From dance to trance, there are only two letters differentiating them. What sets them apart is in their beginning, while what brings them together shines in their ending. Trance is like a surpassing of dance in a way. Or, trance as a continuation of dance through other means, those of the mind. Ametonyo Silva is our shaman sorcerer. White t-shirt, shorts, sneakers, shoulder-length tousled hair, he greets us with a bound. The audience’s entrance is that of the garage of the Menagerie de Verre, with the decibels and smoke of a nightclub immediately putting us in the atmosphere of a late evening with its long queue extending onto the sidewalk. Ametonyo Silva’s proposal, presented humbly as a choreographic research, places us in a different spectacular relationship. Is it still a show? Would it not be rather an experimentation, a process, a metamorphosis of the spectacular act itself? Would it also not be an invitation to divert our voracious gaze as consumer spectators to enter into an unprecedented, sensitive, sensory relationship, opening up the field of reception to the entire physical and invisible environment?
Between two facing speaker-totems about twenty meters apart, the performer does his Trojan horse. Repeating a song (Tudo no sigilo by Bianco and Vytinho NG), with captivating music, entrancing rhythm, and bright metallic percussion, the performer chains together lengths with the endurance of a marathon runner, the distance acting like a musical gateway repeated in a loop. In this diagonal of madness, the repetition of the main movements, rebounds and hip thrusts propelling the knees high, is only the camouflage of an endless variation. There is no actual wear, but over time, one perceives a transformation, a metabolization of reality, truly won by this pulsation. Dance is a matter of momentum and energy, a conjunction of space and time. The engagement of the dancer gradually captivates us, who, under the appearance of a frenetic partygoer, reveals himself as a birth-giver of a new world, a discoverer of another reality. Ametonyo Silva is a modern-day dowser. In the ambient fog, the spectators’ bodies move like the forest in Macbeth’s march, the dancer cutting through the crowd like an explorer venturing through the Amazonian jungle. He appears intermittently, emerging at the edge of our wood when the human foliage finally separates, his bounding dance almost giving him the appearance of a faun, then disappearing again concealed by other bodies.
He is a vibrant human at the edge of inert humans. His ecstasy lies in exhaustion, his body dripping like dew condensed on a plant. a s s o m b r a ç ã o unfolds in a present and elsewhere, while the spectator is carried away by the tempestuous flow of music and dance and migrates simultaneously into the multitude of his thoughts. The music fades into silence, the dance punctuated with stillness, allowing sensations, flashes of recovered memory, indecipherable whisperings like graffiti, and fixed gazes to surface into the visible realm. We are the guests of this unshareable, which belongs only to him yet radiates out to us. From our shore, we accompany this transhumance. Similar to the main character in Nostalghia (Tarkovsky) moving in an empty pool, inexplicably but persistently, back and forth, holding a candle whose flame flickers under the wind, Ametonyo Silva preserves with the madness and courage of saints a secret fire.
a s s o m b r a ç ã o
Choreographic research and performance: Ametonyo Silva
External view and artistic collaboration: Flavia Pinheiro
Sound design: Eduardo Joly
Sound loop based on the song Tudo no sigilo by Bianca and Vytinho NG
Accompaniment and sound director: Tal Agam
Light design: Laura Salerno
Accompaniment and light director: Manuella Rondeau
Costumes: Ametonyo Silva, Flavia Pinheiro, Ana Silva (drawings and serigraphy)
Artistic dialogue: Anne Kerzerho, Katerina Andreou, Myrto Katsiki, Pauline L. Boulba, Alix de Morant, Mareu Machado, Roberto Dagô, 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 pm
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 am to 8 pm
