An interview with Rambert’s Artistic Director Benoit Swan Pouffer
An interview with…
Rambert’s Artistic Director Benoit Swan Pouffer
You know how much I love a performance that becomes a space for real human connection — an act of resistance against the isolation and insecurities that digital spaces so often create.
Well, a new show at the Southbank Centre is exactly that. We Should Have Never Walked on the Moon is the result of a bold collaboration between two groundbreaking dance companies: London-based Rambert and Marseille’s (LA)HORDE, the collective that has redefined contemporary dance in the past decade with their uncompromising “post-internet” aesthetic.
Part rave, part contemporary dance, part live DJ set — and above all, a journey of freedom — the piece brings more than fifty performers into the Southbank’s iconic brutalist building, where we are free to carve our own path through foyers, corridors, terraces and backstage spaces.
To find out more, I caught up on a video call with Rambert’s Artistic Director, Benoit Swan Pouffer, trying to pin him down before his day disappeared into rehearsals. I’ve been following his creative journey for years, watching how he has turned Rambert into one of Europe’s most forward-looking repertory companies.
For him, this project is nothing short of audacious: not a single performance, but a complete takeover of the building, shared between two companies who see dance as a tool to break boundaries.
Credit: Manuel Harlan
“This is a true collaboration,” Pouffer told me. “Two companies, two repertoires, two different ways of moving but the same desire to stretch boundaries.”
(LA)HORDE — led by Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer and Arthur Harel — built their reputation on dismantling hierarchies in dance. As artistic directors of the Ballet National de Marseille, they’ve drawn on non-institutional vocabularies like rave culture, jumpstyle, and online movement communities. Their projects often blur the line between choreography and cultural intervention, asking questions about bodies, technology, and collective presence.
Pouffer first encountered them when curating Bring Your Own at the Southbank Centre earlier this year. He felt an immediate kinship. “I’ve been doing site-specific work since my days in New York,” he said. “When I saw how they approach the body, the politics of space, it just made sense to do more together.”
The provocation of the title — borrowed from an offhand Gene Kelly remark about the Apollo missions — sets the tone. This is not dance for passive spectators. Fifty performers, including Rambert and Marseille dancers, community collaborators, DJs, and even a limousine, will occupy the Southbank Centre in a three-hour event where the audience decides their own route. Maps are handed out, but no two journeys will be alike. “You might stay an hour in one room, then ten minutes in another,” Pouffer explained. “It’s your evening. Your choices make the performance.”
Such freedom carries risk, and that’s exactly what excites him. “It’s unpredictable. Each audience creates something different. But that’s the point. We live in a digital age of swipes and scrolls, everything instant and filtered. People are craving something real — live, unedited, unrepeatable.”
That urgency ran through our conversation. Pouffer spoke of a “hunger for presence” at odds with the way audiences now experience culture, half through screens even while physically present. In his eyes, We Should Have Never Walked on the Moon is a way to restore the body as our one universal language. “We all live in a body. We all understand what it means to inhabit one. It’s a way of communicating beyond nationality or speech. That unity is what interests me.”
For me, this show is also a creative challenge to London’s theatre ecology, still dominated by the West End’s predictable churn of musicals and spoon-fed narratives. We Should Have Never Walked on the Moon points to another model: participatory, unsettling, alive. (LA)HORDE’s presence sharpens the edge further.
What does he hope audiences will take away? “Inspiration,” he said simply. “Inspired by life. Excited about live performance again. If this show makes people want to see more work, to experience differently, then it’s done its job.”
As we ended our call, Pouffer summed it up simply: “Hopefully, we encourage our audience to run wild.”
What I love about this show is how it offers a completely different kind of theatre experience: unpredictable, collective, and rooted in the urgency of bodies in space. At a time when social media leaves us more isolated while pretending to connect us, Rambert and (LA)HORDE are betting we’re ready to break free and run.
"We Should Have Never Walked on the Moon" is at Southbank Centre, 3-6 September . And before you ask, Yes I got you a promo code innit! :)
