REVIEW: The Festival d'Avignon Presents SILENCE By Lucie Antunes and Mathilde Monnier

Silence, now performing at the Festival d’Avignon’s Carrière de Boulbon, invites audiences into something approaching the Dionysian. On a circular platform designed by Annie Tolleter and set against the quarry’s towering cliff face, composer Lucie Antunes and an exceptional ensemble of musicians filled the Provençal night with hypnotic, often sublime sound. Around them, performers circulated between the musicians at the platform’s center and its outer rim, where Mathilde Monnier’s choreography unfolded. Rather than intensifying the music’s spell, the dance frequently diverted attention from it. Though judging by the evening’s rapturous ovation, many spectators disagreed.

Adapted from Antunes’s recent album of the same name, Silence proposes a paradox: music about silence. This is not, in the manner of John Cage, a postmodern presentation of silence itself, but a meditation on silence’s place within contemporary life. The score ranges from propulsive percussion and Björk-like lyricism to video game-inflected synthesizers and the spare regularity of a metronome. These textures reverberate against one another, generating the out-of-body exhilaration Antunes seems to seek. Looking beyond the stage, one’s gaze naturally drifts toward the stars above the quarry, where the immense silence of space appears to complete the work’s sonic imagination.

The choreography attempts a contradiction: a choreographed out-of-body experience. Monnier’s movement vocabulary hovers between everyday gesture and abstraction, treating familiar actions as pliable material without fully committing to either register. In this context, the movement felt cerebral for the music’s fluid virtuosity. The performers did not seem to move from a dissolution of the ego so much as from allegiance to a movement concept. The musicians themselves offered a more compelling expression of the relationship between movement and sound. Their drumming, the visible organization of breath, the rocking of their bodies as they played, all emerged organically from musical necessity rather than choreographic design. Watching Antunes hammer out cascading rhythms on the drums carried the suspense of watching an acrobat: every movement was at once functional and mesmerizing.

The piece concludes with two striking scenic inventions that overtook the gestural choreography. Performers slowly tore black cloth from the white stage. They then ran with these light fabrics as veils or capes. Then, they exit the platform for the work's coda and stand within Eric Wurtz’s beautiful amber light, seeming to haunt the space they have just vacated. 

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