Entering the Year with Delicacy

© Simon Dias

At the start of 2026, despite what we may be going through in our own lives, the news around us constantly reminds us of the turmoil in the surrounding world. Whether wars, the state of the planet, or human miseries both small and large, there are many reasons to grieve, to be moved while witnessing helpless the tribulations of a faltering humanity.

I am not optimistic by nature. Not pessimistic either. Rather somewhere between realistic dreamer and awakened idealist; idealist of a world whose possibility, I must admit, is receding despite everything, but whose evocation prevents me from sinking into the darkest thoughts.

In this surrounding miasma, a phrase I read recently particularly struck me. In the excellent book recommended by my dear friend and talented choreographer Nicole Morel, "Pour une insurrection des sens" (For an Insurrection of the Senses) by Jean-Philippe Pierron, discussing gastronomy and a way of approaching the pleasure of the table, he says "We must learn to enter our plate as we learn to enter a river or enter a forest, with delicacy."

From this reflection, Pierron explains how an experience of fly-fishing and the way the fisherman must enter the river gently so as not to disturb the water with the silt at his feet made him aware of the importance of how we approach our world physically.

The delicacy with which we do everyday things, how we approach one another, the thought behind the gesture; concepts that are not foreign to me as a choreographer but that resonate particularly within me today in my daily life, whether personal or in this dream of a better world.

There would be so much around us to which we could apply this concept of delicate approach. To oppose it to the resurgence of a nauseating masculinism, to the advent of a relationship with others in the political world and in an entirely different way in society, increasingly based on the law of the strongest, in another register to oppose it to robotization, digitalization and the meteoric rise of Artificial Intelligence; "AI" which, not content with altering reality, supplants human relationships and the interaction that has forged our intrinsic selves and our societies.

There are struggles where the body is essential to assert one's rights. I think of the Femen, the revolts in Iran, the opposition to ICE in the United States and the tragic deaths in relation to this resistance. All social struggles, past and present, in which women and men have put their bodies on the line as a means of protest. These acts, radical but necessary, have been crowned with violence, suffered or provoked. A necessary evil for a greater good. In most cases...

But what if the ultimate act of resistance, that of the "common" person in the beauty of that word's meaning, supporter of struggles but not physically taking part, were this delicate act, at once silent, gentle, and daily? A gesture turned both toward others but also toward oneself, toward things and our environment.

Inhabited and conscious movement, the endless quest of every dancer and every choreographer, becomes counter-poison to a brutal and savage environment. A gesture within everyone's reach which, far from being a miracle solution to the ills of a beleaguered society, would completely change the physicality of our perceptions.

In the coming months, I will attempt to approach the world with delicacy, like the hummingbird in the fable, conscious that it is only a drop of water but that it can become for others the aphorism of another possible world.

Originally written in French, January 2026