In Exquisite Noise, Dam Van Huynh continues his exploration of how resistance can be felt as much as seen, turning protest into movement, sound, and atmosphere.

Exquisite Noise

Was this the first performance where I’ve ever been handed earplugs on arrival? I think so, and honestly, fair enough. Exquisite Noise, the new work by Van Huynh Company performed as a one-off last night at The Place, does exactly what the title promises. It’s loud, disorienting, and yet somehow beautiful. After seeing a lot of performance week in and week out, it’s rare that something still manages to surprise me, but this one did. The decibel level was only part of it. The piece sits somewhere between choreography and performance art, an experiment in what happens when sound, light, and movement collide. Van Huynh’s pre-show talk with Elaine Mitchener positioned the work as a meditation on protest, shared humanity, and the body as a site of resistance (the plastic sheet as symbol of capitalism, for instance). It was a useful bit of scene-setting as I’m not sure I would have fully appreciated all those ideas through the performance alone. What did come through was the sensation of overwhelm, the sense of the body as both instrument and battleground.

There are echoes here of Pina Bausch’s interest in exhaustion and repetition, or of William Forsythe’s intentionally political choreography. But the difference here is that Van Huynh’s approaches these concepts through sensory onslaught. It’s an audacious decision: to make saturation itself the structure. The visual field, with lots of strobe and saturated colour, recalls not only protest but also the sensory chaos of mass gatherings: moments when the individual body dissolves into collective movement. Watching it, I found myself losing track of transitions or motifs. It’s so immediate and immersive that you can only be in the moment. Past and future cease to exist, at least until the performance is over and you can start to reflect on what you’ve seen.

What Do We Lose When We Stay Quiet?

The earplugs are, of course, a practical gesture, but also a metaphorical one. How do we protect ourselves from the noise of the world, and what do we lose when we do? At times I found myself removing said earplugs to let the work in in its entirety, even if that meant literal discomfort. That question of engagement, participation, risk, and choice runs through the work. The accompanying handout, a series of quotes and fragments on sound and resistance, grounds the performance in a lineage of thought along these lines. The dancers use their voices, too, with cries, exhalations and fragments of sound puncturing the sonic landscape. But I’d expected more of that energy to emerge within the soundtrack itself (composer Ian Tang, sound by Michael Picknett). More of the noise of protest: the disordered, collective roar of a crowd. What we hear instead is something more wide-ranging, featuring electronic sound, music, crowds, and distended human voices. It’s a neat reflection of the visceral immediacy and range of the dancers’ bodies.

Visually and kinetically, Exquisite Noise is astonishing. The minimalist staging and strong lighting (lighting design by Patricia Roldán Polo) create a sense of exposure, of risk. There’s nowhere to hide. Each performer commits completely, whether in solo exertion or collective frenzy. It’s not a tidy or particularly comfortable work, which is very much the point. Like Bausch, or even more recent artists exploring activism through form (say Tania Bruguera), Van Huynh treats endurance as both aesthetic and political gesture. By the end, I felt oddly cleansed, if overstimulated. Exquisite Noise is a reminder that protest doesn’t have to be articulate to be meaningful. It can exist as shared noise, as the persistence of bodies still moving.

Salterton Arts Review’s rating: 3.5/5

Exquisite Noise had its London debut at The Place on 10 October 2025. Check out Van Huynh Company’s website for future listings.

Link to review