition gets you moving – you have to turn your head, walk on tiptoe, or do “lunges” with one foot forward, knee bent. After that warm-up, a suspended disco ball invites you to cross the threshold to Earth, Wind & Fire’s disco-funk tune “Let’s Groove.” Children follow the rhythm in front of a large screen. 7-year-old Anna explains: “The word ‘dance’ is displayed in capital letters in front of us: when I stand on the circle on the floor, every time I move, the letters match my movements.” Adam, 7, is jumping and turning “to see what it does to the letter.”

Leonora, aged 11, doesn’t spend too much time on this first activity and escapes into the section designed by choreographer Anne Nguyen, whose title, Tourner (“turning”), is written in large white letters on the colorful scenography. There are three possible entrances into three different cylindrical structures. Leonora chooses “hip-hop” because “a lot of dancers show you the movements. You can follow them, you can turn, and you can also make a lot of hand gestures.” Gabriel, 8, attempts “the wave” with his arms, while Cléo, 9, combines wheels and bridges. “But when the ball started, the video stopped,” she sighs.

She’s not the only one to experience this frustration: 9-year-old Djed, who came with a small group to celebrate Auguste’s birthday, was also stopped dead in his tracks. Every half-hour, the exhibition is punctuated by a ball imagined by choreographer Virginie Quigneaux: to encourage children to gather in the same space, some animations are interrupted. This is an opportunity to dance with people you’ve never met before, like Anna, who started a waltz with “a lady,” while Gabriel danced with his brother, his cousin, his uncle, and his two mothers.

A little further on, red-cheeked Diane, 12, shoes in hand, enters the “walking” space, designed by the collective Adrien M & Claire B. “What’s happening inside is brilliant! When you put your feet on the floor, it makes waves. I ran and tried to jump at a precise point to see them unfold around me,” she explains. “It’s a bit like throwing a pebble into the middle of a lake.”

The exhibition has no particular layout that participants have to follow. The circular arrangement of the different parts, symbolized by the action verbs, makes it easy to move around freely. One of these verbs in particular is often mentioned by children of all ages: jumping. With the very young, aged 3 and 4, it even becomes synonymous with dancing. Leonora, being an older child, reflects on her experience in the space designed in part by choreographer Vincent Delétang: “I was able to jump, but also to fall and turn, to put one foot here and another there. You can also watch yourself jump on video. I did the funniest jump possible: I jumped and turned at the same time. Then the video shows you all the steps of the movement broken down.” Unfortunately, Anna wasn’t able to experience this: “The first time, I couldn’t keep up with the timing and I managed to do it on the second try, but the technology didn’t work!”

A celebration of movement, the exhibition is essentially made up of screens – images to be viewed, reproduced, or interacted with. While glitches can happen, the technical ingenuity is striking. “On four screens, dances come and go, so you don’t have to move to see them all,” Anna notes in the circular space of the ‘meet’ section. Around a motion capture digital installation, the children seem equally fascinated. Here, technology not only accompanies dance, but also playfully induces it. Anna laughs at the way her body is detected: “If you take your feet off the blue tracks on the floor, ‘it’ no longer recognizes you. But if you move your feet while moving your hands, ‘it’ can reverse your image or even make it disappear.” Camille particularly liked these various “interactive characters, made of bubbles and glitter, which reproduce our movements and sometimes explode.”

As for Djed, he paid particular attention to what he calls the “iconic” dances, i.e. choreographies that have become famous, particularly on the Internet. In one space, films run for 2 or 3 minutes, showing different dance aesthetics and cultures. Camille recognized Billy Elliot, Anna spotted the animals from Madagascar and those from My Life as a Courgette. She explains: “Some videos made me laugh, and others were more serious, like the one with a dancer in a blue tutu and a crown that was spinning and spinning...” In the face of such virtuosity, Anna remained highly concentrated, having begun to learn ballet. With her class, she is preparing a choreography for her school’s end-of-the-year celebrations. To create it, she and her classmates are drawing inspiration from the videos. “Maybe I could do that move again,” she wonders before trying it out. “I point my finger twice to the left and then to the right.”

Located at the exit, the last part of the exhibition, Se Poser (“quiet time”), is often overlooked, as parents are in a hurry and children are no longer paying attention. This was not to Anna’s liking, as she was keen to leave a trace of her passage by writing on the large dedicated wall with a sharpie “Anna, dancer,” in her native language. On her way out, she asked her mother to repeat the warm-ups in the corridor in the opposite direction, so as to “say goodbye to the exhibition.” After all, dance, which this exhibition celebrates, seeps into our bodies and we take it with us.

Charlotte Imbault is an artist and art critic whose work unfolds between writing and spoken word. She creates situations in which people who have never met come together – whether through sound editing, interviews, the creation of a journal, programming, exhibitions, conferences or workshops. She was associate editor of the journal Mouvement, and she co-founded the journal watt in 2017, which is devised as an open-air studio; she also created the podcast What You See in 2018.

Danser
Exhibition
Curators: Sophie Manoff and Laurence Caunézil
Until April 28 2026, at the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie, Paris