The dance that introduced Emanuel Gat to the world was a provocation, but not only that. For his 2004 Sacre, the Israeli used Stravinsky’s riotous score for an hour of salsa. The smooth churn of the dancers’ hips never stopped, whatever menace the music broadcast. And yet the original libretto—about a deadly sacrifice for the sake of social order— hadn’t entirely disappeared; it had just shrunk to the commonplace and the modern. At any given moment, in the cast of three women and two men, one of the women had to dance alone. Gat has since relocated to France, where his troupe has grown in size and prestige, but the outrageous juxtapositions, worked out incrementally in highly repetitive patterns, remain. For his 2024 Freedom Sonata, the runaway adagietto of Beethoven’s last sonata and Kanye West’s restless, fractured 2016 album, The Life of Pablo, are the unlikely pair. According to Gat—who trained in music before he turned to dance, at the late age of 23—what unites them and inspires the dance is the problem of freedom: “the internal tension between the individual and the collective.” —Apollinaire Scherr