SILENT DISCO

“Everybody’s a Silent Disco, playing her song inside, running along the ride”

Duration: 35 minutes

Genre: Participatory dance piece

Synopsis

Silent Disco is a virtual performance in which the audience is the main actor, taking part in a remote-controlled choreography. The audience dances on the notes of a playlist composed collectively from the most important songs in the lives of the participants, which are sent live as in a DJ set.

Project

If your life could be summed up in 10 songs, what would they be?

A song is a measure of time. A piece of individual and collective history. Listening to a playlist implies a small death and a small rebirth with each track. Through a meeting by Zoom we set up a virtual disco in which the public from their home is the protagonist of the night. Instructions will guide the dance so that the spectators tune in to the vibrations of their own body and echo the music.

Silent Disco is an exercise in listening through dance, a musical lecture about your life and an emotional documentary about the physical residues of songs.

Creation process

The performance is generated from a virtual workshop that involves a community of non-dance professionals, based on the following autobiographical exercise:

The Playlist of your life: Write down the Hit of each stage of your life. Insert title and author of ...

A childhood song: ______

A song of adolescence: ______

A love song: _______

A song of war: _______

A song for sex: _______

A song to cry on: _______

The Song of Summer: _______

A song from your house: _______

Your funeral song: _______

A song for the future: _______ "

We explore songs as a trigger for listening and as communication tools with oneself, with other people and with the environment. The playlist is here a metaphor for the aimless journey in the car of individual and collective destiny, where the songs mark the stages and evoke the landscapes we cross on the road. With a secret, deep and silent dance on the surface through our songs, we immerse ourselves in the anecdotes, parallel universes, holograms and confessions that emerge from them.

Artistic Team:

Direction and dramaturgy

Nicoletta Cappello

Technical Direction and DJ

Maria Virzí

Video Design

Olimpia Pierucci

Creative Assistant

Angelina Mrakic

Produced by Il Pubblico

Premiére

To be defined

Language

Spanish. English version in process.

Phase

Work in progress

Theme

Can our room become a disco?

A silent disco is a disco in which everyone listens to music through headphones and can choose between different playlists at the same time. In our day-to-day lives, we often listen to music as if we were on a silent disco, through our headphones, locked in our worlds. We share our songs in a delayed and displaced way, on Spotify, where we follow other people's playlists and deliver ours to serve as a soundtrack for other lives.

What happens when two different songs meet on the same memory? When does the song you hear on the inside meet the song on the outside? And when do you come across someone who silently listens to a different song than yours? Can you feel a song without hearing it?

Virtual format

Dance like nobody's watching

During the pandemic, virtual discos proliferated due to restrictions, and then they did not disappear. Online dance communities continue to live as decentralization movements, as inclusive initiatives or as clubs that bring together people who do not feel like leaving home, but do feel like dancing.

"Dance, see and be seen" is the slogan of one of them.

What drives us to dance together but from a distance? Is the virtual connection a less real connection? What is the difference between dancing alone and dancing with others?

From the threshold between the intimate space of the house and the public space of the theater, through the screen, the performance investigates the action of listening to a song as a solitary and communal act at the same time, as a private ceremony and a collective ritual, as a silent and sonorous phenomenon at the same time.

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Dramaturgy

We study the task ("instruction") as a composition tool for a participatory choreography. We explore the score as the meeting point between the text and the movement, the word and the body, poetry and physical action. We apply instruction as a tool for activating the public, their body, their imagination and their memories.

Intimate and everyday actions like remembering, listening and humming, involuntary movements become dance steps. The acquired habits of the spectators, their tics and their idiosyncrasies become choreographic gestures.

Silent Disco opens a dance floor and a battlefield where the shame of dancing and the desire to express oneself, the impulse towards solitude and the need to relate, the need to be silent and the desire to sing in struggle within the same body, dance a duet together.

Stage Project

Channel: Zoom.

Structure: The performance is constructed as a sequence of 10 stages that take the title and themes of the initial autobiographical exercise.

Duration: 35 minutes

Action

Previous: The spectators are informed in advance that the performance is interactive and that they can attend even if they do not want to participate actively, as voyeurs. The participants fills the formulary "The playlist of your life" prior to the show, with their lives' song, nurturing the performance's sound bank.

