Wednesday seminar: Body, Place, Ambient Listening

This seminar is part of the Wednesday seminar series this autumn, where we explore ways of sharing and minor gestures. Here you can learn more about the series and discover upcoming seminars!

Martin Sonderkamp:

– The seminar "Body, Place, Ambient Listening" draws on my artistic practice, spanning four decades of choreographic works, performance, installation, and participatory formats, approached from the dual perspective of a dancer and a choreographer. An early focus of my artistic investigations was the question of how listening to divergence, as a compositional concept, would maintain a generative tension between impromptu choreographed dance and improvised music, rather than mediating between the two or synthesising them.  
From there, my research interests expanded into how guided listening might encourage participants to inhabit public and institutional space, aiming to sensually subvert the implicit conventions through which institutions regulate how bodies act. 
Underlying all of this is a sustained interest in artistic attention and perception within compositional practice, particularly in how perceptual drift and depth generatively affect neurodivergent artistic practice.  "Bodies as Ears: Speculations on Acoustosomatics" (2022–2024) opened another research path into listening. In this collaborative project with Jenny Sunesson, Hara Alonso and Ulrika Berg, we have explored how extending the reach of listening beyond acoustics to other bodily sensations, memory and the imagination can lead to the development of participatory formats. During the seminar, I will present some of the listening practices developed     as part of this research.

Martin Sonderkamp is head of subject area dance and professor of choreography at SKH. He studied dance and choreography at the SNDO Amsterdam. His choreographic work seeks to expand disciplinary and aesthetic boundaries between dance, visual art and music and features forms of social choreography, mixed media installations and scores for extemporary performances. He co-founded and danced with Amsterdam based Magpie Music Dance Company (1995-2006) and performed in numerous improvisation events across Europe, the US and Asia.

Host: Petra Bauer