“The ears are amazed, the look fades: here it is. And since then, it is a ghost."

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Silence invades.

Silence challenges.

Silence faces.

Silence doesn't need to fight to be present, because it never left.

Silence reveals the unspeakable of words.

Silence elucidates the invisible.

 

It comes in a sudden breeze

 

and it is the work of a sick mind trying to avoid it.

Avoiding its gaze, the presence of multiple others, means getting lost in solitude.

 

Silence does not exist but it is present in every background, behind, in the permanent search to dive even deeper into the sound, in its body. Silence is that which sustains everything, that which is before. Like a white screen on which nothing can be projected because its matter is light. There is no end in sight. It can only be inhabited, traveled, breathed. Silence is in the listening, in the resignation of the body to allow itself to be affected and transformed, in the void where the senses can be without limitations, where they can transform the gesture they touch, the skin they rub, the image they hear and the sound they see. Silence is a liquid material that soaks the senses to calm their anger.

 

Dance and music have the quality of becoming, traveling between, speaking in languages ​​never written. Listening involving the totality of the senses allows what is content to fluctuate, giving rise to new forms with malleable limits and imprecise durations. As an artist of movement, known is the scope of listening and transmission through the skin, involving not only a frontal reality but also opening the range of perceptual possibilities so that the back gains eyes and touch turns the body into another material, expanding its volume until it disintegrates in submission with space. Disintegration-integration are opposite but complementary in the process of encountering with the other. A shared act of penetration and exchange, in which new forms are given birth. The dynamic quality of sound allows it to enter spaces of uncertainty or darkness to elucidate them, move them, shake them and finally make them present. This bodily contact with sounds only occurs in a state of an attentive listening to the presence of many others. An encounter that seeks to blur the limits that separate, in a reciprocal dialogue in which all components, objects, subjects, airs and silences acquire their own voice. An expansive volume in the body allows it to merge with "the outside", revealing the invisible, rebelling against absences and generating new presences.

 

Listening is then an active and committed contemplation of all the senses, of each organ of the body, of each pore of the skin to a complete surrender to the environment to observe. Silence becomes the sphere where we can listen to the voices that dignify, justify, confirm the way we roam the world and choreograph living. Listening becomes an ethic to review, question and rethink what we create, how we do it and the reason for doing it. Silence as a means, a support for the process of becoming. Becoming through silence deforms the rules on how to be and how to move, charging the movement with responsibility over the context it affects. It provides the human being with a sense of empowerment over its life and that of others.

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As well as sounds, movements “resound within a space of silence” (John Cage, 1961). In instances of silence and stillness, emotions and gestures can grow, travel and manifest themselves within and outside the limits of the body, in a space where bones, joints and flesh meet and find their way out. A body on stage confronts to what it can become, why it does it and the conditions in which it mutates. In its roots, the creative and performative instances question what a body is. They take it to its limits or on the contrary, they do not reach it. What is a limit? Where is it and why? To make something visible you have to observe it, face it without interference, without noise. Movement and sound have nothing to say. They are the source and mirror of images, thoughts, prejudices and other people's ideas. In Mr. Cage's words, "We are naive enough to think that if we were saying something, we would use words." The meaning is not given by them, but by whoever perceives them in a context in which there is an absence. 

 

“Defeated By Silence, Here Is A Place Where The Silence Is More Subtle” transits moments of sound and non-sound. A voice breaks the silence in an impossible attempt to go unnoticed. Words thrown at intervals, surprise in their resonance nesting in the thought as if they came from oneself. Why are they there and why weren't they before? They drive the inevitable commitment to the act of listening, not only to them, but to the silence that continues each time. A silence that reveals the almost unlimited exchange with the outside world.

 

What is one and what is other?

