Silent Dances (2021-ongoing)

Silent Dances is a yearly collection of short vignettes around movement, touch, intimacy and playfulness between myself and my older performance partner Hans Muller. After inviting him to work on The Unanswered Question in 2019, simply interacting with movement and touch seemed to be the most powerful and motivating part of our collaboration. We decided to continue this practice as a series of yearly performances in outdoors spaces. Silent Dances are developed with a combination of gentle rehearsals, Feldenkrais and a research around “elegant postures”. The result is a dance that is accessible to almost anyone while remaining entirely original to the two bodies performing the dance. Though simple in form, these dances create a space where male identifying bodies from different generations interact with playfulness, tenderness and complicity in public space, creating a precedent for how such bodies are portrayed in society. 

I love performing this work with Hans. Over the past years of finding each other to train together, I’ve found a working partner with whom I’ve developed a radically fraternal relationship. I hope that we will manage to continue these silent dances at least once a year, in one place or another, and that we will find the conditions and support needed to show an alternative to what authentic relationships between cishet men can look like. The best part of this work for me is when Hans tells me how much he misses practicing because of how good he feels afterwards.

Written and performed by Andrée Chapatte and Hans Muller
Presented at Sueur festival in 2021 thanks to Amélie Gomet
Filmed by Mehdi Mojahid, Nathaniel Moore and Chiara Monteverde
Special thanks to Meytal Blanaru who’s Fathom High method helped us dance.