Speechless Voices

“Speechless Voices”, Compagnie Greffe / Cindy Van Acker

Current Dance Works

“Speechless Voices”, which premièred at the Steps dance festival in 2018, is inspired by the paintings of the contemporary Belgian artist Michaël Borremans. Cindy Van Acker places the six dancers like figures in these sceneries, embedded in the pictorial environment even when they are dancing. Archaic rituals also served as a starting point for the composition and for the creation of the costumes and jewellery by the Belgian artist Marie Artamonoff. For the rituals – in which the barbarian meets the civilised – Cindy Van Acker also drew heavily on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film “Medea”. In “Speechless Voices” contradictions arise out of the communion of presence and absence, solitude and togetherness. Further contrasts emerge from the ritual dance tableaux and the electronic music composition by Mika Vainio, for whom the piece is also a homage: Cindy Van Acker often worked with the Finnish musician, who died in 2017.

Isabelle Fuchs, jury member:

“How can we translate the unsayable, conceive what is not there? How can we face up to mourning? Those are the tantalising questions that Cindy Van Acker attempts to answer via the evocative power of dance and an end-of-days theatricality in which aesthetics intertwine. She gives form to the chaos of emotions through the interplay of novel correspondences, conjuring up a place where the unconscious reformulates events. The choreographer takes mourners drawn from medieval statuary and shifts them towards the mannerism of monuments to the dead or some of the cult images of our recent history. And beneath the crystals of a Baroque chandelier, the loops of electronic music punctuate this captivating ritual of farewell.”

Compagnie Greffe / Cindy Van Acker

Cindy Van Acker was born in Belgium in 1971. After training in classical ballet she danced with the Ballet Royal de Flandre and joined the Ballet du Grand Théâtre in Geneva in 1991. In 1994 she began choreographing works of her own and in 2002 she set up Cie Greffe, gaining international recognition for her solo “Corps 00:00”. “Pneuma” (2005) was her first group piece for eight dancers. That same year she invited the Italian director Romeo Castelucci to the Biennale in Venice, a move which led to an artistic collaboration between the two. In the 2006–07 season she presented the trio for women “Kernel” at the Théâtre du Grütli in Geneva, her first cooperation with the composer Mika Vainio. As well as her creations with Cie Greffe, Cindy Van Acker has produced works for the Ballet Junior and Ballet du Grand Théâtre in Geneva, P.A.R.T.S in Brussels and the Ballet du Lorraine. “Diffraction” (2011) received a Current Dance Works award in the first Swiss Dance Awards in 2013.