(LA)HORDE, the multidisciplinary trio blazing a trail in dance

This article is partly taken from the summer 2026 issue of Dazed. Buy a copy of the magazine here.

Après moi, le deluge premieres on June 30 at the Montpelier Dance Festival. See exclusive photos from (LA)HORDE here.

At the Brit Awards in February, Rosalía and Björk stood centre-stage at Manchester’s Co-op Live arena to perform Berghain, the brooding centrepiece of the Spanish artist’s acclaimed 2025 album Lux. During the song’s outro, the stage flooded with 40 dancers, the UK hard dance scene and beyond: choreographed by multidisciplinary trio (LA)HORDE, their bodies thrashed, spasmodic and ecstatic, somewhere between a techno dancefloor and a gospel church mid-rapture. Berghain had always been (LA)HORDE’s favourite track on Lux; when Rosalía said it was theirs to choreograph for the Brits, they were thrilled.

(LA)HORDE is led by Marine Brutti, Arthur Harel and Jonathan Debrouwer. At the Ballet National de Marseille, where the group have been directors since 2019, the courtyard is filled with palm trees, birds flitting from frond to frond. “We managed to create our own little version of a utopia,” (LA)HORDE says. And this utopia extends to the make-up of the group, which comprises queer, trans and non-binary people, communities the classical dance world has historically failed to adequately accommodate.

The collective is now a global phenomenon. Their films are housed in the collection of the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and have screened at MoMA in New York. They’ve worked with artists and visionaries including Madonna, Sam Smith, Spike Jonze, Ivo van Hove, Christine and the Queens, and Angèle. Their video for the latter’s What You Want was shot on the streets of Marseille on an iPhone over the course of a mere 14 hours – a process which lent the footage, in their words, “a form of urgency”.

(LA)HORDE began life, as the best things often do, on a dancefloor, and then in the smoking room: those claustrophobic, nicotine-yellow closets that have always been a crucible of creativity. Brutti and Debrouwer had met at art school in Strasbourg, but it was in the clubs of early 2010s Paris, in the febrile heat of the city’s queer nightlife, that they connected with Harel. The three artists who hadn’t quite fit in anywhere else found kindred spirits in each other.

Labels have never been important to them – but soon after uniting, they understood they needed a name for their newly formed trio. (LA)HORDE arrived from two directions at once: a sci-fi novel by Alain Damasio, La Horde du Contrevent, about a crew that assembles across generations to find the origin of the wind, and Debrouwer’s World of Warcraft habit, where leagues are called “hordes”. The brackets around “LA” were a political decision – the French language demanded a feminine article, but the group wanted to push back against the confines of gender. “The Horde could be three people, 100 or 1,000,” (LA)HORDE says.

Many of them didn’t formally train as dancers, which is precisely the point. They experienced some impostor syndrome at first, working with dancers of formidable technical ability, but (LA)HORDE understood the gap between what they could do and what their collaborators could do as generative rather than diminishing. “We respect their craft, what they put in in terms of intention and soul,” (LA)HORDE says. “It’s pure appreciation.”

The distinction runs through everything (LA)HORDE does – including the Ballet National de Marseille. Their appointment to the directorship could have absorbed them into the establishment, flattened their verve in the way institutions so often do. Instead, (LA)HORDE absorbed the institution into their world: today it’s a company which distributes shows where dancers perform alongside those with classical training and those with none, where club culture and hard dance sit alongside ballet technique without hierarchy. They are still pushing for better workers’ rights for dancers, for structural change within a national institution that does not always move at the speed they’d like. But (LA)HORDE’s existence feels, right now, like a necessity.

There’s a story (LA)HORDE tells about Madonna, for whom they choreographed the Celebration Tour, that crystallises their approach to dance. Relentless, old-school and “such a Christian about suffering”, Madonna was apparently struggling to access her instincts in the studio. And so she’d repeat the mantra: “I need to stop thinking with my brain. I need to find that instinct again.” (LA)HORDE later discovered the source of this wisdom: Björk had imparted it to her 20 years earlier, telling her fellow artist, “You need to be more animal.”

And there was Madonna, still reaching. “To see that she hadn’t entirely figured it out,” (LA)HORDE says, “was somehow so reassuring. She’s literally the biggest pop star that ever was. So it’s fine to not be entirely set.” (LA)HORDE are still figuring it out too, navigating the liminal space between identities and between disciplines – all while holding the door open, so others can find their way there as well.

Hair Stephanie Farouze at Artists Unit, make-up Eva Louise at ASG Paris using Byredo, (LA)HORDE collective Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer, Arthur Harel, dancers from the Ballet National de Marseille Nina Auerbach, Dana Pajarillaga, Elena Valls Garcia, Isaïa Badaoui, Titouan Crozier, Luca Völkel, Alida Bergakker, João de Castro Franca, Layne Paradis Willis, Arno Brys, Jonatan Myhre Jørgensen, Lung Ssu Yen, Isla Clarke, photographic assistant Patrick Igonet