Skip To Main Content

- Ameena Green - No Noise -18.07.2024- | Deeper

To call it a dance would be a lie. To call it theater feels too loud. What Green has constructed is a 47-minute excavation of the self using the absence of music as its primary instrument. There is no score. No found sound. No breathing looped through a subwoofer. There is only the rustle of her tendons, the soft percussive thud of her heel meeting the floor, and the terrifying, intimate sound of her own heartbeat amplified by a contact microphone taped to her sternum.

Ameena Green, the 29-year-old choreographer and “silence artist” (a term she begrudgingly accepts), stands at the center of the concrete floor. She is wearing a grey shift dress that absorbs light. For three minutes, she does not move. The audience, trained by a pre-show email that was ruthlessly polite, does not cough. Deeper - Ameena Green - No Noise -18.07.2024-

As the audience files out into the wet London night, no one speaks. They don’t look at their phones. They stand on the pavement, blinking, listening to the rain hit the awnings. For a few precious seconds, the whole world feels like Deeper . To call it a dance would be a lie

“We’ve confused volume with depth,” Green told me after the show, her voice still hoarse from the effort of silence. “If a movie is loud, we think it’s important. If a bass drops, we think we feel something. But real fear, real longing, real deeper —that happens in the absence of noise. That happens when you can hear yourself blink.” There is no score

Then a bus drives by. The spell breaks. But the fracture remains.

“It’s like staring at the sun,” says Mark Felton, a sound engineer who attended the premiere. “I spend my life fixing noise. I never realized that the loudest thing in the world is a person trying not to make a sound. You hear the blood in your ears. You hear the building settle. You hear your own thoughts, and they are deafening .”

To call it a dance would be a lie. To call it theater feels too loud. What Green has constructed is a 47-minute excavation of the self using the absence of music as its primary instrument. There is no score. No found sound. No breathing looped through a subwoofer. There is only the rustle of her tendons, the soft percussive thud of her heel meeting the floor, and the terrifying, intimate sound of her own heartbeat amplified by a contact microphone taped to her sternum.

Ameena Green, the 29-year-old choreographer and “silence artist” (a term she begrudgingly accepts), stands at the center of the concrete floor. She is wearing a grey shift dress that absorbs light. For three minutes, she does not move. The audience, trained by a pre-show email that was ruthlessly polite, does not cough.

As the audience files out into the wet London night, no one speaks. They don’t look at their phones. They stand on the pavement, blinking, listening to the rain hit the awnings. For a few precious seconds, the whole world feels like Deeper .

“We’ve confused volume with depth,” Green told me after the show, her voice still hoarse from the effort of silence. “If a movie is loud, we think it’s important. If a bass drops, we think we feel something. But real fear, real longing, real deeper —that happens in the absence of noise. That happens when you can hear yourself blink.”

Then a bus drives by. The spell breaks. But the fracture remains.

“It’s like staring at the sun,” says Mark Felton, a sound engineer who attended the premiere. “I spend my life fixing noise. I never realized that the loudest thing in the world is a person trying not to make a sound. You hear the blood in your ears. You hear the building settle. You hear your own thoughts, and they are deafening .”