The Brooklyn Rail

Leïla Ka cycles. She cycles through movements with unforgiving repetition. She cycles through dress upon dress, each article constricting or extending the body. She cycles through shades of womanhood, the dancers transforming before our eyes through abstractions of different life stages. Each cycle is regimented, exacting, and precise. A sense of nobility, or prophecy, sustains Maldonne like a pulsating heart.

It’s Leïla Ka’s first group work following three lauded solos and duets: Pode ser (2018), You’re the one we love (2020), and Bouffées (2022). Ka feels destined to work with an ensemble, with her command over unison movement and startling visual compositions. Designed for five dancers, Maldonne works its way through a wardrobe of forty different dresses, and each shift in costume calls the performers to change, chameleon-like, into another kind of woman. The shifts distill into repeated gestures—pleading bows and sensual hip rolls—dialed up with drama.

Repetition, to the point of abandon or exhaustion, persists in Maldonne, creating a performance out of routine. In its opening, the women appear as weeping widows, draped in frumpish and long floral gowns. They wear their despair with dignity, shrinking away to wipe a tear, before jutting their chin in a show of quiet strength. They get faster, sliding through their statuesque positions of grief and feeding into a collective song of sharp sobs. They get bigger, imploring as they bow forward until collapsing onto the ground, jerking themselves across the floor. The breath pulses, metronomic. On we cycle.

At certain points, the dancers break the chain when someone falls out of unison or they alter their pattern ever so slightly. As the dancers pull themselves off the floor, one woman remains prostrate. They continue without her. In one cycle, the women flip up their skirts as they push themselves from laying on their bellies to sitting back on their knees, and we get a flash of their bare asses. Their skin is gone in a blink as they start the pattern over again, but the vulnerability of the moment persists.

Amidst the cycling of gesture, another, overlapping cycle of Maldonne is one of breakdown and recovery. Emotion builds up like a dam until it breaks, and we see the women try to put themselves back together. It’s a pendulum between precision and theatricality, and each swing back and forth leaves the stage hollower than before.

When the women change from their floral dresses to slinky, satiny animal print pieces, they transform from despairing to lascivious. Kneeling, they force their knees open and close, open and close, manipulating the slit in the front of the dress. Their eyes stay trained on the audience. It’s an intense, almost primal depiction of sexuality, as the dancers grip the satin tail of the dress between their teeth or slide a closed fist down the fabric, extending it from their crotches.

But eventually, the rhythmic, repetitive, pulsing rolls of their hips cease and the women slap themselves with the fabric of their dresses. Their eyes turn exclusively inward, on their own bodies. The movement is self-flagellation, dripping with youthful, nearing girlish shame as they cry out in broken frustration. The women eventually rip off these dresses, leaving them bare in black underwear.

Every build and collapse feels like watching a small death—part of their character doesn’t make it out as the women emerge from the wings, donning a new dress, and with it, a new identity. The first breakdown feeds directly into a dramatized scene, where the dancers go between lip syncing and scream-singing along to Lara Fabian’s “Je suis Malade” [I am Sick]. After, they reappear on stage one at a time, luminous in bright floral frocks, to give a grand bow for the performance of their shame. They freeze. Five hooks drop from the ceiling, falling behind the women. Their faces drop, slowly. They realize what the hooks mean. So do we.

The hooks call for another transformation, as the women fold their floral dresses over their heads to form a mourning cloak, revealing swishing black skirts beneath. A version of their womanhood—one that they punished, then relished—is mourned. They hang up their dresses on the hooks and waltz, in unison; the dresses haunt the stage like ghosts.

The final, and lasting, image of Maldonne is the same as its beginning. The women end as they started, breaths pulsing like a heartbeat, in exacting tandem with their syncopated movement. It makes you feel as if we were always destined to arrive at this moment, giving the dancers’ struggle and triumph a sense of command and nobleness.

There’s a crucial distinction, though. As they cycle through the motions, the women peel back their dresses, layer after layer after layer, reliving the life and death of each shade of womanhood they’ve experienced. We witness the layers Ka has intricately built throughout Maldonne worn by the women all at once: cycles of movement transposed on cycles of being. Coming back to their start, you see that these cycles will go on—daughters into wives into mothers into widows, and on, and on, and on.