Cindy Van Acker’s latest creation, Quiet Light, is a powerful, atmospheric work. It is inhabited by two magnificent performers, Stéphanie Bayle and Daniela Zaghini, who populate the stage with their presence and absence. As the title, Quiet Light, suggests, Victor Roy’s lighting system creates random conditions of visibility: you never know when the dancers will appear or disappear. This interplay of shadows is exhilarating, full of trompe-l’œil, spectacular jumps in scale, and breathtaking superimpositions. Through dance, Van Acker has sought out the diaphanous nature and the beloved, deep blacks of Léon Spilliaert’s paintings: she spent long hours alone in the Flemish painter’s retrospective at Fondation de l’Hermitage in Lausanne in 2023.
Held together by the striking alikeness of these two bodies, the work tracks down sensations of ephemerality and evanescence, just like the sounds of young American artist Lea Bertucci, processed by Denis Rollet, whose electronic ambiance seems at times to link all the beings present in the theatre in unreal suspense. There is a kind of radical hollowing out in this choreographic composition, which is as meticulous as lacework. What is left then? Constantly changing visual disturbances. Something meteorological and infra-perceptual. In place of a belief in masterly, standardised representation, Cindy Van Acker substitutes pictorial fragility, temporal porosity, furtive encounters, and the precision of lines, in an attempt to approach what might lie between matter and anti-matter – sensitive poetics that are enchanted by a finely crafted and stripped-down dance. — MP
