Sylvie Robinson

If I’m trembling, the world is trembling. What are the political and metaphysical implications of a trembling body in a trembling world? What resonant possibilities does a trembling body produce? If the world is trembling, aren’t you trembling too?

This project treats trembling as a movement quality and political ontology. Sylvie is diagnosed with an essential tremor—a condition that causes her hands to visibly shake and affects her ability to do many tasks. In this performance, Sylvie exploits her tremor as an artistic device, choreographic tool, instrument, and technology—exploring ideas of the body as an event or disturbance, dis(ability), and the perpetual motion of our material and political world. Oscillating and blurring the boundaries between humor and despair, pop culture and the personal, theory and embodied knowledge, revelation and repetition, resistance and acceptance—the performer trembles towards a reconciliation between her body and all that demands to be trembled over. After all, there is so much to tremble for.

The musician and drummer, Akram Hajj, will contribute live his existing musical practice. The performance thus becomes a duet between dancer and drummer, between embodied and sonic frequencies. TREMOR is, most simply, an invitation to tremble with the world. TREMOR is the first collaboration between performer Sylvie Robinson and dramaturge Louisa Raspé, who founded TRBL in 2024. Their artistic research not only precedes performance but necessitates a performative act with an immanent outcome. Working as TRBL, Sylvie and Louisa seek to create thoughtful and deeply layered theatre and movement compositions that draw upon critical, gender, and psychoanalytic theory and their respective backgrounds in media philosophy and anthropology.