No phones. No whispers. No shuffling of programs. No ambient hum of expectation.
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 Quiet Unraveling: Ameena Green’s ‘Deeper’ and the Art of No Noise Deeper - Ameena Green - No Noise -18.07.2024-
Then a bus drives by. The spell breaks. But the fracture remains.
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.” No phones
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 .
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 . No ambient hum of expectation
You hear the squeak of a leather shoe. A nervous swallow. The distant wail of a siren three blocks away that suddenly feels like a Greek chorus. One woman’s stomach growls, and ten people flinch. Green smiles—the only expression she allows herself all night.
“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.”
“It’s like staring at the sun,” says Mark Felton, a sound engineer who attended the premiere. “I spend my life fixing noise. I never realized that the loudest thing in the world is a person trying not to make a sound. You hear the blood in your ears. You hear the building settle. You hear your own thoughts, and they are deafening .”
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.