Interstitial Listening: A somatic technique for dancers. Teoma Naccarato
Choreographer Teoma Naccarato was awarded a DIS-TANZ-SOLO grant to support her ongoing, collaborative development of Interstitial Listening (IL). Over the course of six months, Naccarato worked closely with composer John MacCallum to deepen and document the practice of IL, specifically as a somatic technique for dance and movement artists.
The goals of the grant period from May to October 2021 included:
1) to further develop IL by way of intensive individual practice
2) to facilitate workshops to explore pedagogical and methodological aspects of the technique
3) and to generate sustainable, multimodal documentation and resources related to IL for public distribution.
You can learn more about IL and try a guided individual session of IL on the project website.
About Interstitial Listening
IL is a multi-sensory listening practice. At the heart of IL is an impossible task – that is, to synchronize one’s own actions with that of any other person or thing. Each IL session involves a series of repetitive tasks, such as tapping, breathing, walking, or improvising movement and music alongside a metronome that starts out regular, but becomes increasingly unpredictable and difficult to align with. With each tick of the metronome, you are asked to bring awareness to the temporal gaps, or interstices, that emerge between yourself and another; each interstice is an opportunity to explore and intervene aesthetically in the ways in which rhythms emerge in movement and music. The somatic dimensions of IL involve bringing awareness to the behaviour of one’s own awareness, and to the effects of disciplinary habits and patterns, such that we may engage more fully with the inherent musicality of movement itself.
Interstitial Listening @ Lake Studios Berlin – August 2021
Over the course of three days, this intensive workshop progressed from the foundations of IL towards an emergent strand of training dedicated to movement and dance artists. By situating IL in relation to dance, we were able to observe the potential of the practice to probe aspects of discipline-specific training, habits, and aesthetics, especially in terms of temporal relationships between movement and sound.
Guided Individual Practice Online – Free & open to everyone
A new dimension of IL is the development of virtual resources, such as guided individual practice online. On the project website you can access a 90-minute pre-recorded practice for free, and select to be guided by either Teoma Naccarato or John MacCallum. This is the ‘basic sequence’ of IL, and involves simple tasks such as tapping, breathing, and weight-shifting that can be performed in your home. Additional recordings will be added over time.
Try IL online here.
