The beauty of noise

At first there is only silence. The interpreters enter and look at the spectators in the audience. Back, they receive the public’s gaze. It is from this relationship that Noise is made, the show by Sofia Dias and Vítor Roriz, which is on Culturgest between this thursday, 10, and Saturday, October 12. It is no coincidence that there is no sound in these first minutes – even if the title reminds us of exactly the opposite. “I like the idea of ​​causing this initial shock, I believe it gives more space for those watching to accept, to be in the present”, notes Vítor. “Yes, from this present, we enter fiction and give way to an imaginary together. This show also ends up being an ode to the place of Theatre, where many fictions fit and where many gestures and movements fit, where there is mystery, and where we don’t know what we are going to find, but where we go anyway, because we need to go and be, because we need to unfold”, adds Sofia.

The first words are spoken in English: “What do you see?” The translation comes in the form of some subtitles written on small pieces of paper and placed by hand, one by one, on an overhead projector. “What do you see?”, “A body?”… The dancers describe their gestures and offer several reading possibilities. “How many words can fit in one gesture?” asks Sofia, remembering that a movement does not need to have just one meaning and that audiences less accustomed to dance feel embarrassed by the obligation to explain what they see. “How do we break this, how do we invite and welcome the multiplicity of perception of a movement?” On stage, the dancers strip themselves of virtuosity, complicated movements and layers and assume the presence of their bodies and their weaknesses in front of an audience. “It’s nice to be in a place and not know,” will be heard later during the show. Before that, the attention has turned to the audience, the “abstract and diffuse mass” has revealed itself in faces, dreams, expressions, gestures, desires, and the spectators were invited to – metaphorically – go up to the stage. “It’s a feeling of belonging, that they could also be here on scene, an invitation to imagination, to think about how we live in the present and how we are going to fill it. This happens in all our shows, but here it’s a topic”, says Vitor. “Those bodies summon humanity, it’s a call to empathy”, summarizes Sofia.

The extra power of dance

What’s noisy about this show, then? The title, they explain, came about halfway through the creation process, which was accompanied by scientists from the Champalimaud Foundation’s Center for the Unknown, where the duo has been in artistic residency since 2023 and until the end of this year. “The show didn’t come from these meetings, but we had a lot of conversations, they attended rehearsals and many of the ideas we ended up developing came from these discussions”, says Vítor. “Seeing their reactions reminds us again that dance is an extraordinary thing, in which we can put so much into a movement, and that dancers have so many skills that we no longer pay attention: the way they occupy space, synchronization, listening to others, improvisation… It’s almost an extra power, there’s something very special about dancing and, on stage, we are on a more poetic and freer side than in scientific research”, says Sofia.

The dialogue with neuroscience made them realize that noise is essential to existence and learning. “We need the noise to access the signal. To nullify the noise is to nullify our ability to understand”, highlights Sofia. It all depends, then, on where we turn our attention, because there is much that is peripheral that is, after all, essential. The squeaking of the chairs in the audience, the noise of the door opening and closing, the shoes on the carpet on the living room floor, the presence of the other person right there next to us – isn’t there, after all, so much beauty in noise?