The choreographer Serge Aimé Coulibaly grew up in one big city, in Burkina Faso, and has lived in another, Brussels, for the last 15 years. But he imagines the stage as a village agora—scaled to human interaction. Discrete clusters of activity occasionally coalesce in a playful circle or tumble to the ground (and it is always ground, not concrete or ballet-floor Marley). You do not sense a choreographer–puppetmaster directing these moves: the players seem to decide when and how to move. And yet the world palpably presses in. Lately in Coulibaly that pressure has felt terrible, as it has for many of us in the world outside the theater. C la vie—for seven dancers, a singer, and a percussionist—signals its attitude toward this state of things with its punning title. C la vie can mean the jocularly resigned “That’s life,” the bilingual exhortation “See life!,” or the celebratory “C major Life,” which proceeds without sharps or flats. —Apollinaire Scherr