Words by Paula C. Riofrio.
Not Even a Pin Drop premieres during the Resolution Festival at The Place in January 2025. Gabrielle de Souza, in collaboration with Luke Cartwright crafted a choreographic narrative about de Souza’s sudden deafness in one of her ears. I sat in the front row of the theatre in complete darkness. Peters Gregson’s Bach recompositions for cello suites entered my aura.
Suite number 6. Gigue opens to silhouettes wearing flowery summer dresses and black leotards. Dancers enter sprinting their steps in a neoclassical dialogue with brushed glimpses of Trisha Brown fluency. Maggie Kelly, Tanisha Addicott, Rosanna Lindsey, Elizabeth Jeanna Ortega and Ellen Wilkinson form a circle in the back center on the stage, they broke it within it, as spiraling down a coil. Their movements along the floor incite air and expansion, as sound waves do. Their turns and the projection of their arms felt like silk sliding down the auricle.
A deafening silence marks an ending and a new start; one of the dancers was left alone, outside the coil shaped group of four. I can hear Gregson’s reinvention of Courante, solid, minimalist, sharp. Courante’s bass notes freeze her, the higher notes unfold her movement. Tanisha Addicott, de Souza’s alter ego, narrated the emotional states and the physical damage caused by her loss.
I feel the fractured lines, I see them forming patterns on a black canvas. On the left front corner, the four dancers started an inquisitive dialogue, first with each other, then with the audience. The marks of fear and self-imposed isolation formed angles in her body, it became contagious.
Lights dimmed, 5.5 Gavottes embraces us with its vibration, a 4/4 time signature with moderate tempo. Dancers dissolve into the mesh of sound, their colours tincture the experience, their naked arms expose the vitality of the sensual. The choreography is marked to precision; they dive in groups, they form lively sculpture. I hear no echo, but the dancers’ motions recalled it in their fluency, like bodies a capella.
We were sensing the music. They were unfurling their bodies and ours, unfurling spines, unfurling canvas with each of their gestures merged with the tempo. Our main character, Addicott, de Souza’s alter ego, remained hesitant, held by a profound affection and longing. Was she missing it all; the birdsongs, the sound of rivers, festive voices? A solo in silence, pleading, lamenting. As more bodies came back onto stage the sound was brought back with them.
Dancers came together on a dainty allegretto, 6. Gigue played again. The dancers mesmerise the audience with their mastered neoclassical free representation. Deftness remained a movement, feet and forms molded the space with its musicality. The evening was a celebration of the ontological connection between movement and sound. It reminded me that one does not live without the other.