5 things to know about (LA)HORDE

Founded in 2013, (LA)HORDE create choreographic works, films, video installations and performances that always evolve around the body in movement.

Dance is at the heart of what they do, the starting point for works that explore contemporary issues through different narrative spaces. In 2024 we hosted the premiere of their showcase Roommates here at the Southbank Centre, and as we welcomed them twice more in 2025 – firstly with May’s Bring Your Own, and then with September’s WE SHOULD HAVE NEVER WALKED ON THE MOON – we thought it an apt time to give you the breakdown on this forward-thinking collective. So, from Paris to Petticoat Lane, Marseille to Madonna, here’s the lowdown on LA(HORDE).

They emerged from Paris’ queer club scene

(LA)HORDE are a collective of three artists – Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer and Arthur Harel – who initially came together in Paris around 2010. Brutti and Debrouwer had met at art college, and frequented the same clubs, bars and parties on the city’s queer scene as Harel. As their friendship grew they began assisting each other on artistic projects. So often were they helping each other out that in 2013 they took the decision to make their collaboration more structured. 

As they explained to Gia Koulas in a September 2023 The New York Times interview, they began to think of their collective as a house; they would ‘go and hunt for projects and bring them home, and, like, share the beef. Because of this idea of hunters and shelter and protection we decided to call each other (LA)HORDE. The horde’.

They’ve worked with some pretty big names in contemporary culture

Within five years of forming, (LA)HORDE were teaming up with Christine and the Queens to choreograph the tour of his second studio album Chris, and from there the contemporary culture collabs have kept coming. They worked with Spike Jonze on the film Ghosts; with Sam Smith on the music videos for ‘Unholy’ and ‘I’m Not Here to Make Friends’; with Burberry on a reimagining of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ filmed on East London’s Petticoat Lane; and, after she slipped into their Instagram DMs, choreographed Madonna’s 2023 Celebration tour.

They’re currently the directors of Ballet National de Marseille 

In 2019, when Emio Greco and Pieter C Sholten’s term as directors came to an end the Ballet National de Marseille put out an open call for their successor. Though they’d seen the call, LA(HORDE) hadn’t considered applying, but a chance meeting with the choreographer Dimitri Chamblas in Los Angeles opened them up to the possibility, as they told Koulas, ‘He was like, ‘You’re young, you’re hot at the moment — if not now, when?’’

Chamblas prompted the collective not only to think about applying, but how doing so could, as Koulas writes, ‘serve (LA)HORDE in a deeper way’ and how it could offer them a greater platform upon which to ‘create a manifesto about what contemporary dance could be today’. In a bold statement from the Ballet National de Marseille, especially given the trio’s unusual route into dance and choreography, their application proved successful.

They want to break down and break away from classism and classifications

At the heart of LA(HORDE)’s manifesto for contemporary dance today is escaping the classism that exists in the artform, with its longstanding hierarchy in which some forms of dance are considered to have greater worth than others. Speaking to The Guardian’s Lyndsey Winship in 2024 they gave the example of being ‘on a residency in Los Angeles and we went to a strip club and we were saying, this is dance, but because of the context I cannot receive it in the same way that I would on stage’.

And as they told Koulas, ‘There is so much segregation. Classical dance is something. Contemporary dance is something. Modern is something, and street dances and then TikTok dances. You have urban dance. What does it mean? We want to get rid of that idea of class… these scales of values that are completely terrible’. As Koulas deftly summarised, ‘to (LA)HORDE, dance is nonbinary’.

They have described their work as ‘post-internet dance’

The way in which the internet, and social media channels such as TikTok, has changed and shaped dance, offering new forms of expression, is of particular interest to LA(HORDE). Inspired by a breadth of different online communities they have, as dance writer Claire Diez explains, collaborated with ‘communities of individuals on the margins of the mainstream’, and by doing so their art in turn becomes ‘the practice of practical solidarity’. Many of LA(HORDE)’s works feature amateur dancers, from a breadth of backgrounds ‘they have worked with groups of seventy-year-olds, blind performers, smokers, juveniles’.