Ilenia Romano in Suspended Time. Photo © Thierry De Mey

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Catching dreams suspended in time

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Ilenia Romano in Suspended Time. Photo © Thierry De Mey
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A conversation with Adriana Borriello and Thierry De Mey about interweaving sound and motion, rationality and spirituality

In the black box B of Rome’s Teatro India, around 1130 uneven length bamboos are suspended by thin metallic strings hanging from a delicate and sophisticated structure. The austere verticality yet the warm texture of the bamboo tubes, covering a distance of approximately 25 metres, makes them look like a thick forest that invites the audience to traverse, touch and smell. Dream Catcher, the name of this installation, was conceived by music composer and filmmaker Thierry De Mey (BE) and first arrived in Italy (Casa delle Arti, Belluno) in April 2024 for a short but dense rehearsal period that led to Tempo sospeso (Suspended Time), an ongoing project by dancer, choreographer and educator Adriana Borriello (IT) that choreographically activates Dream Catcher. Tempo sospeso, together with Tempo sospeso_Walking Through, a playfully participatory version of Dream Catcher, premiered at Rome’s Fuori Programma Festival 2024.

The meeting between the two artists dates back to 1983 in Brussels, where they were both working on Rosas danst Rosas, a choreographic landmark by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, created on original music by De Mey with performers Borriello, De Keersmaeker, Michèle Anne De Mey and Fumiyo Ikeda – all fresh graduates from Maurice Béjart’s dance school Mudra. After many years of developing their friendship but taking diverse and autonomous artistic trajectories, Borriello and De Mey formally renewed their professional collaboration in 2019, when Borriello invited De Mey to teach a music and dance workshop to the self-running, public funded and nomadic professional training programme DA.RE. Dance Research – Dynamic systems for transmission and research in contemporary performing arts. By that time, Borriello had already fused her practice with Tai Chi and oriental philosophy and they both were interested in exploring rationality and spirituality, chaos and order, to reflect on the perception of time through their time-based arts (music, film and choreography). Since then, various transdisciplinary projects across music, film and dance, notably the Creative Europe project Body Visions and their upcoming film La Rampa (working title), have arisen to explore in different ways how both disciplines mutually affect each other in search of the ‘sound of movement’ and the ‘movement of the sound’.


Still from La Rampa (working title, 2024–2025). Photo © Thierry De Mey
Still from La Rampa (working title, 2024–2025). Photo © Thierry De Mey

An additional project, Timelessness Dances (ongoing since 2023) – or ‘time-less-ness’ as De Mey emphatically and slowly pronounces it during our online interview, to clarify the meaning of the word ‘as a state where time no longer exists’ – clearly manifests their artistic interests in rationality, spirituality and time transcendence. De Mey explains: ‘time-less-ness is inspired by cosmology to describe the state in which the linear perception of time or the time coordinates of before and after do not exist.’ This idea gave birth to Timelessness Dances, recently presented in the 2024 edition of Short Theatre festival in Rome, a ‘floating’ choreography by Borriello set to percussion music by De Mey and the interactive sound design by Edoardo Maria Bellucci. Tempo Sospeso builds on the interwoven music composition, sound feedback, set and aleatory choreography that emerged in Timelessness Dances.


Timelessness Dances primo passo, Campania Teatro Festival, June 2023. Photo © Salvatore Pastore
Timelessness Dances primo passo, Campania Teatro Festival, June 2023. Photo © Salvatore Pastore

