When Did Silence Get This Loud?

A question that isn’t looking for an answer, but rather actively requests the spectator’s participation, body, and mind. While asking, we already know that an answer is not an escape. When did silence get this loud? The dancers and the choreographer put silence in conversation with electricity through a symphony of movement, sound, light, and pulsations, exploring the ways we experience the overstimulation of information and sensory noise nowadays. Are there still kinds of silence weighing down on us?

The result of a recent multi-sensory research on the mapping of repetitive movement, this work harnesses oscillation, the constant flow of electricity, and the dynamics found in pauses, to reflect upon the relationship between movement and the production of energy and sound fields. The title’s ‘deafening silence’ is a field made of sub-sounds, electric pulsations, and small vibrations – all elements outside audible range that the body is still able to perceive. Waves of low frequencies – sensible through vibrating subwoofers –transform hearing into a wholesome bodily experience, as the spectator doesn’t listen passively, but feels the energy piercing them all the way to the bone, coordinating their body with space.

A dancer in Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s group ROSAS, Zoi Efstathiou blends minimalism and the social repercussions of movement in her choreography, delivering a consciously subtractive and deeply collective work simultaneously appealing to intellectual anxiety and the spectator’s sensory participation. Through repetition and the movement’s extrovert character, the performance explores the moment before a voice is heard, where silence remains ambiguous – a field that sometimes protects and sometimes represses.