Listening Is An Act of Care

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On Thursday 30 April, I’m partnering with MDC Live Arts’ EcoCultura initiative and Venture Cafe to offer an online workshop on how to set up an audio livestream from your balcony or yard. During the presentation, I will introduce the principles of acoustic ecology and teach participants how to share their soundscape with other people listening around the world for a 24 hour radio broadcast called Reveil which coincides with International Dawn Chorus Day. As I prepare for these events, it seemed like a good moment to trace how I came to involve sound in my work, and why these events are important to me.

About 15 years ago, I was fortunate to receive a research grant for travel while I was a graduate student in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. I intended to make a documentary video about carpet weaving in Iran, my ancestral homeland. It was an overly ambitious project for me at that time. I didn’t have filmmaking experience and I hadn’t done much ethnographic field work. The personal significance of a return to Iran only served to complicate the technical and research challenges. Though I was a student of visual arts, I had always made projects that involved other elements. Texture, smell, performance, movement, and interactivity have been features of my work from the early days. The footage I collected was probably not very good, but I learned something about myself and my relationship to images.

I knew that the apparatus of the camera changed the relationship between me and the people I was recording, with whom I would only spend a short amount of time. Language and cultural barriers enhanced the awkwardness. People transformed for the camera, some might say they performed, and I did too. Plenty of documentary filmmakers could serve as models of how to elegantly address this tension, but I was not ready yet.

My clumsiness with the carpet project did not deter me from continuing to gravitate to ethnographic research. It happened to be around the time that podcasting caught fire, and I was able to learn more about audio documentary. I was fortunate to encounter communities of practitioners for whom images were not the dominant form of communication. I attended workshops, conferences, and learned as much as I could from the worlds of radio journalism and oral history.

A relational shift took place when the camera was missing. With permission to let go of the image and only a microphone between us, the people I interviewed were more at ease. I too had a greater capacity to be fully present in the process. I learned quickly that you don’t have to say or ask too many questions, which is exemplified in the work of people like Studs Terkel. Everyone has significant stories, and everyone longs to be heard. The microphone was still a gadget held between us, but a focus on audio recording signaled my commitment to listen. With more experience, I have learned to create this dynamic behind the lens too, but my early experiences shaped the prerogatives for my future work.

When catching up with friends, I sometimes find myself rambling a bit too long or needlessly interrupting. Our intimacy animates me, I am excited to transmit. Recorded interviews are different because my personal desire to be heard and seen is quelled. The microphone is a portal to open myself up, to receive. I try to practice this with my loved ones as well because I want to be better at listening without the recording. Listening is an act of care. It requires active engagement but also requires a fierce passivity. For me, the ability to receive is easier with strangers, absorbing the other comprises the work of navigating from stranger to friend. But to build intimacy, listening-as-caring must continue beyond this threshold. The transmission and the reception must work in reciprocity. And over the years I began to realize that this process can and should extend beyond our human relations. 

In a 2016 essay for The New Yorker, musicologist Kerry O’Brien argues that composer Pauline Oliveros dedicated her life to the art of listening as a form of activism. Oliveros described listening as a necessary pause before thoughtful action: “Listening is directing attention to what is heard, gathering meaning, interpreting and deciding on action.”

In a world that is oversaturated with mediated communication, where we direct our attention is big business. Attention must be paid. In recent years, I have chosen to focus a great deal of my attention on ecological issues. How can we hold more productive conversations between people and places? Environmental justice scholar Monica M. White reminds us that “land is a living being and the scene of a crime.” What can we learn if we listen to the stories of the land and water around us? How can this listening enable us to reckon with our past, present, and future?

Able-bodied people often approach landscapes as places to be seen, to be gazed upon, rather than places to listen, to be understood through our sense of hearing. This is a feature of American culture’s European roots, which have long prioritized vision over other ways of knowing. However, our sensory experiences are intersectional, they are overlapping and interdependent on one another. My attention to the act of listening is not directly tied to the sense of hearing,  a distinction I came to understand better by studying the work of Oliveros. 