The precursor of Tempo sospeso, Dream Catcher, is a sort of a silent architecture conceived to produce sound through its activation by the moving body. Dream Catcher was developed in 2017, the year De Mey concluded his role as co-director of Charleroi Danse, ‘to offer a physical experience of space and time’, as De Mey explains. Created with an almost mathematical precision by De Mey, who applied the rule of the golden mean in a three-dimensional way, it was realised by SHSH Architecture + Scenography, who had also collaborated on De Mey’s Solid Traces, an installation ‘based on the traces of movements by choreographer Trisha Brown’. Dream Catcher uses floor patterns that act according to De Mey ‘as a topological structure, as a minimal choreographic proposition for dancers and non-dancers to navigate the installation and organise their movement’. In this way, De Mey says, Dream Catcher has a ‘double life’: on one hand, for an audience to playfully experience it from within, as a sort of a large-scale toy, and on the other to experience it from outside, as in the case of Tempo Sospeso. De Mey considers the double reading very important: ‘one is totally naive and offers the audience an intuitive discovery of the installation, and the other asks artists to use creative means to propose a new vision of the work.’ This ‘double life’ between participatory and performance-based work inevitably informs the perspective of the audience, and both artists hope it may nourish interactive workshops in the future for targeting specific audiences.


Tempo sospeso_Walking Through, Teatro India, Fuori Programma Festival, July 2024. Photo © Giuseppe Follacchio
Tempo sospeso_Walking Through, Teatro India, Fuori Programma Festival, July 2024. Photo © Giuseppe Follacchio

The mathematical precision of Dream Catcher also reflects the choreographic meticulousness of Tempo Sospeso, a choreographic experiment that aims to produce an alternative feeling of time (suspended time, as the title suggests) and ‘a synaesthetic experience’, as Borriello observes, based on sound, light (by Théo Longuemare), body and movement. For Borriello, the choreography of Tempo Sospeso ‘is almost written as the dancers [Erica Bravini, Michele Ermini, Michael Incarbone, Donatella Morrone, Ilenia Romano and Borriello herself] need to touch specific bamboo tubes or cross the installation from one side to the other during specific time frames that correspond to their inner timing’. Yet the central choreographic task proposed by Borriello is the binary of ‘activity-inactivity’ in which the dancers engage with Dream Catcher through various actions (such as blowing the bamboo tubes like wind instruments, or pulling and pushing the whole installation), while on other occasions they let the installation remain inactive ‘to enable contemplation, to emanate the resonance of their activity, to allow their actions to reverberate in space and time’. For instance, as the six performers move across the installation, they may become the breeze that makes the bamboo tubes tinkle like a wind chime or, depending on their effort, the installation may respond sequentially as a pendulum. The dancers also navigate the bamboo forest, filling the negative space underneath the tubes, or moving around and between them with their bodies partially hidden, or being imprisoned behind them – a condition that one audience member described thus: ‘the prison becomes a way to find freedom in the inner part of the self’.


Michele Ermini in Suspended Time, Teatro India, Fuori Programma Festival, July 2024. Photo © Thierry De Mey
Michele Ermini in Suspended Time, Teatro India, Fuori Programma Festival, July 2024. Photo © Thierry De Mey

Small microphones and transmitters attached to the dancers (e.g. on the arm or the lapel) and to the bamboos capture the personal timbre of movement of each performer, transmitting it to sound artist Edoardo Maria Bellucci, who controls De Mey’s composition according to the intensity and frequency of the movement and transmits it back through speakers positioned around the installation. The aural outcome is sometimes dry and other times deep, creating echoes, being multiplied and amplified, resulting choreographically and musically in ‘resonances, delays and responses among other sound effects’. In Bellucci’s live audio feedback system, the movement becomes sound and the sound instigates movement in a circuit of continuous interaction, and the detailed choreographic structure blends with ‘the dancers’ enhanced listening of the response of the sound system that adds an aleatoric (and vivid) element to the choreographic operation’.

As Borriello adds, bamboos indicate their age through their length and in this way ‘time becomes space and matter to be vertically suspended, to become a suspended time’. This is another way in which both artists understand the link between space and time as ‘an entangled spatio-temporal experience’. Indeed, the architecture of Dream Catcher, through the choreographic experience constructed by Borriello, gives the impression that there is no before or after, no in or out; no anchor to define when and for how long dancers and audience have been in the sealed condition of Tempo Sospeso; only ‘a strong feeling to be somewhere else in another time, another space’. Time is momentarily suspended to immerse audience, participants and performers in a multidimensional experience that bridges the perennial and the ancestral with the present. ●


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Rome, Italy
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Adriana Borriello.it
Thierry De Mey
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