The space between making sound and hearing it holds intimacy and possibility.

This is the first line used to introduce Listening Acts and an apt summation of the sensitivities of the artists involved in the program. For Listening Acts, music and performance company Chamber Made presented installations and performances at the Melbourne Recital Centre for Now or Never Festival. Participating artists included Thembi Soddell, Hannah de Feyter, Monica Lim, Tamara Saulwick with Peter Knight, Rebecca Bracewell, Anna Liebzeit, Aviva Endean, Biddy Connor and Alexandra Spence. Listening Acts provided astute responses to ideas of listening, channelled through the respective artists’ concerns, cultural histories and identities.

None of the works were hurried offerings, having been produced by artists with critical and sustained practices and nurtured through Chamber Made’s dedication to creating time for artists to connect. As Chamber Made artistic director and CEO Tamara Saulwick explains, “the initial idea for Listening Acts sprouted when Rebecca Bracewell undertook our Little Operations program, creating a sound piece using hearing aids as speakers and microphones. The work called for an intimate type of listening and led us to consider the creative intersection between the body, listening and technology.” For Listening Acts Chamber Made invited artists to interrogate this intersection.

Rebecca Bracewell transformed the sound of a single accordion with field recordings, feeding sound through multiple devices and creating a sonic archaeology. Monica Lim presented water coolers in conversation, questioning the consequences of AI to contemporary life. Thembi Soddell presented recited letters, exchanged during their Polish grandparent’s divorce—considering the effects of listening with experiences of transgenerational trauma. Hannah De Feyter played with memory and architecture. Inspired by classical mnemotechnics, it felt as if De Feyter was both constructing and deconstructing at once—planning the self and planning space. A re-configured installation of prior work by Chamber Made—My Self in that Moment —allowed Tamara Saulwick with Peter Knight to consider agency, asking, “Whose voice is it once it’s no longer ours?”

Anna Liebzeit presented With Ghosts: A Choreography of Presence—a four-metre plait with a ringing bell, suspended and swinging on a wall; and a video. The work recounted memories of the artist’s matrilineal connection to the Stolen Generations. The video showed Liebzeit recounting her mother’s stories of time in children’s homes in the 1950s, juxtaposed with haunting images. The recitation became at times distorted—an empowered and intentional “right to refusal” from the artist. This sense of disjuncture was heightened by Liebzeit’s fringe masking her eyes—perhaps a reference to the quashing of childhood that results from institutionalisation. Liebzeit’s mother—through Liebzeit—recounted, “it was…regimented, with an undertone of cruelty. There was no fun…everything was done by the bell.” Liebzeit noted, “research shows how institutions and institutionalisation is a force that can effect kids from the children’s homes and non-Indigenous people. Yet I don’t know how much reckoning non-Indigenous people do. I’m working at that interface.” Liebzeit told me that some viewers felt unsettled by the plait. This sense of being unsettled talks directly to a subconscious call for these essential reckonings.

When speaking to the initial meetings with the artists, Liebzeit remarked, “I came to these meetings talking about love. Questioning how we practice love when dealing with difficult subject matter. As artists, we can hold that paradox. I want to imbue my work with spirit and material—two wings of the bird. I don’t want to fly with one wing—with only a material object.” Liebzeit’s work spoke to an ability to meet emotional experience with material form.

In the first of the three performances, Tactile Piece for Human Ears, Aviva Endean used binaural microphones, fitted on mannequin heads and linked to headphones worn by the audience. We were met with a layered and moving sound-score, communicated through devices, replicating an experience of human hearing. This signals a new direction in Endean’s research, branching from an ongoing one-person performance, performed since 2011, titled Intimate Sound Immersions. The performances consist of Endean making intimate sounds for one person at a time. She explained, “For Listening Acts, experiences of intimacy through sound and touch are mediated through technology. I’m interested in how I can create intimacy with a full audience. The binaural technology feels so real to the human experience. By using these instruments—these absurd acoustic filters—we question the real.”

Following Endean, Biddy Connor presented Song to the Cell, transforming an IV machine into an instrument, and entwining the sounds produced in vocal song. Saulwick explained, “This duet came from Biddy’s experiences of medical treatment, and the comfort found when recording sounds from the machine.” By engaging with the machine differently and adding a song cycle, Connor considers the intersections between bodies and technology. She transformed medical experience into music, with a deeply sensitive nuance that allowed her experiences to speak honestly without being caged in the confessional. Connor reconfigured old technology to give a sense of purpose and productivity to a difficult past. These performances met with a final offering by Alexandra Spence—sounding forms / forming sounds—an evolving electroacoustic performance highlighting the connection between body and sound, drawing accompaniment from Endean and Connor.

When reflecting on personal experiences of listening, Liebzeit explained, “listening is active and essential to relationality and spirit. Listening is an opportunity to gain wisdom and fresh perspectives, even if that might have an interface of discomfort. There’s nothing wrong with discomfort, because often listening can be a portal to a transformative moment.”

Listening Acts
presented by Chamber Made
Melbourne Recital Centre
22 August—24 August

Presented as part of Now or Never Festival, Melbourne/Naarm
21—31 August