Six dancers and five musicians will share a long runway stage with the audience on both sides when choreographer Aina Alegre's new work “At Dawn” opens the International Dance Festival New Orleans on Thursday inside the Contemporary Arts Center's warehouse space. The piece draws on Second Line parading energy and the jazz Alegre grew up listening to outside Barcelona, folding brass instrumentation directly into the choreography rather than treating it as background score.
The festival, which runs September 10-13 at the Contemporary Arts Center, was founded by Leslie Scott, who also serves as Associate Dean of Performing Arts and Associate Professor of Theatre & Dance at Tulane University, according to the Contemporary Arts Center. As reported by Gambit, Scott founded the festival and hopes it will help develop New Orleans as a regional hub for contemporary dance, and she has said movement must be the primary storyteller for a piece to have a place in the lineup. Scott also teaches dance for camera at Tulane, according to the same account.
Alegre came to New Orleans two years before the article's publication on a research grant, and she has said she saw similarities between the city's Second Lines and Spanish parading traditions she knew from home, per the Gambit report. She has said parading traditions carry mystic dimensions, and that music grew central to her work after she began including brass band musicians on stage starting in 2022. Her father was a composer who played saxophone and clarinet in a jazz band, and Alegre has said she came to see instruments as extensions of the body.
A Runway Built for Brass and Bodies
“At Dawn” uses contemporary dance movement along the long runway configuration, with the New Orleans staging built around six dancers and five musicians. The score comes from Enric Alegre. The piece is also functioning as an early research phase for Aina Alegre's upcoming group work “RODA,” which is scheduled to premiere in April 2027 at MC2: Grenoble in France, according to the Centre Chorégraphique National de Grenoble, where Alegre has served as co-director alongside dancer Yannick Hugron since January 2023.
The New Orleans premiere received financial and diplomatic backing from Villa Albertine and the Albertine Foundation through the FUSED, or French-U.S. Exchange in Dance, program, according to Villa Albertine. That organization describes the piece as drawing parallel inspiration from Mediterranean pasacalles street parades and New Orleans Second Line processions to examine public spaces as sites of community empowerment. Lighting design comes from Jan Fedinger.
Alegre's broader repertoire includes “This Is Not (an Act of Love and Resistance),” a 2022 work made by women musicians and dancers featuring three trombonists and a tuba that explored recovery from the pandemic and reclaiming air from fear and isolation, per Gambit. In 2025, “Fugaces” appeared at the Lyon Dance Biennale, according to Arte TV.
A Festival Lineup Spanning Continents
The International Dance Festival New Orleans includes international, regional and local artists across a schedule that also features a dance film section, masterclasses and other events, according to Gambit. Colectivo Glovo, a company based in Galicia, Spain, and led by Esther Latorre and Hugo Pereira, is performing two short works from its repertoire. Evelyn Tejada, a founding member of the Contemporary Dance National Company of the Dominican Republic and originally from that country, is presenting “Impossible Explicar.”```` round out the international presence.
Local and regional work is also featured. New Orleans-based choreographer Sydney Lopez is presenting “Burning Snow,” which depicts her grandmother's escape journey in Southeast Asia. Houston-based Persi May is presenting “Handle With Care,” featuring dancers covered in bubble wrap who rely on each other to move. Jacksonville Dance Theater is presenting “Tribes,” about cultural memory inspired by Marc Chagall's glass windows, and the closing-night program includes Diana Salles's aerial performance “Delusional,” which uses aerial work on silks and floor dancing to portray her transition from male to female. Salles premiered that piece in 2023 and won international acclaim for her 2019 work “Genesis” at the Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain.
Films, Masterclasses and a Growing Regional Footprint
The festival will screen 10 short films from the United States, Brazil, France, China and Switzerland on September 12 at the Contemporary Arts Center; programmer Rachel Slater selected 15 films from more than 100 submissions. A free artist mixer is scheduled for the Contemporary Arts Center on September 13, and the festival partners with the University of Florida and Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, with additional performances planned at the Acadiana Center for the Arts in Lafayette on September 16.
Founded in 2023 as an exchange between artists from Chile and the Gulf South, the festival expanded to feature performers from six nations by 2025, according to IDFNOLA. It is presented by BODYART, which was founded in 2006. Festival shows and masterclasses start at $20, though some events are free, per Gambit's reporting.
According to the National Endowment for the Arts' FY 2017 appropriations request, the Arts Council of New Orleans received a $40,000 FY 2015 matching grant to support LUNA Fete.
