We came in to the Chapelle Scénes Contemporaines forum. The stage was covered in what could be construction debris: tarps, wood, cardboard, clothing, all scattered whitin the stage. Is it a construction site? An abandoned one? Or are they traces of destruction? On the left side, amidst the chaos, musical instruments can be distinguished: a guitar; a keyboard; a computer; a console; and a video projected in at the back, almost hidden. We are at Concerto by Charlie Khalil Prince and Olivia Tapiero, presented at the FTA, a work that seems like a mourning ritual, a theater of absence but not of death, a dramaturgy of objects that ends up in silence, not because they can’t or won’t have anything to say, but because they are wear out. There’s no more to say and yet here they are, here we are.

Charlie Khalil Prince is a Lebanese musician and dancer based in Montreal; Olivia Tapiero is a Quebec writer and musician; they premiered this collaboration in 2024, where they work from their shared language: music. The title, Concerto, with the Italian voice, underlines the Eurocentrism of chamber music and the instruments themselves we are seeing on stage: the piano, the guitar, a cello without strings —offered in sacrifice? The piece offers no explanations or sermons; there are questions, sensations, evocations of images that hunts us but become distorted, intervened by the bodies of Charlie and Olivia, a sequence of superimposed fragments that dissolve one into the next. I couldn’t say if they are adding meanings, if they are redefining what came before, or if they simply move on to something else, although only in appearance because that much is clear: we are in a loop with no way out. Sometimes we can hear the music of Chopin or Mozart and other times only the distortion. The space is the protagonist of the piece and is never fixed: the sound as a place, the places that bodies creates, images they patiently create and destroy producing a permanent tension, yet their movements are slow, ritualistic, like mourning, like resignation but not defeat, perhaps that’s why the tension, perhaps that’s why the attention.

The music generates different tensions, not only because of the atmospheres it creates but also because of the personal relationship with the performers, a kind of toxic relationship we don´t know about but we can sense it through a concert we can’t hear and the way the guitars are use in a rough manner. All this chaos happens with a ritualistic, solemn tempo, unhurried. Almost unnoticed some images of Beirut intervene in the video of the concert that we don’t hear, they reminding us of the Israeli occupation of Lebanon and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. There is not a single mention of it, the Palestinian flag never appears and yet I doubt anyone in the room hasn’t thought about it.

The loop ends with a gradual distortion until it reaches a buzzing sound, a vibration that stuns and shakes our bodies even after it´s stop. In the end, the rest is silence?