Listening with..‪.‬ the Bluecoat

It begins in darkness by Seke Chimutengwende is on Thursday 27th October 2022 at the Bluecoat in Liverpool.

Recommended reading:
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa - Walter Rodney
Beloved - Toni Morrison
The Rats in the Walls - H P Lovecraft

All episodes and full transcripts: listeningwith.substack.com

Marie-Anne McQuay 0:05
Hello, you're listening with the Bluecoat in Liverpool, a series of podcasts taking the themes of our exhibition programmes as a starting point for 15 minute insights from artists, scientists, writers, educators, storytellers and more. In this episode, dance artist and choreographer Seke Chimutengwende discusses storytelling, nonverbal communication, haunting and horror.
Seke Chimutungwende 0:33
I'm Seke, I'm a choreographer, a performer, and teacher, and I live in London. I guess in terms of work, that's the main thing, the main role that I have is choreographer. I perform in other people's choreographies and performances as well. I've been involved in in dance and performance for about nearly 20 years. I don't think I really started thinking of it as a profession until I was about 18. That's when I started doing formal dance classes. And when I was 22, I went to London Contemporary Dance School and did a three year training there. After graduating, and up until now, I've studied various improvisation practices a lot. And I've performed a lot of improvisation. But yeah, I'd say a lot of my training is rooted in various improvisation practices, as well as more traditional contemporary dance / modern dance techniques.
Seke Chimutungwende 1:37
I've always worked a lot with text and language and voice work. A lot of the work that I've been involved in has sort of crossed over from dance into theatre. And I would say, that's been a big part of my practice. Growing up, I was definitely very into storytelling and mythology, fantasy, science fiction, and the sort of fantastical. And the other thing that I was really interested in as a child and growing up was history. At one point I wanted to be a history teacher. I was always reading history including world history. So both of those things have always been there. I would say I wasn't particularly interested in ghosts or horror, that's sort of something that's come much more recently, but definitely the general fantastical realm has always been an interest, as well as kind of real history. I'm not sure what I mean by that - history is history, the subject.
Seke Chimutungwende 2:43
I made a piece a few years ago called Black Holes with another choreographer. Alexandrina Hemsley. As we were researching that piece, we were very interested in Afrofuturism, and black science fiction. I've always been interested in sci fi, and I discovered the term Afrofuturism, I didn't know when it was, about seven or eight years ago. And I was really interested in that. Part of that research led me into looking at horror and black horror as a genre. Films like Get Out and books like Beloved by Toni Morrison. I was kind of intrigued by this relationship between horror and blackness. There was something very interesting about that, for me. Something that particularly resonated for me was the idea of haunting, and histories that people don't want to look at so much or acknowledge, or if they do look at them they're sort of disturbing and troubling. For me, there's a function of 'ghost' to that fear of something that might be there, as well.
Seke Chimutungwende 3:59
It's interesting, the idea of exorcism. I think, in a way, bringing something out into the open that can then help us move forward - that's definitely part of it, for me. Another part of it is more... it more just feels like a kind of inevitable sort of point of research or point of focus. It's something that I feel like I just can't really ignore. When I look at it in that way, it's not so much that I'm wanting to achieve anything through it. It's more that I just feel like "Well, as somebody who makes d

In episode six, artist and writer Sadia Pineda Hameed reads an extract from 'To Make Philippines' and considers the things we can't talk about that stay as unspoken histories.
Recommended reading:
Hélène Cixous - Philippines
Gina Apostol - Insurrecto
Augusto Boal - Theatre of the Oppressed

