Deeper - Ameena Green - No Noise -18.07.2024- 【2027】
The piece is structured like a spiral. Green begins with micro-movements: the twitch of an eyelid, the slow clench of a fist over ninety seconds. She calls this phase “The Static.” As she moves into “The Pulse,” the audience hears the wet click of her joints, the slide of her palm against her thigh. By the time she reaches “The Abyss”—a harrowing ten-minute sequence where she lies prone, hyperventilating into silence until the sound of air moving in and out of her lungs becomes a hurricane—several audience members are crying. Not from sadness. From the sheer sensory overload of nothing .
Ameena Green, the 29-year-old choreographer and “silence artist” (a term she begrudgingly accepts), stands at the center of the concrete floor. She is wearing a grey shift dress that absorbs light. For three minutes, she does not move. The audience, trained by a pre-show email that was ruthlessly polite, does not cough.
“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 . Deeper - Ameena Green - No Noise -18.07.2024-
18.07.2024
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.”
Halfway through Deeper , there is a moment that will become legendary among the avant-garde circuit. Green stops moving entirely. She sits cross-legged. She looks directly at the audience—not through them, but at them. She holds her hand up, palm flat, like a traffic cop. For four minutes and thirty-three seconds (a direct nod to John Cage), she does nothing. The piece is structured like a spiral
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.
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 .
Green’s work comes at a specific cultural tipping point. We are living through the era of the “dual screen,” the 24/7 news cycle, the infinite scroll. Noise has become a weapon of mass distraction. In her artist’s statement for Deeper , Green quotes the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer: “The modern ear is a sewer.” She wants to unclog it. By the time she reaches “The Abyss”—a harrowing
The Quiet Unraveling: Ameena Green’s ‘Deeper’ and the Art of No Noise
“We’ve confused volume with depth,” Green told me after the show, her voice still hoarse from the effort of silence. “If a movie is loud, we think it’s important. If a bass drops, we think we feel something. But real fear, real longing, real deeper —that happens in the absence of noise. That happens when you can hear yourself blink.”