Resonant Topographies: Listening-led Movement [2017]

Listening-led choreography

Collaboration with Tora Hed and Hannah Buckley

Performed at The Calder, The Hepworth Wakefield, 2017; LEGROOM, Manchester, 2017

This site-generic work uses listening-led movement as a language for exploring architectural spaces through natural resonances. A given architectural site is acoustically analysed for its strongest resonant frequencies. When these are played back into the space, resonant topographies occur – sonic geographies consisting of loud and quiet distributions of varying frequencies, caused by the positive and negative interference between waveforms and their interaction with the architecture. In this work, resonant topographies become the stimulus for practices of movement that unfold as listening-led physical interactions between dancers, and between dancers and an audience. This work allows numerous radically different subjectivities to be articulated against a topography, to engage with it, and eventually each other through it: listening breaches the barrier between performer and audience, and a sociality of movement is crafted through resonant listening.