Web links:
sadiaph.com
thebluecoat.org.uk

All episodes & full transcripts: listeningwith.substack.com

Sadia Pineda Hameed 0:06
One morning, light from the window wakes us together. The hazel tree outside acts as a net curtain, letting just enough sun in from between its branches and offshoots. The slits of light permeate so gently, so knowingly, billow about the two of us, and I can feel an almost impossible breeze. My mother says "you should paint it, it would be nice, and if any art critic asks you what it is, you say 'this is the story of my life'". Small branches from big branches lost in each other. And here, I remember a dream in which she says this to me. I wonder if this is that very dream right now. Am I in the past or the present, reliving or living for the first time? I'm lost between two times but regardless, remembrance is in abundance. We both remember the dream. We both wonder if we are in that very dream right now. Our collective memories, hers and mine, overflow. Remembrance is in abundance. And though we are lost between two times we keep treading together. We tread this in-between state together in circles that always progress. We tread together in circles, always progressing. Treading together in circles we progress. This morning we circle around that tree that brought us into telepathic communion. My mother tells me she has just dreamt of the hazel tree in one of several dreams that night. Another dream involved waiting to have her cards read by the manghuhula. A third about looking for a young girl who was eating spiky leaves from the garden. The last was a trance dream, which I woke her from when I heard her muffled voice asking for help. She says after remembering these, it was like one montage. I say montage in my film class, but I would explain it as the sewing of fabrics together. Then we look out the window, focusing on the tree, and she says "you should paint it". This morning we circle around the tree. We are never lost if we know we will return to the beginning. We are never lost if we tread in circles together, progressing. That morning feels like a part sewn into a whole. I match this loose thread up with a thread from the past, a dream from two years ago. My mother and I look down at a triangular bed of flowers in her garden. She tells me to look up but it is dusk so she lights it up with a torch. She tells me to look, is getting impatient, insists. But the lilies are so overexposed, so unnaturally illuminated for this time of night that I avoid looking. I look eventually when she tells me that this is the story of my life. These two threads of morning and dusk almost make up a full day. It is a slow-releasing story I've had to sew together myself, and I'm still searching for more loose ends. There'll be one called Night, another called Noon and a third named Dawn. I intuitively know this. And I now come to know that this is the only way to communicate a secret held for too long, to scatter the beginnings, middles and ends so that the secret can only be discovered gradually. These things need time, the comfort of time, to be understood. And yet these things also insist that I should already understand. There is an insistence on knowing, that I should have already known my mother would offer her camisa to me when she reminded me of the pillbox hat that night. I think I knew already. This knowing is a kind of ancestral intuition. I weave together fibres to form a whole. Then only after do I remember that I knew already. I visit places with a compulsion for reconnection, then come to remember that I have been already. It is so simple. The knowing is always there in the soon to be remembered. It can o

In our fifth episode, we hear from the Heritage Education Centre Space at Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre. The HECS speak on precision, partial knowing and decentering histories.
For full transcript and web links, visit: listeningwith.substack.com

Mary-Anne McQuay 0:02
Hello, you're listening with the Bluecoat in Liverpool, a series of podcasts taking the themes of our exhibition programmes as a starting point for 15 minute insights from artists, scientists, writers, educators, storytellers and more. In this episode we hear from the Heritage Education Centre Space a Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre. The HECS speak on precision, partial knowing and decentering histories.
Kym Ward 0:29
I'm Kym, I'm one of the people who operate and run Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre over on the Wirral. We've been running for a couple of years now since 2018/2019. And is a space for researchers, artists, philosophers, dancers, musicians to come, stay and work on their own practices communally or individually.
Maeve Devine 0:56
I'm Maeve. I am a musician and sound art practitioner. I've been a friend and associate of the Observatory for about a year now. And I'm really interested in how we experience sound, and music in places and spaces and linking those experiences with oral histories. And this idea that there's a lineage of sound, when you hear a sound, you can trace it to its origin. And that becomes part of a wider kind of interlaced, I guess kind of tapestry of sounds and experience, which then for me, kind of bleeds out into like, music history and like popular culture, and then little bits of identity politics and whatnot. But specifically for me, I'm interested in how neurodiverse people process sound sensually, and how they experience sound in places. So I've been working a little bit with some of the artefacts here at the Observatory, and some of the spaces here as well. I'm really fascinated by reverb, but I haven't fully explored what that is yet. And I too have an interest in witchcraft and I guess specifically the - how would you say it - the transformation of energy from state to state, and, um, where sound fits in with that? If indeed it does. Spoiler: it does.
Jara Rocha 2:51
Hello, my name is Jara Rocha. This is my second time visiting the Bidston Observatory. I come from Barcelona. I'm an interdependent researcher there and around. And I'm here as part of the Vibes&Leaks group, which has a focus on the inner crossings between the phenomenon of the voice and its inscribed politics.
Kym Ward 3:27
So HECS is the Heritage Education Centre Space, and it sits inside Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre. The Artistic Research Centre is a place that artists, designers, dancers, philosophers, musicians can come and stay between two nights in a month. And HECS is dedicated to the history of the building. So the building's an old observatory. It was built in 1866. And from its foundings, to the mid 2000s, it was home to natural earth sciences research. So the Heritage Education Centre Space, which has a physical room in the building, empty at the moment, this is the focus for some of the researchers that come through here who want to engage with the history and heritages - multiple. Yeah, so HECS is a play of sound. We understand that it sounds a bit like a witch's spell somewhat, and we're having a kind of a joke reference or a playful reference to that which sits outside science or sits outside 'capital H History' or sits outside, well, received knowledges. And we're trying to do that in lots of different ways, which I guess we're going to go into. If we start to think about maybe we could separate the words of HECS so Heritage Education Centre Space and we can maybe talk a little bit through those.
Jara Rocha 4:54
H as in ‘heritage’, and I guess also patrimony, and inheritance, and unexpected modes of passing on memories or knowledges.
Kym Ward 5:08
Well, the