 

Invisible set of audible words, an off voice, an acousmatic sound. The dislocation between an image and a sound provokes in the imagination the unfolding of enchanted landscapes, songs from the past, voices from the present and futures to come. Listening to those sounds abstracted from a visual and tangible reality, whose source is unknown, become foreigners who question what is shown and what is hidden. It demands the necessary sharpening of the senses to be able to see and ask, question their origins and destinations.

 

To whom do the voices that move our bodies, direct our arms, legs and gaze belong?

Who dances through our body?

Who is speaking and who is not?

 

The spectral voices invoked by Melgaço recall the power of those which pass through our bodies and their affective capacity as agents themselves. Opening to the possibility of increasing our imaginary power, to the flourishing of memories and fantasies, Otacílio invites us to a journey towards an ever deeper intimacy with those internal dialogues that participate so fiercely in the way we face the world. Sound and dance manifest, expose, exhibit, sensitize. They favor the amplification of the listening spheres to offer the possibility of generating a more harmonious and meaningful, active and participatory relationship with the environment through critical questioning and observation.

 

What does a body have to say?

What does a movement have to offer?

Or stillness.

What is hidden in those interstices between cells,

between fibers,

between memories and emotions,

between one gesture and another,

under the tongue,

behind the gaze?

 

Inhabiting silence transforms, transmutes, reveals and surprises. Listening in silence generates possibilities, sliding in seas that navigate and converge objects with subjects, lakes with rivers and the earth with the sky to manifest that which is still nothing and could become everything. Listening without being certain of what it is, to the indefinableness of movement and sound frees the effort to establish a form, a delimited object. This unstable situation in which words do not define what is seen but rather experience establishes what is perceived, opens new possibilities to create elastic and malleable contents constantly affected by the proximity with the other. A body who listens can be deformed in the process of meeting and entering another, in the translation of what is seen and felt in the fluctuating exchange with everything else. In being-in that interaction, a body can take any shape to offer an instant to be interpreted. In the interaction with sound, the skin acquires a volume that expands beyond its limits, allowing its shape to change. This perception of an expansive volume transports the body to another space-time dimension where it can explore and expose its own prejudices, manners, behaviors and present potential alternatives to the known. The elongation, stretching and opening of the skin, the contour of the body, creates a conflicting image of the body and induces questions about the sense of shape and its meaning. Thus, alternatives to the real appear in order to generate a change in the paradigms in which the world is understood and what a body is expected to be.

 

In the realms of a blinding silence, the skin embodies a whisper in the heart, an exhalation, rapid breathing, footsteps and birds. With a sound, not only a vibration reaches the ear but also a memory, a sensation, a texture on the skin, the taste of a drop of honey or the smell of a rose into which a melody can become, a color that can transform in a landscape or an emotion. A soft Entr'act, interaction between an absent image, a sound and a dance.

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In his best-known book "Silence," Cage tries to "find a way of writing that comes from ideas, not about them, but produces them" (John Cage 1961). His greatest contribution to the process of mutation that music and the conception of sound underwent since then, took place through its relationship with silence and non-silence, sound and non-sound, the presence and absence of audible frequencies generated intentionally or not.

 

4´33´´ by John Cage was revolutionary not only for imposing complete silence for a period of 4 minutes 33 seconds before an expectant audience willing to listen to his fingers pressing black and white keys, but also for his proposal to give space to the sounds that surrounded them, to make them visible. Cage inaugurated the possibility for others to be present and actively participate in the musical creation. It turned out to be a break in the traditional way of presenting music, an inversion in the way of receiving it and a change in the way of conceiving the sound. Despite the fact that 4´33´´ appeared at Woodstock during a concert of experimental music for piano, the public received it mostly in a negative way. This daring, imposed on the very heart of an institution of this size, allowed the emergence of new ways of making and treating sound.

 

What is silence if not a potential rhythm?

What is rhythm but a pulse charged with life?

 

This fruitful silence takes on a life of its own, becomes a body and acquires a three-dimensionality that allows it to act as a decoding agent and translator of the poetry recited by the chameleon dermis towards the creation of a thousand choreographies.