Alida Esmail's choreographies are is the result of her will to try and understand different aspects of life. They most often start with explorations of her physical, emotional, and spiritual beings and take her to more philosophical or political places. By bringing daily life as a subject matter and commenting on the everyday aesthetic of middle class values, she finds that movement reveals an inherent awkwardness, a humour that echoes our own vulnerabilities. Her movement is perhaps a metaphor for the ever-seeking individual who experiences a continuous loss.

Her approach can be seen as a sieve that catches and attempts to filter imprecise thoughts, ideas, and concepts expelled from her brain. Sifting through an array of memories, experiences, and questions, Alida uses her art to entertain different possibilities and perspectives of the world. Her inability to comprehend life has more often than not left her in a state of movement. A victim of time, she travels in space, in time, in her head, and around the world, picking up different pieces to add to the unsolvable puzzle.

Her works demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction in the twenty first century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own 'cannibal' and 'civilized' selves. Alida was guided into creation through the notion that she was made to move coupled with her desire to discover. She needed a language and from birth she always struggled with speech; adding to the noise of the voices around her already never made sense. Much like herself, her work is a journey, a travelling experience, comprises of shape, colour, emotion, and flow.