Perched intermittently among and atop a ragged pile of industrial materials, the Les Commandos Percu performers’ faces glint with shimmering silver among smears of grime.

As they beat the surfaces around them, a cloud of sound swells, underscored by bursts of carefully timed flame, light and darkness that envelop performer and audience alike. This overwhelming experience is SILENCE ! – a percussion and pyrotechnics performance devised by the French artists.

“SILENCE ! the show poses a question about the future of the world,” says Les Commandos Percu artistic director Raymond Gabriel.

“The scenography of our show evokes a sort of mountain of debris. We emerge from it as if we were miners, workers from the depths; we extract the sound material.

“I often say to musicians: ‘We are flowers growing on a field of ruins. We are the return of life in all its elemental force. Our rhythmic pulsations are its beating heart’.”

Gabriel and his team have been performing SILENCE ! for more than five years, and have toured widely in that time, with the show continuously evolving.

Pyrotechnics are an integral part of SILENCE! Photo: Supplied

This year’s season at Adelaide Fringe is the work’s Australian premiere. Presented at Elder Park at Tarntanya Wama (Park 26), SILENCE ! will be the headline performance across each night of a three-day event that also includes a line-up of Australian musicians, food and drink stalls, and roving performance artists.

While the pounding percussion and strobing pyrotechnics of SILENCE ! are conducive to a party atmosphere, Gabriel says the performance’s almost Mad Max-esque aesthetic is designed to produce as much thought as movement among its audience.

“SILENCE ! also evokes the ‘run out of fuel’ [idea] – machines that stop for lack of fuel,” he says. “There are passages in the staging of the show that directly evoke this notion. We live in a finite world. We are all very dependent on available energy, and we may have reached a limit.

“There is also a scene in the show where the pyrotechnics follow the music as it comes like a growing storm to a peak… In this piece we have achieved something that is unprecedented in pyrotechnics: after rising, the storm of fire and sound descends gently, gradually, until it disappears; it is the return of silence. In this sense, silence is also a time for reflection. You can’t think properly in noise. It allows us to think deeper; What have we done? Where are we going?”

The unique sound of Les Commandos Percu is central to the group’s capacity to incite layered thought amid its high-energy performances. The sound is fostered by the unconventional instruments the artists wield, all of which are of their own invention.

Gabriel says the unfamiliar nature of the instruments and sounds allows the artists to produce a new language through which to communicate with the audience.

“The world of percussion is always at the limit between noise and sound, and we are well placed to know it,” he says. “Especially in SILENCE !, we sought to generate noises which would become sounds as soon as we give them a meaning, that we can ‘code’ them and therefore create a language.

“It’s the complete opposite of a show with shiny chrome instruments… There is a form of ecology in our show because we are able to recycle sound material with what could be considered industrial waste.”

Using the fundamental forces of fire and beat as its main mediums, SILENCE ! is a performance that draws on the long and deep history of ways humans come together and connect.

It is a celebration of the ephemeral and the sensory, but with a long-tail ripple that asks the audience to keep thinking long after the applause has quieted, the pyrotechnics have ceased, and silence has descended.

Momentarily, Buxton Walker and Les Commandos Percu are presenting SILENCE ! in Elder Park at Tarntanya Wama from February 17-19 as part of the 2023 Adelaide Fringe.

This story is part of a series of articles being produced with the support of Adelaide Fringe. Read more Fringe stories here.