In her handmade book called You are a pattern of sounds, space is a body responding to you, artist Gwyneth Zeleny Anderson describes listening as a “voluntary, focused act of perception… not only in reference to the perception of sound, but also to physical sensations, memory, mood, imagination, etc.” I would like to invite you to practice a shift in perception this weekend, during a 24+ hour live broadcast of soundscapes around the world.

The first weekend in May has been designated as International Dawn Chorus Day, when people all around the world take time to listen to the intensified sounds of the world waking up. At first light, many species begin their activities and their song and chatter in what is referred to as the dawn chorus

While parks and other public lands are closed in South Florida due to the Covid-19 restrictions, I’m taking the opportunity to set up my tent and spend the night outside in my own backyard on Friday night. Early on Saturday May 2, I will be livestreaming the sounds of my yard for anyone in the world to hear, which you can find at http://streams.soundtent.org/2020/streams/utc-4_miami-fl

You can join in and broadcast your sounds too, or you can simply tune in online to other people’s environments on the Locus Sonus map.

If you don’t have a tent or a yard, you can still set your alarm to wake up in time to catch civil twilight. This is the period of time when the sun hasn’t fully come up above the horizon, but darkness is beginning to diminish.

Using just your phone and wifi, you can contribute to a 24+ hour radio transmission of live sounds of daybreak from your own home. This broadcast is called Reveil. A collective of sound artists, radio producers, and acoustic ecologists begin their curated sampling of open microphones on the morning of Saturday May 2 just before daybreak near the Greenwich Meridian. As the earth turns on its axis, the live broadcast moves slowly westward, picking up audio feeds one by one. In this way, the event tracks the sounds of sunrise from microphone to microphone, from location to location, until the morning of Sunday May 3 in the eastern hemisphere.

You can also participate without technology, and just tune your body to receive transmissions from your environment, to fully embody the act of listening and perceiving. I don’t often wake up at sunrise, and when I do, I might be inside making my cup of coffee instead of outside witnessing the transition from light to dark, from stillness to movement. This weekend is a reminder and an invitation to pause and notice the world in a different way that shifts my usual habits and perceptions. I will feel the temperature of early morning air on my skin, smell the trees, taste the humidity, and join the morning conference call of a myriad of different species. I invite you to tune in.

Dale-Andree-National-Water-Dance

Live-streaming National Water Dance 2020

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National Water Dance 2020 MDC Live Arts

“So, I guess you’ve had to cancel National Water Dance 2020?” That’s a question I’ve heard over and over again and reflexively I respond, “No! We’re dancing! Dancers from across the United States, Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. will be dancing on April 18 at 4:00pm EST. So, find a computer and go to nationalwaterdance.org or get on your cell phone and follow a dancer that you know or go to @nationalwater_dance on Instagram. There will be plenty to see.” Luckily, live-streaming National Water Dance has always been a part of the structure of this national event so as we adjusted our focus to switching everything to social media, we were already somewhat prepared.

National Water Dance is first and foremost a “movement choir” * – a collective of dancers and movers physically engaged in bringing awareness to, and action on, climate change, particularly as it affects our waters.  In preparing for our “movement choir” we share choreographed movement phrases that are contributed by the participants. Although we are stretched across thousands of miles, the knowledge that dancers all over the country are dancing at the same time with the same movement creates a collective energy that fuels the impact of the individual performances. As dancers, we believe in somatic empathy, which speaks to our connection to ourselves as ecological systems that exist in community with all other systems. In this way, we begin to see ourselves as part of the whole of all living things, a part of an historical lineage from which we can learn and to which we hope to contribute responsibly and caringly with our physical imaginations.

Because of COVID19 our performances are no longer physically public or, should I say, in the same shared space or at a specific site. In fact, none of that is true. Our performances are still physically public, they are in a shared space, and they are site-specific, except now the public, the sharing, and the sites are all through digital media. It’s the same language in a new context. How we translate that to one another as we create our dances and how we translate that to our digital audiences is the choreographic challenge we are all taking on. Sharing screen-space becomes a new choreographic language, and by using old choreographic tools in new ways we are making exciting discoveries. Is it the same as it would have been? No, not at all. But is it something worth creating? Yes, absolutely.

