Founded in 1985 by choreographer Anne-Marie Porras in association with ballet master Rudy Bryans (ex-star of Roland Petite’s Ballets de Marseille), the French dance company Dansomania landed unexpectedly at the Mella Theatre in Havana to treat us, during a brief April weekend, to Plaine des Sables, a disquieting, seductive and bizarre work by Porras, created in 2004.

Into the ample stage of the recently restored theatre burst a pack of “centaurs”—brutal and enigmatic—, actually six virile and muscular dancers who barechested and barefooted, dressed only in hakamas (black pleated trousers worn by aikido practitioners), closely fitted to their half horse half man bodies, present a beautiful and organic dance with an intense desire to live.

The lyrical and fluid movements, and the intimate force these dancers exude is displayed through a precise choreography that is masterly supported by Jacques Chatelet’s lighting design, executed in situ by Cyril Klein.

Indeed, the music by the composer Armand Amar of Moroccan descent is a key contribution to achieving the communicative seductive effect of these beings, participants in a tough combat or in an initiation ritual of Uzbek folk healing, where one of these men-thoroughbreds, stripped of their only garment and their human wrappings, find their original purity: a superb solo performed with an energetic and dramatic sensuality of movements by Yann Cardin. Amar’s music, essentially percussive and at times ethnic, lets us hear the galloping horses’ hooves, yet they do not mark rhythms or tempos. At times it will be the dancers’ forced respiration which marks the tempo.

These wonderfully sinewy beings unite and separate, summoned by their chief, dancer Patrice Acunzo, an ebony athlete who will lead the pack to the end with such a savage expression that it produces a tribal atmosphere.

Clearly, the choreography that Porras has imposed on these dancers, who have been launched into vast spaces in the bosom of an oneiric universe, reactivate emotions and basic instincts, leading them into an inner quest.

Anne-Marie Porras explains that her half-men, half-horse characters describe a journey, whose origins lie in the distant steppes. It is a captivating voyage which combines strength, fragility and modesty in these eternal and dazzling “body-to-body” combats.

These performances have no doubt been a brilliant finale to the “Days of Dance”, a festival that is organized in Cuba every year in April. (These presentations were a co-production of Dansomania, Montpellierdance, the Jean Villar Theatre in Montepellier, the Mayor’s Office in Montpellier and the Cultural Service of the French Embassy in Havana.)