MACKENZY BERGILE – AUTOTHÉRAPIE: UNBOLTING COLONIAL STATUES FROM OUR CONSCIOUSNESS Dance

Few artists navigate disciplines with as much fluidity as Mackenzy Bergile. The Franco-Haitian self-taught artist is at once a dancer, choreographer, composer, writer, model, and photographer, and works at the intersection of performance, theory, and postcolonial critique. He has collaborated as a dancer, musician, and composer on Saïdo Lehlouh’s acclaimed works Earthbound (Kampnagel 2022) and Témoin (Summer Festival 2024), and now presents the world premiere of Autothérapie. Developed as a solo, the piece extends his museum performance shown at the 2024 Summer Festival at MK&G with dancer Mayvis William. In Autothérapie, Mackenzy Bergile deliberately confronts the codified, hierarchical vocabulary of court dances with the subversive force of resistance dances born in clandestinity — notably traditional Haitian and Afrodiasporic forms. Inspired by Haitian spiralism — a literary aesthetic grounded in circularity and political consciousness — Bergile explores diasporic bodies as living archives, as sites of rupture but also of transformation. With Autothérapie, dance becomes a powerful space for repair, reclamation and resistance.