Dialogue in Creative Practice 

All too often we imagine dialogue as a language based practice, rooted in semantic exchange fraught with hegemonic power relations and assumptions. This one-day event departs from traditional ideas of dialogue and asks how we can think about dialogue differently, opening up alternate routes of listening, engaging, being and becoming with others across degrees of difference.

The event features dialogues with the creators of four diverse artistic projects that place creative dialogue and alternative listening practises at the centre of their process. Exploring dialogue with other humans, buildings, water, land and animals, we will ask how these creative practices allow us to actively reimagine dialogue through engaging with alternative ways of listening.

Considering how we might be accountable to live together less violently, we ask, how are we listening? and how might we listen less violently to others? Thinking about dialogue as a creative process of listening to others opens up alternative knowledge rooted in listening, feeling and materiality. Is it possible to engage in a dialogue that is open, ethically oriented and reciprocal? What power relations emerge from these creative dialogue practices? Are we brave enough to enter into those spaces, to inhabit and even become them in order to listen deeper? What do we need to let go of in order to hear the other? What - or how - do we become in the creative dynamic of dialogue and listening?

***

Schedule

9:00 - 9:30 | Welcome & Cellular Dialogue

9:30 - 10:30 | With Voice: Trauma & Dialogue

Abi Weaver with Dr Daniele Rugo and Farah Wardani

This session explores the grass-root theatre and film work of ‘Memory from the Margins’. The project trains 12 Syrian refugee women currently living in Shatila, Beirut. The training offers the women a safe space to explore their trauma as refugees living in Lebanon and the consequences of their daily struggles as women.

10:30 - 10:45 | Coffee break

10:45 - 11:45 | With Space: Illumination and re-interpretation of geometries and spatial concepts through sound

Verena Lercher with Gerriet K. Sharma

Can sound create space for an alternative perception of the world? This deep-listening session offers the possibility to listen to the complexity und multifacetedness of the building sound-compositions by Gerriet K. Sharma, sound artist and artistic researcher, and to discuss how perception, once activated, composes its own, individual sound-spaces from its environment.

11:45 - 13:00 | Lunch

13:00 - 14:00 | With Other Animals: Rethinking Interspecies Dialogue through Performance Practice

Flo Fitzgerald-Allsopp with Hermione Spriggs

How might creative practice allow us to attend to forms of dialogue with the non-human world? This interactive session invites artist and researcher Hermione Spriggs to screen her short film Earth Swimmers (2021, 23mins), and considers the radical possibilities and ethical implications that might emerge from creative interspecies dialoguing with animals.

14:00 - 14:15 | Coffee break

14:15 - 15:15 | With Water

Rosalind Holgate Smith with Andrea Scheel & Manuela Blanchard

A film showing and discussion with two aquatic dance artists from the fields of Contact Improvisation and Somatic therapies; Manuela Blanchard(CH) and Andrea Sheel(MX). In this session we will explore how these specialists develop dialogues in and with water, considering touch, ecological systems thinking, and making aesthetic choices.

15:15 - 15:30 | Coffee break

15:30 - 16:15 | Open Dialogue

***

Access Notes: Films will be subtitled, and conversations live captioned.

For more information about the different sessions and participants, click here.

Organised by Abi Weaver, Verena Lercher, Florence Fitzgerald-Allsopp, Rosalind Holgate Smith and Polly Hember.

Supported by the AHRC Techne DTP.

Event website: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1489535/1489536