FIVE DAYS IN THE SUN

Creation 2026
A piece for 12 dancers
World premiere - June 21st 2026, Opéra Berlioz - Le Corum, Festival MontpellierDanse.

Five choreographic tableaus, following the five movements of Mahler’s fifth symphony, opening five choreographic portals into a deep emotional and structural journey through the human experience.

FIVE DAYS IN THE SUN is a work for 12 dancers, developing over five acts and unfolding in an open space governed by a complex and dynamic lighting storyline. The costumes created by polish designer Inez Vicher, add to the layering and richness of this choreographic voyage, exploring transformation, resilience, and catharsis.

This new work, which will open the 2026 edition of Montpellier Danse before going on tour, is all the more important in Emanuel Gat's career as a choreographer as it opens a new chapter for the company: the creation of a new group of dancers that is currently in the process of being formed and that will be composed of 12 performers coming from around the world to live and work in Marseille.

FREEDOM SONATA (85’)

World Premiere Festival de Marseille, 20th and 21st of June 2024

“Everything that is, is of everything else that is,
nothing is of itself alone.”

2024 will mark 30 years of me having the privilege and joy of practicing the art of choreography. 

I’ve created my first solo, ‘Four Dances’, in 1994 to music by Bach, and 30 years and more than 50 works later, I always have the feeling I’m just starting. 

If I need to define what I’ve been working on in the course of these 30 years, it would be the refinement of a human system - as in, the ways in which individuals come together, access their highest potential, cohabit and collaborate.

LOVETRAIN2020 (70’)

Premiered on October 3rd, 2020 at Montpellier Danse 40 bis, Opéra Comédie, Montpellier (FR)

“LOVETRAIN2020 is marvelous, a rambunctious yet rigorously staged piece for 14 dancers, set to tracks by the British pop group Tears for Fears (big in the ’80s), outlandishly costumed by Thomas Bradley: ruffles, peculiar shapes, huge skirts, missing parts of clothes, plaid mixed with satin.

Mr. Gat melds gestural detail with larger-scale movement, sometimes working against the music’s rhythms, sometimes with them, frequently in silence. This eccentric physical dialogue with the music — mostly in a minor key and vaguely gloomy in content yet somehow gloriously singalong — is exhilarating.

LOVETRAIN2020 is everything the small-scale, often somber work made for video during the past months is not. It’s loud, joyous, physical, close. (…) A celebration of the body, of performance, of life.”

Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times

INTERVIEWS WITH EMANUEL GAT