BENEDETTO PACIFICO - DAME DE PIC / KARINE PONTIES (20') The peaceful blessing reveals a scarecrow without sadness, simple and fleeting, catapulted from the field to the steppe, like a gaunt cloak, puffed up by the wind, which moves stones and, it is said, frightens away wolves. How do human beings, so fragile, manage to contemplate the world ? By being sensitive to the slightest movement. BECOMING TOGETHER - BRIANA ASHLEY STUART (15') Briana Ashley Stuart is an international multidisciplinary artist whose work examines how the history and culture of artistic expression relates directly to the human condition and experience. In her interactive solo show, Briana Stuart uses the movement and energy of stepping - a traditional Afro-American dance form - to achieve a live cultural exchange with her audience. Her solo seeks out and uses well-known and lesser-known rhythms and songs to redefine the familiar through the vocabulary of song and stepping movement. The result is an intimate atmosphere of rhythm and music, creating an instant bond between the audience and Briana Stuart as performer and person. CARTE BLANCHE TO MERCEDES DASSY (25') Since her first piece in 2018, Mercedes Dassy has been building a prolific and radical body of choreographic work around the relationship between intimacy and politics. With her protean and metamorphic works, dense and dazzling, sculpted by omnipresent music, video images and sartorial transformism, she is laying the foundations for a new and singular aesthetic that is turning audiences and the dance scene upside down. In her solo and quartet pieces, in which she also dances, she deploys a magnetic presence that is sometimes placid and bewitching, sometimes raw and frenetic, and never hesitates to broaden the scope of her intimate or political questioning. Alongside the five pieces that make up her current repertoire, Mercedes Dassy has launched a series of small satellite forms, danced or sung, that revolve around her work. For this edition of the D festival, she will be presenting one of them, a solo dance form that retraces choreographic material from her repertoire, set to sound compositions by composer and producer Maxime Pichon as well as samples or tracks by Cher or Alicia Keys. Presented for the first time at the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles International in October 2024 during the Performissima event, this short form shows Mercedes outside her major creative processes, in a more informal moment, indulging in the pleasure of dancing in connection with the music, with her emotions of the moment, and always in the quest to rediscover a lost joy.