Transcript
Michelle Henning 0:00
If you think about Marcel Proust, if it takes a smell and the taste, or I mentioned it could be a song to bring the past flooding back. That's why art and the arts is so important in in the treatment of people with Alzheimer's and dementia, I would imagine.
Marie-Anne McQuay 0:18
Hello, you're listening with the Bluecoat in Liverpool, a series of podcasts taking the themes of our exhibition programmes as a starting point for 15 minute insights from artists, scientists, writers, educators, storytellers and more. In this episode, writer and Professor Michelle Henning discusses Walter Benjamin, modernity and unfaithful atmospheres.
Michelle Henning 0:42
My name is Michelle Henning. I'm a professor in photography and Media at the University of Liverpool. My background originally I was a fine artist, I did my first degree at Goldsmiths, and then I did an MA in the social history of art, I still am to some extent, a practising artist and writer. Most of my career, I've taught cultural studies, that's where I became interested in questions of memory, around ideas of culture, and everyday life and everyday experience. But also, I've always been interested in the writing of photo Benjamin or Walter Benjamin, depending on he wants to say, so I'm interested in his writing. And he writes about modernity and culture. And it's also relevant to to understanding how media changes, our daily experience, that kind of thing. One of the books I used to read through a plastic bag while I was painting was Susan Buck-Morss book about Walter Benjamin's arcade project, which was this big project he'd done on the 19th century shopping arcades in Paris. And it was just a really, really inspiring book. I was interested in the kind of slight utopianism of it, you know, how you can just be attracted to the way someone thinks, how do we encounter new media, because he says, it's often in the disguise of old media, and so on. A lot of my work is concerned with that relationship between new and old media. And that's, that's where Benjamin came in. Benjamin, he was interested in the way that people of his time, wrote about memories, if there was there was a kind of authentic kind of memory, which people were losing. And then this kind of alienated modern memory, there was an authentic connection with the past that people used to have, and in modernity, something has happened, and we've become broken from that. And Benjamin wants to challenge this. But at the same time, he also wants to argue that they're right in the sense that modernity and modern technology, modern everyday life, you know, living in big cities, and so on, has changed how we remember things. So he wants to say it has changed, but it does. It's not this simple kind of opposition between authentic and alienated. What he does is he takes Marcel Proust notion of involuntary memory. So the famous book by Marcel Proust is called remembrance of things past. And this is this begins with Proust describing eating a Madeline cake with like a little biscuit, which has got soaked in chamomile tea, because it's sat in the saucer. And it's that combination of flavours, when he bites into it, suddenly takes him back to his childhood. And that's involuntary memory. It's usually stimulated by smell, or taste, or the famous ones newly mown grass or song, things like that. These things stimulate a sudden rush of the past into the present, and you don't control it. It's that's what the involuntary memory is, it just comes upon you and you can't You're taken by surprise. And then Proust has this other category, which is voluntary memory, which is straightforward recollection. So if you said to me, how was your train journey this morning, Michelle, I would recall what had happened. So there's these two kinds, involuntary memory is the one that gets seen as authentic. So the idea would be that in the past, say you were from a more rural society, pre modern, you'd have thi

