MACKENZY BERGILE
Autothérapie: Unbolting Colonial Statues from Our Consciousness
A stage work about the collective history of colonized bodies.
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 Afro- diasporic 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.
