Director and choreographer Ruth Allen introduces ‘Everything Happens for a Season’ — a film made with Rob St John which asks: What does it mean to listen to the world?
If the many interconnected crises of our times — climate emergency, declining mental health, diminished connectedness and ensuing loneliness — are crises of relationship, then how might learning to listen better — more fully with our whole sensing bodies — improve the relationships we have with the world, each other, and ourselves?
Listening is the foundational act of relationship, and learning to listen better has never felt more important or necessary in a loud and divisive world, a world losing its silent places, a natural world drowned out by artificial noise. When we stop listening, we stop noticing what is at risk of disappearing, or is already lost. Individuals. Species. Our own intuition.
But what does it mean to listen to the world? How are we to hear the quiet, arrhythmic and episodic murmur at the heart of the more-than-human world? What about the low rumble of rock? Listening is slow, careful work. Generational work. Epochal work.
For this project a group of dancers were tasked with exploring the theme of ‘listening’ through the body-based technique of Contact Improvisation (CI) with the gritstone rocks at Mother Cap in the Peak District National Park. While rocks are often considered to be the epitome of what is ‘dead and lifeless’ in the world, the dancers were invited to look again and listen more closely. If we can learn to listen and come into deeper relationship with the abiotic ground beneath our feet, what else might be possible?
Dancers were given verbal prompts inspired by the stepwise development of the therapeutic relationship, which is itself another curious proxy for relationships more broadly. Indeed, psychotherapy might be one of the last bastions of deep and intense listening expressly for the purpose of understanding what the other person needs holding and tending to.
The dancers considered through improvised movement what it feels like to approach a new relationship, to move in closer despite vulnerability, to come together and explore what it feels like to be in a relationship with another, to explore what is similar and shared. But also what is different, and what it means to cross difficult terrain. To merge, to weather, to dissolve, to separate. The invitation throughout was to keep listening in the multiple directions and ways required to hear what needs to be heard, whether you are listening to a rock or to a person, or in community. Allowing associations to form and distinctions to blur. Listening deep, but staying alert.
Listening is always ambiguous and subtle. It demands that we stay open and speculative without preconceived outcomes around what we might hear. Sometimes we cannot hear. We cannot attune. We cannot decipher. How are we to listen to what is hard to hear? How do we listen as far back, and as far forward as we need to? The act of listening isn’t easy, but what might emerge when we try?
Direction and choreography by Ruth Allen
Film by Rob St John
Music by Rob St John & Modern Studies
~ Featuring ~
Ana Raquel Azevedo
Frank Dunne
Mariana Jindrichova
Ruth Phillips
~ Filmed in the peak district in November 2024 ~
Screened for the first time at Kendal Mountain Festival 2024