They are the forgotten women. The ones who transformed art and life, yet slipped from history’s grasp. They linger in yellowed archives, on fading canvases, and in songs no one sings anymore. Their power is to return in a way and time we least expect. Choreographer Lara Barsacq brings one of them back to life through dance: Cassia of Constantinople, among the earliest known female composers of the Middle Ages. KASSIA UNDEAD is a performance that moves between fiction, documentary, biography, and ritual. In it, past, present, and future flow together in an enchanting choreographic vision.

Lara Barsacq traces a path back to the 9th century and to the work of Kassia, whose hymns, songs, epigrams, and poems have survived to this day. In the Byzantine Empire, such artistic pursuits were far from typical for women. Yet Kassia was embraced by the Church, later canonized, and her compositions became part of Byzantium’s official liturgical tradition. Her influence, particularly in the development of polyphonic art, receives a renewed and expanded interpretation in Barsacq’s performance. Through it, she explores themes of grief, faith, martyrdom, tradition, melancholy, and humanity’s enduring relationship with the afterlife.

Eight performers sing and dance in honor of their ancestors, attempting to summon their presense. Among them are two professional vocalists who revive fragments of Kassia’s long‑forgotten musical legacy. As the boundaries between eras dissolve, the performers shift from troubadours to extras and ghosts - and back again. Positioned frontally to the audience, they resemble movie characters between mysticism and delirium. Their songs echo the Dark Ages before slipping seamlessly into the present.

Surrounded by an intricate scenography of flags and textile panels, they unfold a living gallery -  procession of images inspired by the rituals, beliefs, and festivities of the Byzantine world at a cultural and geographical crossroads. KASSIA UNDEAD reveals the duality between the divine and the demonic, between divination and the summoning of the dead, between East and West. The performance conjures a realm inhabited by spirits, where humor mingles with sorrow and nothing is quite what it seems.

The set design, made of textile panels, combines medieval and contemporary pop aesthetics. The fabrics frame the dancers' movements and allow for the creation of different visual environments on stage. They represent medieval art, abstraction, or even colorful characters. The scenography was created in collaboration with Atelier Indigo, a group that supports artists with disabilities who are involved in visual arts, performance, and music.

“I'd like to create a setting in perpetual evolution, a changing landscape made up of textiles evoking poetic, colourful and naive materials.” - Lara Barsacq

“The choreography oscillates between solemn slowness and rapid, disjointed movements. The gestures evoke divinities, funeral figures, processions or fanfares. The percussive strikes of the feet, like frenzied tarantellas, break up the patterns. The bodies, like animated totems, give the stage a hypnotic and sensual intensity. (...) 

The evanescent nature of this piece is captivating. For me, “KASSIA UNDEAD” is like a perfume. A scent that appears and then fades away, leaving a heady trail. (...) Like each note of this fragrance, each fragment of the piece reveals itself at its own pace". - pzazz Theater

“Even more than in previous works, singing and music take centre stage, creating a spellbinding atmosphere where the combination of voices works wonders, but where the use of certain unexpected instruments sometimes enriches the message. The dance, for its part, draws inspiration from this universe. Discreet, it unfolds in fits and starts, beginning with a human chain where we think we detect a few sirtaki movements, then developing, as the songs progress, in the manner of medieval dances, between grace and the grotesque. Sometimes the feet pound the ground in the style of flamenco, sometimes the bodies twist as in medieval bas-reliefs. Far from any linear narrative, Kassia Undead thus revives the spirit of an exceptional woman and achieves an ideal blend of music and movement.” - Le Soir

Kassia of Constantinople is revered as one of the earliest known female composers in the history of European music. She is the only woman whose compositions appear in the Byzantine liturgy, and around fifty of her hymns have survived. Kassia served as the abbess of a monastery in the western part of Constantinople and was also an accomplished poet. It is said that she impressed Emperor Theophilus when he was seeking a wife. He provoked her intelligence by saying that women must repent for original sin. Kassia replied that women are the source of the sublime, the redemption for the world.

Lara Barsacq graduated in 1991, at the age of 17, from the Conservatoire national de Musique et de Danse de Paris. Her first professional engagement took her to Israel, within the Batsheva company. Very quickly, Ohad Naharin asked her to choreograph a piece for the young Cie Batsheva. On the strength of this experience, Lara decided to throw herself fully into choreography. She produced several choreographic pieces for the Batsheva ensemble, the CNSMD in Paris, several independent companies in Israel and Amsterdam (Danswerkplaats), but also for her own. 

In 2002, she decided to focus on her career as a performer, curious to confront the universe of other choreographers or creators, among whom we can mention: Benny Claessens, Lies Pauwels, Lisi Estaras or Jérôme Bel. 

After 15 years of stimulating encounters, Lara returned to choreography, charged with an experience that now encompasses her many talents as a dancer, choreographer and performer. Lara is also regularly invited as an outside eye on other projects, such as Talk Show, Garcimore est mort and Piñata Cake by Gaël Santisteva, with whom she develops her choreographic work. 

Based in Brussels since 2007, Lara Barsacq finds in this city an attractive, free and uninhibited artistic universe. In 2016, she began to imagine new projects taking their source in the past, while regularly bringing back female figures forgotten in the history of dance. 

“Lara Barsacq’s work is inspired by choreographic archives and favors above all research on the imaginary where history confronts the present. She likes to mix the tracks between archives, fictions, incarnation and documentary; talk about the big story as well as personal stories through which the vulnerability and the sincerity of being are revealed. Starting from historical events, autobiographical rituals and the material of reality, she tries to imagine dances, metaphors and to switch into incarnation.”