S03E22: Listening To The In-Between Part 2: Sensing Traces of Power(lessness)

In the three-part podcast series Listening to the In-Between we will put the rich practice of Deep Listening® into a broader context. In our second episode, Deep Listener Sharon Stewart invites us to participate in embodied rituals of attention, a practice of listening to or sensing aspects of power and powerlessness in the world that surrounds us. This reconnected her to the ground-breaking work of Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”.

 

In 2021 we made the podcast-series Sounding Places / Listening Places, which is still available at Radio ArtEZ. In it we explored how sound and listening can contribute to realizing more sustainable and reciprocal relations with the earth. Back then, we already dipped our toes in the world of Deep Listening®. In the three-part podcast series Listening to the In-Between we will put this rich practice into a broader context.

 

In Part I, researcher and music journalist Joep Christenhusz explores Deep Listening, its connection to space and time, and the interrelations between the outer and the inner world the practice reveals through sonic awareness.

 

In this second episode, Deep Listener Sharon Stewart further connects the idea of an embodied practice with the theme of power and powerlessness by working with others through the creation of text scores, also conceptualized as rituals of attention, that offer a way of listening to or sensing aspects of power and powerlessness in an embodied way. After an open call, Laurens Krüger (student DBKV ArtEZ Zwolle) and Martine van Lubeek (graduate of BEAR ArtEZ Arnhem) participated in this process. Laurens presents her “Triangle Dance with force fields” and Martine her “Score for Thinking-Feeling with the Earth”, a score to bring us into relation with the more-than-human elements all around us.

 

In the final third of the podcast (from 32min on), Sharon Stewart talks about how Audre Lorde’s work inspired her in creating a text score from the perspective of our theme: the Body and Power(lessness) and presents the score “Listening through connection and difference”.

 

In the third and last part of our podcast series we will dive deeper into theoretical concepts related to Deep Listening.

 

Show Notes

In the podcast you hear the following audio fragments:

 

• Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, Panaiotis, Album Deep Listening, track 1, ‘Lear’, reproduced by permission of PoP and MoM Publications. (Pauline Oliveros Publications & Ministry of Maåt). All Rights Reserved. Members ASCAP
• Fragments from: Audre Lorde reads Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power (FULL Updated) This chapter was originally a paper presented at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Mount Holyoke College, August 25, 1978, and was later published as a chapter in Sister Outsider. Copyright ©1984 Audre Lorde and The Crossing Press, a division of Ten Speed Press, Berkeley, CA. Also available in a Penguin edition, 2019.

 

Reading and Listening

 

From Martine: 

• Kimmerer, R., Returning the Gift, 2021, from the website Humans and Nature. This essay originally appeared in Minding Nature, Vol. 7, No. 2(Spring 2014).
• On the more-than-human:
  • Pathways to Planetary Health Forum: David Abram on the More-than-Human World, Garrison Institute, 15 June 2021.
  • “The eco-phenomenologist Abram (1996) was responsible for popularizing the concept of a more-than-human world and expressing everything that encompasses terrestrial "nature" in its broadest interpretations. According to the author (ABRAM, 1996), the expression refers to a world that includes and exceeds human societies, thereby associating them with the complex webs of interdependencies between the countless beings that share the terrestrial dwelling. This approach aims to overcome the prevalent modern dichotomy between nature and culture.” Carlos Roberto Bernardes de Souza Júnior in More-than-human cultural geographies towards co-dwelling on earth. Mercator - Revista de Geografia da UFC, vol. 20, no. 1, 2021. Universidade Federal do Ceará, Brasil. (Accessed 25 Nov. 22)
• Kimmerer, R., YES! Magazine. (n.d.). “Nature Needs a New Pronoun: To Stop the Age of Extinction, Let’s Start by Ditching ‘It’.”
• Escobar, A. (2016). Thinking-feeling with the Earth: Territorial Struggles and the Ontological Dimension of the Epistemologies of the South. AIBR, Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana, 11(1), pp.11–32. doi: 10.11156/aibr.110102e. 

 

From Laurens:

• The article by Michel Foucault that helped me to crystallize some thoughts that fuelled me in my motion was: “The Subject and Power” in: Brian Wallis (ed), Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York, 1984) p. 417–432. Originally published under the title “Why Study Power? The Question of the Subject.”
• During the creation process of the score, the melody and movements of the “Ave Maria” by Schubert played an important role for me, as sung by Renée Fleming, for instance.

 

 

From Sharon:

 

• 5 Oct. 2022, ArtEZ Zwolle, Sophiagebouw and Conservatory: Extreme Slow Walk – Listening to the In-Between.
• Ed McKeon,“Moving Through Time,” published on APRIA in September.
• Anthology of Text Scores by Pauline Oliveros, 2013, Pauline Oliveros, Kingston, NY: Deep Listening Publications.
• The Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer
• Essays and talks by Audre Lorde, from the compilation The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, Penguin Books. Copyright © Estate of Audre Lorde, 2017:
• “Poetry is Not a Luxury”
• “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”
• “Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism”
• “Learning from the 1960s”

Most of these essays were first given as papers at conferences across the US between 1978 and 1982

• Audre Lorde - To be young, lesbian and Black in the '50s. Audre Lorde describes her experiences growing up as a Black lesbian in New York City in the 1950s, touching on subjects such as frequenting gay and lesbian bars in the Greenwich Village and communal-style living experiments. She reads excerpts from her book, Zami: A new spelling of my name. Recorded at Hunter College in New York. Produced by Helene Rosenbluth. Credit To : Pacifica Radio Archives

Date Recorded: at Hunter College in New York, 1982.

Date Broadcast: KPFK, 28 Nov. 1982.

• “Audre Lorde's 87th birthday,” 18 February 2021, Google Doodles Archive. The quote mentioned as answer to the question: “Why do you write poetry? …” starts at 1m06s in the video Behind the Doodle: Audre Lorde's 87th Birthday
• Audre Lorde – Poetry Foundation (1934–1992)

Audre Lorde, "Power" from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. Copyright © 1978 by Audre Lorde.  Source: The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1997)

• Susan Howe's WBAI radio program "Poetry", undated (Tape 1), “Power” read by Audre Lorde at 7m45s-11m18s
• “What Poetry Can Teach Us About Power: Political Poems Use Language in a Way Distinct from Rhetoric" By Matthew Zapruder, 16 August 2017.