Attunement and inclining: How to listen to frail bodies

Presentations and sharing with Thiago Granato, Miriam Jakob, Brandon LaBelle and Nicole Michalla and invited guests. Facilitated by researchers, artists and performers involved in sound studies, choreography, performative practices, voice and breath-work, we’ll think, speculate and share together, delving into concepts of listening and the body. We’ll also test ways of being in our bodies through exercises and experimentation involving breath and voice, dialogical encounter and shared attention, touch and tactility, to elaborate forms of sensing and working with bodily presence. Through such shared activity, we’ll search for ways to grow modes and forms of radical sympathy.

This edition of The Listening Academy focuses on questions and practices of embodiment, and in what ways listening opens paths toward somatic engagement and research. How does listening affect the body and ways of attuning to embodied experiences? Moreover, how do different bodies listen? In what sense might listening provide a generative approach to thinking and feeling the body, as well as conceptualizing new perspectives on relationality? If listening is fundamental to nurturing empathy and sympathetic knowing, as well as attending to past experience, how might this enhance deeper attention to bodily health and healing?

Abstract for Katarina Blomqvist's lecture performance Attunement and inclining: How to listen to frail bodies

"Recording persons for creative documentaries usually takes place in a shared, coherent world. Accordingly, interviewees are considered as informants who are able to give testimonies of their lives. But what happens when interviewees are frail older adults in long-term care, most of whom even affected by cognitive impairment? What does this context reveal about the documentary encounter and listening as an artistic practice? Furthermore, the question of listening in documentary media is theoretically underexplored even though documentary media always constitutes listening subjects.

The aim of the lecture performance which includes listening to documentary audio pieces and sound recordings is to sensitize participants to how we listen to different bodies, in this case fragile bodies of elder persons. What kind of participatory knowing is it possible to attain while hearkening to different bodies in this way? And in what sense the voice can carry the body of a person who is emitting the words and sounds? What kind of attunement is needed in listening frail older persons with dementia? In sum, what is the creative continuity of contact that I am aiming at during a documentary encounter?"

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