MATHILDE MONNIER AND LUCIE ANTUNES SILENCE

A co-production with the Opéra Orchestre national Montpellier Occitanie
Silence is born from the meeting of Mathilde Monnier and Lucie Antunes. Together, they envision a choreographic concert where music and dance are written in the same movement. On stage, the presence of the musician dialogues with the dancers in a hybrid and magnetic form, where gesture and sound are constructed in a mirror.

Both share a fascination for rhythm and its transformative powers: how sound sets the body in motion, how movement makes music vibrate. Primarily conceived as a concert, the piece places listening at the heart of the experience and makes rhythm a space of encounter between bodies and sounds.

Drummer and percussionist from classical and contemporary music, Lucie Antunes composes an original sound work, continuing her exploration of trance, repetition, and pulsation. Her music, nourished by obsessive rhythm and minimalist metric, is part of a lineage that extends from Meredith Monk to the pioneers of minimalism.

Mathilde Monnier makes this sound material the anchor point of the dance. The bodies respond to the rhythm as if to a call, exploring the connections between pulsation, breath, and movement. In the manner of shamanic practices, where the beat of the drum opens the way to other spaces of perception, rhythm here becomes a lever of trance and a motor of imagination.

Silence thus questions our relationship to sound and the body. Omnipresent, sound traverses bodies and pulses life through breath, beats, voice, music, and the noises of the world. In contrast, silence is neither void nor absence: it becomes a space of suspension, a starting point from which a multitude of sounds and movements can arise.

The piece explores altered states of consciousness and variations in the perception of time and space, between meditative slowness and rhythmic frenzy. The choreography is built within these oscillations, between rises and falls, pauses and flashes, offering the audience an immersive physical and sensory experience.

The rhythmic work relies on precise structures, made of pulsations, repetitions, and patterns inspired by the cycles of nature — waves, tides, breaths. These cyclical movements compose a sound and bodily architecture that permeates the entire performance, making silence itself a material to listen to and set in motion.

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