Not Really Strangers

“The strange stranger is a stranger to himself.” – Timothy Morton

“Not Really Strangers” is a choreographic work about ecological thinking, the act of listening and repetition.

“Not Really Strangers” investigates the intrinsic conditions of possibility of ecological thought through the repetition of speech and its unspeakable capacities. Words in space and time are expanded and absorbed by bodies. Neither words nor their sounds contain anything intrinsic that signifies what they mean; it is we, in the act of listening, who grant meanings, and we therefore discover ourselves as open beings, conditioned by the strangeness that we ourselves are.

The invitation to the act of listening is based on the idea that there is no “I” (solid, lasting, independent and unique), and at the same time it invites us to reposition ourselves as the others, the “strange strangers”. The other is infinity.

Starting from Timothy Morton’s concept of the “strange stranger”, this work gives body (embodiment) to sound and to its most intimate and vulnerable listening through words. We are, first of all, vulnerable, and then we overcome that vulnerability, at least temporarily, through acts of resistance. This choreographic research proposes understanding listening as an act of resistance that shows our vulnerabilities, as deliberate exposures to power. To put it in the words of Judith Butler: the act of listening as political resistance through the bodily act.

Improvisation is adaptation plus awareness. Adaptation, when you think of it, is like music that listens to itself. This mode of consciousness heralds a future society in which introversion and passivity would play a fundamental role.

Ecological thinking has something contemplative about it. Perhaps the ecological art of the future deals with passivity and weakness, with humility, not with arrogance. Interconnection implies distance and difference. In time and space.

“Care calls for repetition.” – Josep Maria Esquirol

“Untitled Listening Session” is a sonic situation in concert format in which the audience lies down and listens to different sound works from “The Untitled Collection”, mixed live. Every session includes several modified raw field recordings. Listening with some attention (ἐποχή) is highly recommended, but not absolutely necessary. There is not only one way of listening.