A body floats through a synthetic landfill beneath a suspended cello. A Mozart piano concerto slows down to the point of disintegration. Incantations are whispered and sung. Traces on a wall generate cavernous sounds of a world succumbing to its own collapse. There is no pianist.

Both a gutted concert and a living installation, ‘concerto’ stems from a decade-long intermittent collaboration between writer Olivia Tapiero and choreographer Charlie Prince. The two artists become at once technicians, performers and witnesses. Their gestures unfold in a suspended time, giving way to a profound meditation on the cost of grace, and what it means to mourn the world as the world mourns itself. 

With music as a starting point, concerto offers a suspended time while engaging with the austere and glorified codes of classical music. In this concert-installation, we interrogate the porous borders of our respective disciplines, writing and dance. Loops of sound, sentences and images expand and become the contemplative space in which we move. 

Words from the Artists
Meditating on the nature of traces and waste, we explored disintegrating sonic and synthetic landscapes, confronting collapsing temporalities and juxtaposed places. As we reflected on contrapuntal histories and ecologies, and on the colonial foundations of Western classical culture, we slowed down our music and movements, questioned our notions of virtuosity, seeking to build a relational experience of creation, destruction, and witnessing.

Context & Research
As we bear witness to the present ecocide and normalization of far-right discourses, we have been reflecting on the fact that environmental collapse is indissociable from what has been called “the migrant crisis”, bodies seeking refuge in the global North, escaping unliveable conditions that the North itself has created. 

For ‘concerto’ we are exploring the notions of garbage and residues, as they relate to mourning and collapsing ecosystems, but also insofar as certain bodies are, in the current political paradigm, border-bodies considered as excedents that nations should expel to preserve the violent purity of their own national and geographical bodies.

Following Mary Douglas’s theory that “dirt is matter out of place, [...] the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, insofar as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements”, and that these “border-bodies are relegated to the world of garbage”, we are considering about  how waste (mis)management  - garbage in space, the displacement of “undesirable” materials and populations to ever-furthering borders, artificial objects outweighing biomass - inform the meaning of collective space, along with dynamics of exclusion and dehumanization. 
“Our pollution behaviour is the reaction which condemns any object or idea likely to confuse or contradict cherished classifications.” / Dirt and garbage appear as “a residual category” - Mary Douglas

Dates:
September 20, 21, 22, 2024 @ Sursock Museum, Beirut, Lebanon
September 5, 6, 7, 8 , 2024 (Premiere) @ Tangente Danse , Montréal, Canada
May 10, 2023 (showing) @ Maison pour La Danse Du Quebec, Canada
April 8, 2023 (showinng) @ Tangente Danse, Montréal, Canada
April 1, 2023 (lecture-performance) @ Tangente Danse, Montréal, Canada

Creation & Performance : Charlie Prince & Olivia Tapiero
Original Music: Charlie Prince & Olivia Tapiero
Dramaturgy: Marilou Craft
Movement Consultant: Linda Rabin
Video: Selim Mourad, Sammy Benammar
Coproduction and support : Charleroi Danse (BE) , Tangente Danse (CA) , Par.B.l.eux (CA), Boghossian Foundation (CA), Festival Acces Asie (CA), Canada Council for the Arts (CA)
Video taken by Vjosana Shkruti