From dance to trance there are only two letters difference. What sets them apart lies in their beginnings, what brings them together shines in their ending. Trance as a surpassing of dance in a way. Or rather: trance as a continuation of dance through other means, those of the mind. Ametonyo Silva is our shaman wizard. White t-shirt, shorts, sneakers, mid-length hair in disarray, he greets us bouncing. The entrance of the audience is that of the garage of Menagerie de Verre, the decibels and disco smoke immediately put us in the atmosphere of a late-night scene with its long line stretching out on the sidewalk. Ametonyo Silva’s proposal, which he presents with humility as a choreographic research, places us in a different spectacular relationship. Is it still a show? Wouldn’t it be more of an experiment, a process, a metamorphosis of the spectacular act itself? Wouldn’t it also be an invitation to divert our voracious gaze as consumer spectators to enter into an unprecedented, sensitive, sensory relationship, opening the field of reception to the entirety of the physical and invisible environment?
A song repeated in a loop (Tudo no sigilo by Bianco and Vytinho NG), properly disturbing music, catchy rhythm, luminous metallic percussion, the performer makes his Trojan horse. Between two facing sound totems about twenty meters apart, the performer swims lengths with the endurance of a marathon runner, the distance like a musical gateway repeated in a loop. In this diagonal of madness, the repetition of the main movements, bounces and hip thrusts propelling knees high, is just the camouflage of an infinite variation. There is no real wear and tear, but over time, a transformation, a metabolization of the real, truly won by this pulsation, is perceived. Dance is a matter of momentum and energy, a conjunction of space and time. The engagement of the dancer progressively wins us over, who, under the appearance of a frenzied partygoer, reveals himself as the bringer of a new world, the discoverer of another reality. Ametonyo Silva is a dowser of modern times. In the ambient fog, the bodies of the spectators move like Macbeth’s forest on foot, the dancer splitting the crowd like an explorer cutting a path through the Amazon jungle. He appears to us intermittently, emerging at the edge of our woods when the human foliage finally parts, his bouncing dance almost giving him the look of a faun, then disappearing again hidden by other bodies.
He is a vibrant human at the edges of inert humans. His ecstasy is nestled in exhaustion, his body flowing like dew condensed on a plant. a s s o m b r a & eacute; o doubles in a present and a elsewhere, while the spectator is carried away by the stormy flow of music and dance and migrates in the multitude of his thoughts. The music fades into silence, the dance punctuated with stillness, allowing sensations, shards of recovered memory, whispers akin to indecipherable graffiti, fixed gazes to surface. We are the guests of this unshareable, which belongs only to it and yet radiates to us. From our shore, we accompany this transhumance. Like the main character of Nostalghia (Tarkovski) performing inexplicably but obstinately in an empty pool, back and forth holding a candle whose flame flickers in the wind, Ametonyo Silva preserves with the madness and courage of saints a secret fire.
a s s o m b r a & eacute; o
Choreographic research and performance: Ametonyo Silva
External eye and artistic collaboration: Flavia Pinheiro
Sound design: Eduardo Joly
Sound loop from the song Tudo no sigilo by Bianca and Vytinho NG
Accompaniment and sound technician: Tal Agam
Lighting design: Laura Salerno
Accompaniment and lighting technician: Manuella Rondeau
Costumes: Ametonyo Silva, Flavia Pinheiro, Ana Silva (drawings and silkscreen)
Artistic dialogue: Anne Kerzerho, Katerina Andreou, Myrto Katsiki, Pauline L. Boulba, Alix de Morant, Mareu Machado, Roberto Dag &, Barbara Novati, Sophia Seiss, Clarissa Baumann, Anabelle Yolle, Mathieu Bouvier
Article photographs: @ Shira Marek
Duration: 50 minutes
March 31 and April 1, 2026, at 7 p.m.
As part of the Festival Les Inaccoutumés
Menagerie de Verre
12/14 rue Léchevin
75011 Paris
Tel: 01 43 38 33 44
https://www.menagerie-de-verre.org
June 9, 2026
As part of the Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis (RCI93)
Day at Parc Jean-Moulin – Les Guilands from 10:30 a.m. to 8 p.m.
