Listening In

Brazilian choreographer Thiago Granato on the politics of what we hear

Before the pandemic hit, Thiago Granato was about to start working on a new piece, “The Sound They Make When No One Listens” to be premiered at Tanz im August this year. Beatrix Joyce talked with him about where he left off and how, in these times of physical distancing, his research into the act of listening has become ever more relevant.

Beatrix Joyce: Thiago, for your new work you are focusing on different modes of listening. What triggered you to explore this topic?

Thiago Granato: I consider listening to be a political act. As a Brazilian artist, I have seen Brazil undergo many positive democratic developments over the past 15 years, and then with Bolsonaro, everything changed. Now, the extreme right is a celebration of stupidity. The government loudly promotes hate speech and misinformation, which consequently results in a deterioration of the democratic system. In order to resist this catastrophic reality, I wish to create a choreography drawn from a more precise listening to the narratives of those minorities that, despite having a voice and political representation, are not usually taken into consideration when crucial decisions are made.

BJ: Listening as a form of political representation?

TG: Yes. In the West, we place a great deal of emphasis on speaking and on being heard but we don’t learn to listen in the same way. The kind of listening that I’m talking about is mainly an act of recognition. It creates a space in which people expose themselves and recognise the existence of the other. And when one person claims this space, another cannot. But those who are talked over, those invisible people, or spaces, or movements, still exist. They are there, nurturing the system as well. I am interested in exploring how the act of listening could support those not heard, how it could agitate social and political formations. It’s about the agency of listening, and how it can transform situations and gather people. Instead of taking hearing as a passive action, what about taking it as an active practice? It can be a way to reach what’s not in the field of visibility and to subvert the mechanisms of power that are already in place.

BJ: The experience of listening implies the use of sound. In what way will you be working with sound?

TG: My focus shifted to sound with my latest solo “Trrr” (2018), where listening guided the experience of the audience. Now, I am again working with musician David Kiers and instead of making a sound design, we want to develop a ‘listening design’. That’s what will guide the dramaturgy of the piece. And then together with the dancers, Arantxa Martinez and Roger Sala Reyner, and the light designer Claes Schwennen, we will work both with sounds produced by the body and sounds produced by the environment. We will experiment with different kinds of material, such as movement and text, singing and whispering… We will use sound combined with dance and lighting as a means to question how we connect and disconnect what we see from what we hear.

What would it be like to produce silence in noise?

BJ: Will you also be working with silence?

TG: When I first thought of listening, the first image that came to my mind was that of being in a state of reception, like when quietly contemplating a landscape. But how about we try to listen in an environment in which we are surrounded by noise? We are constantly overwhelmed by images and interrupted all the time. So what would it be like to produce silence in noise? Or noise in silence? It’s not about stopping all actions and listening in solitude, but rather about finding different modes of listening in the chaotic world we live in. BJ: Do you think that this deepened sense of awareness and active mode of listening can incite empathy?

TG: The work is about making it possible to see from another’s perspective, it’s about trying to put yourself in someone else’s position. And it’s not only about empathising with other humans, but also other beings, which I consider to be a revolutionary attitude. What would happen if, in this age in which we place so much value on communication, listening would replace speaking? What if talk shows would become ‘listening shows’? What would our day-to-day look like?

BJ: Like a kind of utopia?

TG: Utopia implies a world that does not yet exist, an imaginary reality. But I think that the act of listening could be a way to expand our perception and direct our attention towards worlds that already coexist. It’s not about delivering a product, a preconceived idea of utopia, but rather about asking what kind of worlds we could connect with if we simply paid attention to them differently.

BJ: In your trilogy “CHOREOVERSATIONS”, you created a series of solos based on imaginary collaborations with dead and living choreographers as well as those not yet born. As you were working with different kinds of presence then, in what way will you be working with presence now?

TG: I am interested in asking what lies beyond physical presence and questioning the surface of what we see. Especially now, in our digitalised world, everything is not what it seems. We are always decoding what we read in the media and on our timelines, trying to understand what is fake, what is not fake. The images that we see are like the tip of the iceberg, and we need to be asking ourselves what lies beyond them. The same counts for the images I create with my choreographies. I wish to engender a curiosity in my audience to engage their attention further than just the bodily movement, in this case, towards the act of listening. T