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IMPRESSIONS: Soa Ratsifandrihana “g r oo v e” at New York Live Arts
By Sarah Cecilia Bukowski
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Published on March 23, 2026
Soa Ratsifandrihana; Photo: Maria Baranova
Presented by New York Live Arts with Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival
Choreographer/Performer: Soa Ratsifandrihana
Music: Sylvain Darrifourcq, Alban Murenzi
Costume Designer: Coco Petitpierre // Costume Assistant: Anne Tesson
Lighting Designer: Marie-Christine Soma // Lighting Management (alternating): Suzanna Bauer, Diane Guérin, Julien Rauche
Sound Management (alternating): Guilhem Angot, Jean-Louis Waflart, Paul Boulier
Archival & External Perspective: Valérianne Poidevin // Outside Eye: Thi-Mai Nguyen
Production, Touring, Administration Alma Office: Anne-Lise Gobin & Camille Queval
Ever had that moment out on the dance floor when you really find your groove? It could be that they’re playing your song and you truly dance like nobody’s watching, or maybe they’re playing the real jam that gets everybody on the same groove, stepping to a rhythm that unites dancing bodies and smiles across generations. It’s that moment when music and dance come together to carry you away—but not just anywhere.
Your groove comes from somewhere, and in so many ways that moment takes you right back there: back to where your primordial groove was born, layered with years of new grooves and transported into the breath and sweat of that present moment, on into the future, on and on to the as yet untapped grooves-still-to-be-grooved, the grooves you’ll discover in your body in that moment and carry into the next, spooling out the winding story of your personal groove. And if you haven’t had that moment, well, isn’t it about time you got out on the dance floor?
Since 2021, choreographer and performer Soa Ratsifandrihana has toured to stages around the world with a study of her personal groove in her aptly-titled long-form solo “g r oo v e.” For two nights only, the Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival treated New York audiences to the work in an intimate staging at New York Live Arts. The French-Malagasy artist draws as much from her heritage as her résumé, gathering and seamlessly merging an array of social dance forms with postmodern minimalist structures. Flashes of recognition will vary from person to person, but her references are almost beside the point as Ratsifandrihana shows us, layer by layer, the origins and branching pathways of her well-worn, ever-deepening groove.
The work begins slowly, arising almost imperceptibly out of a close, prolonged darkness. We are positioned on all four sides of the Live Arts stage, the high reaches of the seating risers looming empty above us, and as I begin to detect movement before me, I’m not sure whether there’s light coming up or if my eyes are adjusting to the dark. It’s a bit of both, really, and soon a body emerges: limbs crouched low, fingers sensitive to the touch of skin and floor, breath softly rising and falling. She traces the stage perimeter to gather height and pace, lit alternately on four sides by single rows of dim, warm light that cast her in full glow, hazy silhouette, or dramatically-shadowed side light, warming her shifting facets to herself and to us. As her arms float and carve through the air in silence, she soars in moments of expansive calm, her front body stretched vulnerably open, and draws focus to a point, plucking and pulling at the air to conjure, beckon, and consume the elemental ingredients of each movement.
Soa Ratsifandrihana; Photo: Maria Baranova, Courtesy of New York Live Arts
Soon the smoothness of the groove-setting begins to glitch, its interruptions, stutters, and redirections vocalized through Ratsifandrihana’s articulate body in exacting tandem with Sylvain Darrifourcq and Alban Murenzi’s electronic score. Here, in an accumulative mass of sounds that become rhythms, the groove takes hold: growing wings and sharpening its tongues through shapes and textures that stretch, shift, and fold with purposeful repetition and iteration. There’s tenderness and affirmation, quiet joy and tactile pleasure as her hands smooth the air and graze her body through cursive gestures or subtly-flourished line dances that pick up a little hitch as she gets down in earnest. Heels kicking back with sly syncopations, she propels her weight along trajectories of space and time to build polyrhythms that converse with the score’s rising musical layers. Lines become curves become circles become serpentine spirals, emerging as she holds multiple grooves in her body at once, only to suddenly surrender entirely to a singular movement etched in a moment—dancing her history, and its many histories, into the present.
All the while, Ratsifandrihana’s mass of curls dances along with her, at times shading her face or revealing the flash of a private smile. She’s loose and sharp, fully in the bliss of her groove, her focus and sensitivity honed to an infinitesimal scale. The many roots of her groove deepen through cycles of recurrence and invention, sprouting new buds and branches of possibility that it seems she might never exhaust. As she spins a slow retreat back to the darkness from which she arose, her groove hangs in the air, an offering to each of us to find our own.
