Charlie Khalil Prince - Shifting the silence

The ballet that Lebanese artist Charlie Khalil Prince brings to the stage of the Teatro Biblioteca Quarticciolo for the 2026 season of ORBITA | Spellbound National Dance Production Center develops as a research in motion, an open field where memory and presence collide.

Already presented at several major festivals and theatres, Charlie Khalil Prince’s choreographic works move between dance and performance, exploring the intersections between the political and poetic body. Starting from the body as a place of violence and erasure, of colonial heritage and fractures, Shifting the Silence seeks to transform vulnerability into revolt, drawing on multiple traditions of movement: dabke, with its communal strength and its challenge to fragmentation; ballet, with its vertical discipline and the weight of its European heritage; and contemporary dance, restless in its desire to dismantle and reconstruct form.

These vocabularies do not harmonize, but clash, interrupt, and disturb each other, producing a choreography in which cultural submissions are both remembered and destabilized. Movement and music exist in reciprocity. The act of producing sound is choreographic, shaping the air into rhythm, while the choreographic act is musical, engraving time with embodied melodies. This intersection of disciplines creates a body that is both instrument and archive: a container of mourning, a witness to stories, and an impulse reaching toward imagined futures.