Ways of listening, théåtre de complicité, Dec 2021
A cross-cultural, cross-borders, cross-language digital project in collaboration with British Council, Algeria.
A short piece I wrote for Complicité’s newsletter 2022:
How We Listened
‘Meeting people on zoom has become the norm: click, join, mute, smile, wait. The new rhythm of human interaction. So when something happens to disrupt this rhythm, the result is wholly, bodily, pleasurable.
Ways of Listening was a project which did just that. It united two lead UK artists, nine Algerian artists, one digital SM, and myself as creative producer in a cross cultural/borders/digital spheres creative collaboration. Over two weeks in December 2021 explored how we create together at a distance. We didn’t know where the journey would take us, only a rough idea of the direction of travel. We wanted to disrupt the rhythm. In our happy few we had Arabic, French, Colloquial Arabic and English. We enabled simultaneous translation on Zoom, and sat, staring at audio channels. This technology is wonderful. It lowers the sound on the language you don’t want to hear and allows you to listen in to the translation only. It’s fast and efficient.
And of course it didn’t work for us. Connecting with people is not about efficiency, but understanding. Our project was about listening, and we needed to do that with our whole bodies: to listen to the intake of breath before words tumble out, to tone and pace and hesitation. It matters to hear and be heard. So we worked ‘in the room’ together, using interpreters in a way that was messier, slower, but richer. We used other technologies. We created stories over WhatsApp, Gather and Cosy Room, Facebook and instagram: deliberately low-tech, free, and importantly working in Northern Africa where our collaborators were struggling with digital inequalities in stark contrast to the UK’s abundance - for those not in digital poverty - of fast internet access.
The final sharing allowed an invited audience into some work that without this digital technology they would not have been privy to. It was work in progress that had not had a chance to be rigorously critiqued, but it showed the start of a new way of working, possibilities, and connections for all of the artists involved. It disrupted the rhythm.’
Creative Producer: Lily Einhorn
Lead Artists: Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre, Paula Varjack
Artists: Zahia Ait Assia, Sensabyl Beghdadi, Sabrina Boukhorssa, Nora Boukraa, Younes Djouani, Nadjib Lamraoui, Amine Medbouhi, Younes Merabet, Sihem Salhi.
Digital Stage Manager: Anya Tye
