A Smile without a Cat

A performance by Steven Michel in collaboration with the 17 second-year students from the Bachelor Dance programme at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp.

A Smile without a Cat unfolds like a dance concert in perpetual construction: a body-muppet show, a cartoon ballet, an off-the-rails recital in which choreography appears while simultaneously falling apart. 
Across a series of crescendos that continuously collapse and rebuild, seventeen performers move through formations inspired by orchestras, swarms, cartoons and collective rituals. Rhythms become architectures, and gestures accumulate into temporary melodies, visual jingles or silly symphonies.

The title borrows from the famous image in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland of the Cheshire Cat slowly disappearing until only its smile remains. Can an expression survive independently from the figure that produced it?

Like the lingering smile itself, the piece inhabits a threshold between presence and disappearance, absurdity and rigor, animation and exhaustion. What emerges is a choreography of persistence: bodies insisting on movement even as forms collapse, meanings disperse and structures continuously undo themselves.