Intro: In gallery view the participants appear standing in front of their computer with headphones on. An audiovisual filter applied to live images evokes the atmosphere of a nightclub. The voice-over of the DJ welcomes the public and explains the rules of the virtual disco and the operation of the Dj Set.

Rave: Always in gallery view, the progressive journey through the memory playlist begins. The spectators are led step by step through the dance by verbal instructions, which appear in the format of video-projected text or sound locutions, precisely indicating the actions to be followed and causing a synesthesia between seeing, moving and listening.

Gallery views of all participants and speaker views of one or more viewers alternate. The live images alternate with a dramaturgy of archival images inspired by the universal theme that gives the title to each stage - childhood, adolescence, love, war, sex, sadness, home, summer, funeral, future - that provoke incursions of the imaginary collective, simulating individual flashbacks.

The end: The disco is divided into virtual rooms where the dance continues in pairs, giving rise to interactions through the Zoom chat. Like every night in a disco, the performance ends in silence. Through a guided meditation, the spectators listen to the silence extended after the music and the reverberation of the songs still present in their bodies.

Why now?

"The idea for this show was born in the car, where I normally listen to music and where my musical crushes occur. When a song appears that gives me goose bumps and my heartbeat to the top, I play it again several times to discover between the lines and notes , the encrypted messages that it brings with it The Universe sends me songs like messages in a bottle, traveling by sea to my distant island with an order, a mandate, a request, which is only for me.

There are also long periods in which I do not discover any new song, and in which I return to play the same old songs over and over again. In this loop the old songs steal mystery from the present, wearing down its meaning. In those times I ask myself why? Why don't new songs come to me? Why am I Radio Universo FM does not send me its vibes?

Last week I was in the car and Stromae's Alors On Danse run on the radio.

The song of my Erasmus.

Alors On Danse makes the cast of a series of problems of the present (and of the past) that affect some more than others, but that can potentially affect everyone: money, heartbreak, illness, disappointment, natural disasters, famines.

"Because of this, because we're in the shit, we keep dancing, we keep singing, again and again," Stromae sings:

Alors on
Alors on
Alors on

Qui dit étude dit travail
Qui dit taf te dit les thunes
Qui dit argent dit dépenses
Qui dit credit dit créance
Qui dit dette te dit huissier
Et lui dit assis dans la merde
Qui dit Amour dit les gosses
Dit toujours et dit divorce
Qui dit proches te dit deuils
Car les problèmes ne viennent pas seuls
Qui dit crise te dit monde
Dit famine, dit tiers-monde
Qui dit fatigue dit réveil
Encore sourd de la veille
Alors on sort pour oublier tous les problèmes

Alors on danse
Alors on danse
Alors on danse
Alors on danse
Alors on danse
Alors on danse
Alors on danse
Alors on danse
Alors on danse

Et là you tell yourself that c'est fini car pire que ça ce serait la mort
Quand tu crois enfin que tu t'en sors, quand y en a plus et ben y en a encore
Est-ce la zik ou les problèmes?
Les problèmes ou bien la musique
Ça te prend les tripes, ça te prend la tête
Et puis tu pries pour que ça s'arrête
Mais c'est ton corps, c'est pas le ciel
Alors you bouches plus les oreilles
Et là tu cries encore plus fort
Et ça persists
Alors on chante

Lalalalalala
Lalalalalala
Alors on chante
Lalalalalala
Lalalalalala

Alors on chante
Alors on chante
Et puis seulement quand c'est fini
Alors on danse

Alors on danse
Alors on danse
Alors on danse
Alors on danse
Alors on danse
Alors on danse
Alors on danse

Et ben and en a encore
Et ben and en a encore
Et ben and en a encore
Et ben and en a encore
Et ben and en a encore

After the pandemic, in the midst of the economic and environmental crisis, after the political and social polarizations, the seas of fake news, between forecasts of imminent blackouts and promises of disaster, Silent Disco was born with the intention of putting PAUSE on mental noise and invite us to dance, to release energy, to move with other people and to know their songs. Silent Disco creates a space where you can make sense of the present through a song.

Silent Disco creates a space where you can make sense of the present through a song. Where to cultivate the hope that our song will come out. Where to discover new music. A space where we can reconnect with the Radio of the Universe and reconnect from our solitudes. "