There's a moment near the end of Jeremy Catto's "Haunted Tales: A Ballet of Lepers" that I keep returning to. One dancer stands completely still while the others orbit her in slow, spiraling arcs — not reaching, not touching, just circling. In that stillness, something shifts. You stop watching choreography and start feeling what it means to be unseen by the people closest to you. That tension between movement and paralysis is where Catto works best, and it's why this piece lingers long after the curtain falls.
Catto came up through the contemporary scene in Montreal before relocating to Brussels, and you can sense both worlds in his sensibility — the structural rigor of classical training fused with an instinct for material that gets under the skin rather than simply impressing. He doesn't build ballets to showcase dancers; he builds them to argue something. In "Haunted Tales," that argument is about what happens to people society decides to quarantine.
The leper colonies of medieval Europe — and, more troublingly, the ones that persisted in places like Rhodes and Hawaii into the twentieth century — aren't just history here. They're a lens. Catto doesn't soften this. The opening image is a row of figures wrapped in fabric, heads bowed, moving together but separated by invisible lines. No one touches. No one looks up. The choreography encodes quarantine before a single word of story is spoken.
What strikes me most is the movement vocabulary Catto developed for the piece. He spent three months in residency at a small studio in Ghent, working with six dancers and a medical historian who consulted on gesture and body language. The result is a physical language that feels both ancient and fractured — long arm lines that echo devotional painting, interrupted by sudden, sharp contractions that signal pain or shame or both. One pas de deux in the second act builds entirely from a gesture of reaching and withdrawal: the hand extends, the body follows, and then something pulls both back, like a reflex. You understand the entire psychological experience of wanting without permission.
The production design serves this atmosphere without overpowering it. The set is spare — stone-gray floor, a single suspended cloth that the dancers manipulate throughout, sometimes as veil, sometimes as shroud, sometimes as shared shelter. The lighting does most of the narrative work, shifting from cold clinical white in the early sections to amber and rust as the piece progresses and the characters begin to find each other. When the lights finally warm in the final movement, the shift feels earned rather than manipulative. It doesn't resolve the tension so much as reframe it.
Music-wise, Catto commissioned a score that layers sparse prepared piano with field recordings — rain, wind, and what I believe is a children's choir recorded at a distance, voices smeared by reverb into something almost tonal. It creates a sound world that's neither liturgical nor secular, which is exactly right for material rooted in spiritual exile.
Critics have called this work powerful, but that word undersells it. "Haunted Tales" isn't content to move you — it wants you to sit with discomfort and not look away. That's a rarer ambition than it should be. Catto's piece won't convert anyone who doesn't believe dance can carry moral weight. But for those of us who do, it confirms what we suspected: the body knows things the mind hasn't processed yet. Sometimes it takes a ballet about outcasts to remind us of that.
The piece had a short run — four performances in a converted chapel — before moving on. I hope it tours. I hope it reaches people who think ballet isn't for them. It's exactly for them.
