One of Switzerland’s most talented choreographers, winner of the 2023 Swiss Grand Award for Performing Arts / Hans Reinhart Ring, Cindy Van Acker presents her new creation, a duet in an empty space that reveals the bare theatre.

Quiet Light has no subject or theme, but rather it lets itself be written by evanescent notions, which have the capacity to bring together the trajectories or the enigmas of bodies, light, and sound. Underlying this work is the idea of the unfinished, the feeling of the irrelevant, and the serene acceptance that everything is in vain: a sort of search for an apogee of the ephemeral, which is the true power of a live performance.

“When I discovered the sound installation Un orchestre de papier by Pierre Bastien at the 2023 Festival Archipel,” – says Cindy Van Acker – “it made me want to work with shadows, without showing the objects that created them. Victor Roy and I then tried out this idea. [...] There would be two light sources, one on each side of the stage: shapes would revolve in front of these projectors, thus creating shadows. It is a very simple, home-made system, but the effect on the space is impressive.
The dancers would thus move in a space that is constantly being transformed. Like clouds passing by, movements come into and then out of the light, while the dancers carry on unperturbed. The lights and the dance live independent lives.
However, the lights have to be programmed in a way that maintains the same qualities sought for the dance. There is shadow, there is light, there is one state and then another, but this is not important. And no sense of frustration should result from seeing the bodies disappear. It is natural to see. It is natural to not see. The poetry lies in this attitude of ‘who cares?’. We are fully dealing with the question of representation.”