After Hannibal

Eyes wide shut

How can one give form to the bond that unites two dancers? Beyond fantasies and projections, how can one shape everything that settles, is transmitted, and circulates in space when bodies move together? To explore this relationship, which is both intangible and intimate, Marie Goudot and Michael Pomero drew on their own experiences—as a couple and as performers; on the deep knowledge they have of their own bodies and of each other’s bodies, of the connections, the zones of uncertainty, vertigo, and the many vocabularies they have traversed together over 27 years of choreographic life.

Seeking to produce an immersive experience of this connection, they invented a protocol of “fabricated blindness” inspired by Vito Acconci’s performance Association Area: blindfolded and cut off from their spatial references, they allowed voices to influence the creation of movement, guided by the dramaturgical eye of Julien Monty. Poet Gilles Amalvi and performer Christine De Smedt steer and reshape the trajectory of their gestures through speech—creating a vocal and poetic material: a fabric of words that function as markers and signals.

Through voices and imaginations, After Hannibal produces an open associative space, a territory of projections where their bodies react, interact, and translate in their own way the impulses generated and dispersed by language. A dual operation of translation: of what words produce within oneself and for the other—which manifests as a choreography on the edge, where words, images, and movements constantly echo each other in a continuous feedback loop.

Eyes wide shut, their eyes closed but wide open inwardly, Michael and Marie materialize an image of connection—a music of attachment. By transforming a constraint into a layer of bodily legibility, they seek to make visible what is usually invisible: the invention and propagation of gestures in space. In this quartet for two bodies and two voices, even the smallest sign makes tangible the way bodies move in unison, slide, fall, and rise—dancing beyond mere appearances.