amilton de azevedo writes about concerto, by Charlie Khalil Prince and Olivia Tapiero (Canada), presented in the 2025 Festival TransAmériques (FTA – Tiohtià:ké/Montreal). this text is part of a special coverage; the critic traveled to Canada at the invitation of the FTA.

Whilst the public find their seats in Théâtre Prospero, Charlie Khalil Prince and Olivia Tapiero are onstage, surrounded by garbage; scraps of different materialities, all spread around as if the stage is a giant dumpster. concerto overflow both its definition – is it a concert, an installation, a performance, a live show, (…)? – and its duration: looks like Khalil and Tapiero are there, present, signifying, long before the convention of the audience’s light going off; as the work ends, something still resonates on the spectator. Throughout one hour and fifteen minutes, the experience is that concerto puts eons into motion, condensating and suspending time and space at the same time.

Since the (this?) beginning, concerto inscribes itself as a manifestation of the woe of our time. Angst and anguish, violence and exploitation, crisis over crisis and yet some effort, some desire of recreation, reordering of the terror that the world faces today. Khalil and Tapiero, together, pull up a white plastic to cover all that mess; putting it under the carpet, one might think. Afterwards, a body bag occupies the center, covered by barbed wire. Death. concerto creates eulogies for the so-many losses that we witness and mourn and are enraging.

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As the set is being transformed by the performer’s actions, layers overlap and concerto targets diverse issues in different manners. Visualities, soundscapes, types of interaction and forms of being present onstage are in constant transit – and permanences. Khalil drop-dances through the plastic as Tapiero “cleans” the space, throwing plastic tubes and other objects in his direction; as he dances, she represents, between blasé and brutality, a violence that is framed on fictionalization – yet, Khalil is there, performing and being hit.

The word “concert” brings an image of a pompous, clean presentation; concerto confronts it in its chaotic noise and the dirtiness of the misé-en-scene. Also, the classic music on itself is somewhat put at stake in several moments, as in the video of a pianist being played on a small part of the back wall, or when Tapiero struggles to play a spinning electric piano, or when a cello is hanged and swinged from the ceiling as Khalil swings an electric guitar on the floor. Past present future are being transversed in both content and structure of the work. Everything is confusing yet everything comes together. How to express our experience of impotence facing the world as it is? How to build bridges, other ways of communicating? concerto’s political statement is its form.

The soundscapes, complexly live-built by the performers with guitar, piano, voice, synths, pedals, banging on microphoned walls, etc., are often distorted and always loop made. The accumulation of inputs reflects an accumulation society – but in concerto, the ephemeral nature of live produced music makes all vanish and reappear differently, building up atmospheres and also fading them. Repeating sound patterns, repeating social patterns; the cycle of colonial violence, always shifting itself in more ubiquitous manners on a globalized world, the cycle of progress, often bulldozing nature and entire populations.

It is hard to ask for an other to gaze upon the future; to create ways of broadening the horizon that lies ahead. concerto acknowledgment of feelings such as impotence and perplexity brings to it not a fatalist perspective, but one that calls for a reckoning – a requiem for the loopxtractivism, a possibility of building from destruction, creating from the disposable, trusting in the ephemeral and understanding the impact of the testimony.

Khalil and Tapiero, arms tainted oil-black, witness a wall, as if glazing upon prehistorical rupestrian paintings made today, longing for something to come; past, present, future. They spin. They dance. concerto is an immersive and dissociative experience, conjuring almost-ritual compositions, pulsing, in and out. Creators, spectators, in and out. Subjects and objects of history, in and out. Excess, obsess, abscess, absence.