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I visit the Ballet National de Marseille the day after the horrific murder of elderly priest Father Jacques Hamel in Normandy, and a fortnight after Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel killed 84 people just 200km along the coast from here in Nice. The dance company’s white modernist headquarters, set in a tranquil park under a blazing sun, seems a haven from the world’s more terrifying realities, but everyone here has been affected by the events.

“There is a silent acknowledgment,” says the ballet’s co-director Emio Greco. “We don’t really speak about it so much because it is scary to say. But we are realising how fragile we are and how it could happen at any moment, it can take any form.”

There is immense sadness, of course, but also a need “to confirm your identity as a nation, as a people”, says Greco. “I think we have to stay together.”

It is bleak coincidence, then, that the work the company is about to bring to London, Body.Dance.Nation.City, comes out of these themes of togetherness and identity. “It’s a sense of community, the history of the company... the characteristics of Marseille and the relationship to the nation,” Greco explains.

This is Ballet National de Marseille’s first visit to the UK in eight years. Greco took over the company two years ago with Pieter C Scholten. The Italian choreographer and Dutch director have been working as a duo since 1995, their style dubbed “extremalism”, referring to their minimal use of theatrics — just stark sets, lights and the human body — combined with their attempts to push that body to extremes of language and emotion.

At Marseille (a company founded in 1972 by the great French choreographer Roland Petit), they’ve instituted an overhaul, continuing to pull the company away from its classical roots into contemporary dance.

They have two main themes for their tenure. The first is “Le Corps du Ballet”. The corps de ballet is traditionally the name for the lower ranks of a company, the backing dancers supporting the soloists, if you like. But the semantic switch from “de” [of] to “du” [of the] signifies that the dancing group is no longer a lesser ideal but the core vision, the essential material of dance.

In the studio I see this greater body at work. The dancers move in a seething mass, breathing together, limbs swooshing into strong shapes. They do not time their steps to fixed beats in the music but by sensing the moves of everyone around them — they think as one. That contrasts with solo dancers quoting from classical ballets, so there is tension between form and freedom, classical and modern, rigidity and rule-breaking.

At one point the dancers line up and whistle the Marseillaise. But it’s not celebratory, it’s uneasy (the feeling Brits sometimes associate with zealous waving of St George’s flag).

This taps into Greco and Scholten’s second theme, “Le Corps en Révolte”, the body in revolt, where “the ballet is used almost for protest”, says Greco. The aim is to create a space for demonstration, “like Taksim Square”. So if their stage is Taksim Square, what’s written on their metaphorical banners? “It’s not a specific message,” says Greco. “But to show the ability of dance to manifest something that has to do with now, with who we are. Not just a stylistic exercise.”

There is resistance from some corners when art tackles the real world in all its ugly complexity. Greco tells me that the Front National, France’s hard-Right party, has recently tried to censor art works and performances in Montpellier, Avignon and Lyon in objection to political, religious or sexual content.

But it hasn’t happened in Marseille, a tolerant city with a long history of immigration and multiculturalism. “Marseille has always been a kind of experiment somehow,” says Greco. “It is another model of living together.”

Greco and Scholten’s work has always been about working across borders. They are making links between Marseille and artists they worked with previously in Amsterdam. In the wake of funding cuts Scholten says it is ever more important for dance to collaborate across the continent. “In your country that’s a bit charged,” he says, laughing.

Does he think Britain will become artistically isolated from Europe in the wake of Brexit? “When we were last at the Barbican [in 2007 with their previous company], there was already an anti-Europe feeling,” says Scholten. “We presented our piece Hell, which was incredibly successful throughout the world, and one woman described us as ‘European crap’.”

“Not just talking about the piece,” adds Greco, “but European culture. I don’t know if Brexit is going to emphasise this isolation or maybe provoke an urge to create bridges with Europe.”

The difficulties of living together and understanding each other’s cultures present themselves in many forms. Marseille’s artists may not yet have been targeted by the Front National, but there has been self-censorship as a result of a more sensitive climate.

Greco and Scholten had used a muezzin’s call to prayer in the soundtrack of their latest piece until a Muslim staff member advised them against it. “He was fine about it, but we performed this piece in the park,” says Scholten, “and [if anything had happened] it comes back to you, you’re the guilty one, responsible for deaths. That says something about the times we’re living in. It means we cannot be cutting-edge any more.”

This is problematic, says Greco. “The most dangerous thing is not to censor but to auto-censor. It’s really a regression.” Artists who want to comment on the world around them must do so with subtlety, he says, but they must do it.

When others want to destroy, Greco believes the only antidote is to create, and world events will inevitably make their mark on the work artists produce. “Maybe it will encourage us to take back the necessity to be subversive,” he says. “But to be subversive by creation, rather than by destruction.”

Body.Dance.Nation.City is at the Festival Hall, SE1 on Friday and Saturday; southbankcentre.co.uk

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