A unique French-Swedish sound and dance show where bodies turn into sound-making instruments, will debut in Mumbai
Wearing mics, the quartet of Gilda Stillback, Mathilde Rance, Sandra Abouav, and Nelly Zagora perform acrobatic acts. PICS COURTESY/ALOUN MARCHAL; Luca Del Pia; G5A
Four Swedish artistes walk onto the stage. One of them raises a mic to her lips and lets out a long, drawn-out sigh. One after another, like clockwork, the women join her — all breathing directly into the mic. Anywhere else in the world, this is an onsite sound engineer’s worst nightmare. Not at Mahalaxmi’s G5A this week.
SonoR, a dance-meets-live sound show by French Sweden-based director and choreographer Aloun Marchal throws the concept of background music out of the window. “I grew tired of seeing dance shows where the music is the emotional underlayer and dance is mainly an ornamentation on top of it,” he reasons. Strapped with wireless mics, his performers become their own soundtrack.
“The entrance scene is very dear to me. If you listen closely, they sound like the seashore and then like a storm while slowly walking in patterns onstage,” he reveals. We rewind and replay a recording of the show Marchal has shared with us. We hear the seas this time. “It moves me because this is what happens when we get lost in observing a landscape. Sometimes, we can forget about ourselves, and it feels like we are the landscape itself,” he adds.
Built and rebuilt over more than five years, the show now features Gilda Stillbäck, Mathilde Rance, Sandra Abouav, and Pauline Reibell, who shape-shift, or sound-shift in this case, into folk singers, monstrous characters, and drummers of each other’s bodies. “In one of the last scenes, the performers play and sing a song using their bodies and voices. It sounds fantastic. In order to reach this level, they have to collaborate extremely tightly,” he shares.
Aloun Marchal
Earlier this month, the performance made its India debut in Pune, and found some unlikely admirers. “We met a young Indian classical dancer, Sagarika Patwardhan. She seemed to be moved by the feminist expression in the piece. Another percussionist revealed how he translates words into percussive sounds. It’s close to a scene in our production where spoken language becomes the rhythm section of dance,” he reveals. Patwardhan, who documented Marchal’s rehearsals in Pune recalls it as “a hall pass to go berserk. It’s like a ticket to an hour of madness.”
As much as the show is about sounds, it is the silence that stayed with us after an online viewing. And while Pune might have been quiet hosts, Mumbai is anything but tranquil these days, we warn the director. “I’ve noticed that it is the traffic that makes things loud in India. But I have to say that I love experiencing chaos because when I stop experiencing it, I enjoy the silence and the rest even more,” he signs off.
ON January 21; 7 pm
AT G5A Warehouse, Laxmi Mills Estate, Mahalaxmi West.
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