Perhaps in response to France’s burgeoning fascism, its choreographers have been obsessed with inventing a rite that might unite not just their own contentious people but all of humanity. For the Algerian-born Dalila Belaza’s recent solo Figures (version performative), the unity ritual takes the form of “an imaginary traditional dance.” For the solo’s companion piece, the ensemble work Rive (Shore, or Bank), the glue is that ubiquitous, inconspicuous step the pas de bourrée, as in bourrer: to stuff or fill. Belaza imagines this stuffing as filling the gap between extreme states, between opposite shores. Together the two works, which mark Belaza’s debut at Paris’s Festival d’automne, add up to a single project: to invent a bonding ritual so unassuming that it escapes piety and slips into the everyday. —Apollinaire Scherr