I have a prior expectation or hypothesis. This is the evidence. Should I change my prior expectation given this evidence or not?
Hello, you're listening with the Bluecoat in Liverpool, a series of podcasts taking the themes of our exhibition programmes as a starting point for 15 minute insights from artists, scientists, writers, educators, storytellers, and more.
In this episode, neuroscientist and philosopher Chris Frith discusses his work into perception, swarm consciousness, and seeing things that aren't there.
I'm Chris Frith. I'm currently an Emeritus Professor at University College and also a research associate at the Institute of Philosophy. I originally trained as a clinical psychologist, and I then went into research as an experimental psychologist, which was at a very good time, I think ’65 -  we were the first psychology department in the country to get a computer. So I started using computers very early and carried on ever since.
I then went to work for the medical research council on a special unit that was interested in schizophrenia. We did a lot of work on schizophrenia and we were particularly interested in the biological basis, where the brain comes in, but I became fascinated with hallucinations in particular and how to understand what on earth is happening when you see things that are not actually there.
I was also able to start doing brain imaging in the first unit in the country where you could do that, which was originally in Positron Emission Tomography, and then subsequently MRI: Magnetic Resonance Imaging. So I did some of the early work using brain scanners, and one of the first things we did of course is look what happens in the brain when you're hallucinating.
As you probably know, the hallucinations assisted with schizophrenia are basically hearing voices. And some people say they’re just making it up. They don't really have voices… but the brain imaging showed that there was really something going on, interestingly in the speech areas. It was as if they were speaking to themselves, but didn't realise this.
When I retired, which was a long time ago, I became particularly interested in social cognition, how people interact with one another, Schizophrenia, and my wife's speciality, Autism, seem to be in a sense, primarily a problem of interacting with other people.
I met Suki Chan through my colleague, Colin Blakemore, a neurophysiologist particularly interested in perception, and we were both working at the Institute of Philosophy when we retired, because that's what you do when you retire, you become a philosopher. Suki was particularly interested because of my work on hallucinations and perception more generally, and what we'd like to call the Bayesian approach, which is to say, actually we're all hallucinating all the time, but in most cases, what we hallucinate corresponds very closely with reality and what goes wrong in schizophrenia, for example, is that what they are perceiving no longer coincides as reality.
I'm particularly interested in artists because art - particularly visual art - is all about how perception works. My colleagues Semir Zeki has gone into this in a big way, talking about what he calls neuroaesthetics, but making the point that many of the developments in modern art, like Op art and so on followed by developments in science where you discover there’s a bit of the brain that’s only interested in movement. There's a bit of the brain that's only interested in colour. So many of these developments take account of how the brain works, which the neuroscientists only discover a few decades later. So that's quite interesting.
There are cultural effects. So we all think we see the world in the same way although we don't. One of the things we’ve noticed about synaesthesia is if you go and give a lecture about synaesthesia, somebody will come up afterwards and say, I am like that. But I thought everybody was like that. We think we're experiencing the world much more

You’re listening with the Bluecoat in Liverpool: a series of podcasts taking the themes of our exhibition programmes as a starting point for 15-minute insights from artists, scientists, writers, educators, storytellers, and more.
In this episode, storyteller and broadcaster Roger Hill recounts his life and work, the dementia dimension and the role of remembering.
We started with the idea that this would happen: that there would be a recording of some thoughts relating to the current Bluecoat project. The cultural force that is Roger Hill has actually gone into a number of territories. I mean, throughout there's been education, but also there's been the arts, both as performer, but also in that kind of workshop facilitator, somebody who helps other people to do their own art, and the other people itself has branched out hugely from what started out really is working with young people mainly of school, age to people older than that, through youth theatre and then moving on to older people, to very old people in fact, to people in there they're third age, but also to much younger children, so that now the work concentrates, for example, on babies.
So that spread out, and also it spread out geographically - what became something that was pioneered in the North West of England, all around Liverpool and beyond, then moved out through the rest of the country, through the national associations that I was involved in,  and then went abroad to Europe connections and then round the world couple of times. So there'll be the geographic expansion as well.
If you said what's been consistent through that, I'd say: one,  the enabling of other people to do things. The consistent offering of information, skills, and experiences that would help people to grow and develop individually.
I think also a real sense that there is a lot to be learnt from the other, from not this here now, but from the different things, the things that are culturally other than us and therefore a real hunger, a real taste for always finding something new and different to engage with and probably looking from this perspective, which I wouldn't have been able to do a few years ago a real interest in the way in which the individual engages with the wider reality. I suppose what we now call neuroscience, but the validity of certain kinds of personal experiences, which has fed into the other thing that runs through it all is writing.
Reading, writing, researching have been something that I've been able to do, even when there's been no other kind of work around. So I don't think I'd find it very easy to give myself a job description or job title, but it must have something to do with adventurer in ideas.
The one thing that people have always associated dementia with is a memory loss. It's a cliché. It's been going for as long as people have identified this thing called dementia, and Alzheimer's to a certain extent.  I think it's really important at this stage of history to unpick the cliché, which is that you know that the person is experiencing dementia because they've lost their ability to recall. They seem to have lost their ability to deal with the present.
And that for me is the shift. It is indeed about the extent to which certain experiences which have happened in the past, aren't available anymore. But it's also about the ability to simply negotiate the present, even if those memories aren't there.
One of the things that I think was very important was the idea that people would develop the capability -  in fact, they automatically have the capability thrust upon them - of getting through daily life, without reference to their past experiences, or to their recent experiences and things that they've recently learnt. This is a state which we're all actually getting into more or less because we do don't we. We spend a lot of time outsourcing our memory to our phones and to our computers and to our hard drives.
So basically, we're having a bit of a reality crisis