Leather Jacket is a reinterpretation of a solo I created in 2015, now reimagined for eight performers. The work is resolutely minimalist and intensely physical, rooted in repetition and brute force. At its core is the practice of the bounce, which has nourished my choreographic language for over eleven years.
I first encountered this practice while working with T.R.A.S.H in the Netherlands, where it was taught by Guilherme Miotto. Gui was trained in the bounce by Emio Greco in Amsterdam – as part of his double skin double mind technique with Peter Scholten.
I think it’s interesting to work on dance lineage. And the reality that nothing is original. Everything is a mutation of what has come before. A digestion of what your body has lived through.
Leather Jacket opens up the dancer’s past. Asks us to confront it, live through it. And be spat out the other end. Tired, but stronger.
The sounds produced by the bodies – feet striking the floor, bodies hitting leather – build together with an original soundtrack created by Federico Ortica and Luca Truffarelli. Cormac Begley gathers the community in the work to make the dancers outgrow the demanding reality they are in.
We start with a robotic focus, we drive through the ‘coolness’ of athleticism, until we are met with the reality of the body, the flesh, the sweat. And the strength of friendship to hold it all together.
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Oona Doherty
ON TOUR – check our CALENDAR
Choreography: Oona Doherty with the dancers
Dancers: Thibaut Eiferman, Zoé Lecorgne, Mohamed Mahklouf, Andréa Moufounda, Ryan O’Neill, Magdalena Öttl, Mathilde Roussin, Joseph Simon, Hilde Ingeborg Sandvold.
Rehearsal direction: Solène Weinachter
Music: Federico Ortica & Luca Truffarelli (including Cormac Begley’s Ryan’s rant)
Costumes: Darius Dolatyari Dolatdoust & Paul Escamez with Oona Doherty and the dancers
Physical preparation / Physiotherapy: Charlie Brittain
Coproductions in development: Bold Tendencies (UK), La Briqueterie CDCN du Val-de-Marne (FR), Festival de Marseille (FR), Kampnagel Summer Festival (DE), Théâtre de la Ville (FR), Dublin Dance Festival (IE).
Residencies: Pôle 164 Marseille (FR), Studio Festival de Marseille (FR), Trinity Laban (UK), La Briqueterie CDCN du Val-de-Marne (FR).
With the support of DRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur and Département des Bouches du Rhône.
From Lyndsey Winship’s review in The Guardian – 26th July 2026:
“Here is the collective pleasure of sharing a rhythm and a common dance. The unison is exacting, but always with a sense of being flesh-and-blood people, not a regiment.
There’s something very honest about it, the dancers exhaust themselves, and between sections they pant, sweat, swig water, laugh with each other (in a way that says: “Can you believe we got through that!”). Their presence is real. And this is really what Doherty wants to show us: the pushing, the perspiring, the getting on with it. The dance is a means to an end, and the jackets only make it harder, sweatier work.”
