The Force of Listening #5

https://vimeo.com/1203111670?fl=pl&fe=sh

The Chapel, The Good Shepherd Center, Seattle, WA

NINA NINA, Kafele Williams, Amber Cortes and Julia Edith Rigby collaborated to create an immersive, interactive performance at The Chapel in Seattle, where we hybridized multi-channel projections centering themes of place and territory with live viola, trumpet and an electrical circuit that was activated by audience participation.

 In our search for soft futures we created a piece centering soft materials. What if we could make technology soft and tender, like our bodies? What if our bodies are an ancestral technology for connection and liberation?

We worked with Makey Makeys and simple technologies to build a soft electronic circuit that could not work by itself, that needed connection. In order to activate the land, this fictional land, we needed to touch and connect, to close circuits, to make distances shorter.

We invited audience members to explore the ways that our bodies are electronical devices, the ways we are inherently conductive. We invited our audience to physically touch and interact with the circuit and one another to co-compose a collaborative, ephemeral soundscape and a space for collective joy, listening and connection. The piece spontaneously resulted in everyone in the audience linking hands to connect the circuit, create a musical chain, and create new spatial and sonic territories.

Viewers / listeners were invited to become fellow performers, and the venue transformed into a walk-in instrument. We too became the instrument, via electrical connection.

If songs are maps, what if electrical circuits are maps as well? What if tech is a magic, a way to map our futures and our lives? What is a territory? Where does it begin, where does it end? Our bodies are extensions of our territories. The territory doesn't belong to us; we belong to the territory.

2026

Photo c. Katharina Bömers-Muller (@kbmuller)