LIstening Choir
Art of the Danforth Presents: Listening Choir by Adam Kinner and Christopher Willes
All performances start at the Robertson Parkette Festival Hub
Aug 20 – 7 pm
Aug 21 – 1 pm
Aug 23 – 7 pm
Aug 24 – 6:30 pm
The event is free, but please RSVP here: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/listening-choir-by-adam-kinner-and-christopher-willes-tickets-27076075270
Listening Choir is a performance that takes participants on group walks through urban spaces. Enacting a practice of group listening, these walks offer a way of encountering the affective landscapes of public settings together, reflecting on broad notions of common space and participation.
Using homemade recording devices participants record and subtly alter the sounds of the city, and perform the simple act of listening together. Agreeing to drift without speaking, the group collects recordings of places, objects, language, and ideas within the present environment, creating a continually fractured soundscape as each act of recording erases the previous.
These recordings are choreographed and listened to in various ways throughout each walk, evoking the sounds of the immediate past, the sonic dislocation of some objects and spaces onto others, and the folding of histories and places on top of one another.
Listening Choir invites making listening itself the thing that is listened to. Trespassing on traditions like soundwalking and the situationist dérive, the project seeks to combine collective and individual ways of hearing, and proposes the act of listening within the urban setting as politically forceful.
A nomadic proposal, previous performances include SummerWorks 2015, Intersite Visual Arts Festival (Calgary), and Open Ears (Kitchener, Waterloo).
The project also includes a public installation on view for the duration of the festival that serves as a point of departure for the walks.
To learn more visit: http://www.artofthedanforth.com/listen/
(photo by Claire Harvie)
