The Body Keeps the Score
The Body Keeps the Score is a collaborative work with choreographer Audrey Thao Berger, created at London Contemporary Dance School. Inspired by Bessel van der Kolk’s book of the same name, the piece explores how trauma remains imprinted in the body — shaping emotion, behaviour, and memory long after the experience itself.
Creating a musical imprint of a traumatic voice
The fractured viola and percussion material is derived from a digital transcription of a field recording of a woman keening in Gaelic — a traditional vocal lament, expressing grief through wailing, crying, and improvised melody. This creates a mechanical imprint of traumatic voice, stripped of its human immediacy but still carrying its intense emotional residue. From this, small fragments — single lines and rhythmic cells — are extracted and repeated, reduced, and distorted, becoming imprints of imprints that drift further from their source. Alongside this, the original recording is stretched and layered into a ghostly, disembodied presence, so that live instrument, mechanical pattern, and transformed voice coexist like overlapping traces of memory: persistent, altered, and unresolved.
The choreography developed in parallel with the music, shaped by the same idea of traces and absence. Gestures are repeated, displaced, and reconfigured, leaving behind physical “imprints” of what once was. In one section, an intimate trio is performed and then repeated with one dancer missing, creating a visible absence where a body had been. Later, the same material returns with the dancers separated in space, as if the original connection has been fragmented. Movement, like the music, becomes a process of remembering and re-enacting — a physical manifestation of how experience lingers in the body, even when it is no longer consciously held.
A physical manifestation of how experience lingers in the body
Music: Alex Mills
Choreography: Audrey Berger
Dancers: Margherita Giuliodori, James Healy, Lauren Jenkins
Musicians: CHROMA