I was asked by a writer for a dance publication, “What will audiences gain by viewing this performance.” My immediate response was, “How are audiences coming to see this digital event? Are they coming with curiosity or are they coming to be entertained? If they come with curiosity, then there is an opportunity to be surprised, to be challenged, to see dancers performing in different locations as soloists through individual feeds, or in groups through Zoom creating a mosaic of moving pieces on the screen. We are making visual our driving concept of dancers performing simultaneously from thousands of miles apart, creating a collective energy in space and time through the experience of sharing movement phrases.

National Water Dance 2020Time —how do we measure it? What happens when one day flows into the next without our normal demarcation of responsibilities and patterns of behavior. As we begin the next week of sequestering ourselves in “physical distancing” * from one another for fear of infection, the days melt together and our sense of time, space and connection are being redefined. We are fortunate to be living in the digital age, where we are able to close that distance by linking together through social media. How does time work on a shared screen that is live-streamed from multiple locations — a fractured image made whole by intention? Live-streaming National Water Dance allows us to share that moment together and capture it on Instagram, Facebook and our website. The ability to join in a digital community with others brings us closer together while at the same time underscoring our deep, human need for connection. Dancers are communal creatures even within their solo practices. We understand the inherent human desire to connect with our world viscerally and in that connection we reach deep into ourselves for our physical expression.

“Why do you think people take water for granted?” This was the question posed to me as Director of National Water Dance by Abby, a 10-year-old student at Pinecrest Elementary, who was interviewing me. My immediate answer was, “Because we can. And because so many of us have no idea where the water comes from or how it gets to our faucets and showerheads and hoses.” Adjusting to our new lives, isolated from each other with only essential services open, makes me think that what is happening to us now references Abby’s question.

Let me paraphrase it, “Why do people take the conveniences of modern living for granted?” Because we can, and because we don’t think about how those conveniences are supplied to us. National Water Dance is moving forward on April 18 because in this time of change we have the opportunity to answer those questions and find new ways of recognizing how our survival depends on our understanding of the collective “we”. Food comes to us through a chain of workers, from the fields to the packaging to the selling and preparing — we are the food chain. Water comes to us from the Everglades through the processing and the pipes into our homes and then our bodies – we are the Everglades. What we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves. By using the structure of a “movement choir”, all of us at National Water Dance have always known the power of the collective but in our new living paradigm that collective has expanded way beyond our participants and audiences. This is a time of “us”, all of us, everyone who is part of making this world function. The “us” has exponentially grown with this virus. Maybe that is a ray of light in the darkness of this time.

What a paradox. This devastating virus is ravaging human bodies, economic systems, challenging governing institutions and all human activities that we’ve established for functioning efficiently in the 21st century. As those systems and our bodies struggle for air, the Earth is finding new breath. There are signs all over the world of Earth’s healing—cleaner waters, returning migratory birds, cleaner air.

The balance between human activity and nature has been off kilter for a long time and now, amidst a worldwide catastrophic shift, the balance is being restored in nature’s favor. It is now, when we are forced to turn inward, to take time, to look around, to re-evaluate, to see how dependent we are on one another, to value the most basic elements of life, that we have a chance to emerge from this darkness, find a better way of living, one which takes inspiration from those cultures who for too long have been disenfranchised but whose teachings speak to the interdependence of all life. Looking to our indigenous neighbors and humbly asking for their guidance, we have a chance to move forward together, to find the balance of which we are only one part; but one part of the magnificent whole that is the Earth and all things that live on her glorious body.

At this pivotal time, National Water Dance’s offering is to recognize who we are as dancers and to create a collective spirit of respect and hope through the personal movement expression of each one of us.

 

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*Rudolf Laban, an Austro-Hungarian dance artist and theorist, developed the art of movement choir, wherein large numbers of people move together in some choreographed manner, but that can include personal expression. (Wikipedia)

* Physical distancing rather than social distancing was coined by Vladimir Angelov, Executive Director of International Consortium for Advancement in Choreography.

 

Tune in LIVE to our Facebook and Instagram on Saturday, April 18 at 4 PM EST as LALA artist-in-residence Michelle Grant Murray of Olujimi Dance Theater takes over our social media with her original contribution to National Water Dance 2020.