“I’m not anti-music,” she clarifies, wrapping her hands around a lukewarm tea. “I’m anti-sedation. We use noise to fill the void. ‘Deeper’ is about jumping into the void and realizing the void isn’t empty. It’s full of you . And most people are terrified of that.”
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. 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. Deeper - Ameena Green - No Noise -18.07.2024-
In a world screaming for our attention, Ameena Green asks us to turn it off. Her latest piece, Deeper , isn’t a performance. It’s a confrontation with silence.
18.07.2024
The room is half-empty, but not in the way that suggests failure. It is half-empty by design. On the evening of July 18th, 2024, at an unmarked warehouse space in East London, thirty-seven people sit on simple grey cushions. They have signed a waiver. Not for physical harm, but for something far more unsettling: they have agreed to no noise .
But the room is not silent. Because the audience, finally, becomes the instrument. ‘Deeper’ is about jumping into the void and
The physical toll is evident. Her knees are bruised. Her right index finger is taped where she dragged it against the concrete for a sustained thirty-second note—the only “melody” in the entire piece. She trains for this like a free diver. “Holding your breath is easy,” she says. “Holding your noise is harder. It’s a muscle. You have to learn not to fill the space.”