Hearing the Audience with ‘The Listening School’ and ‘The Listeners’ (Q&A)

by Kathryn Yu
Kathryn Yu
•
June 21, 2019
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6 min read

Site-specific performance artist and social choreographer Ernesto Pujol will bring his multi-year project Listening School to the upcoming River to River Festival in NYC next week. The project’s four-day presentation will consist of series of lunchtime public listening exercises called The Listening School as well as a silent durational evening performance called The Listeners where the public is invited to engage with artists trained in the art of listening. These “listeners” will sit in a circle during the performance providing their act of listening as a service to all people who pass through the historic Federal Hall Memorial that night.

We spoke to Ernesto over email to find out more.

No Proscenium (NP): Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

Ernesto Pujol (EP): I am a social choreographer. I seek an interdisciplinary movement methodology and language. Traditionally, a choreographer designs movement for trained bodies onstage. Depending on the lineage of that design, we call that staged movement: ballet, modern or contemporary dance. However, I design movement for society in the commons. I sample from a social lineage. The resulting gesture is a social choreography in which a collective sees itself portrayed. Joseph Beuys’s notion of social sculpture led me to the notion of social choreography. His democratic project, seeking works of art informed by direct public engagement, searching for an art practice capable of healing and thus transforming society, is at the foundation of the vulnerable methodology of my Listening School, and its intimate embodiment in The Listeners. The artist as a public servant.

NP: What is the Listening School project about?

EP: The Listening School Project is an effort to research listening in public, seeking to relearn how to listen not only in Trump’s America but also across the globe. Artists meet to reflect, talk and write about their diverse definitions and listening experiences. They also voice their concerns and fears about what they may hear yet not wish to bear, seeking strategies and listening ethics. Vital to the credible sincerity of their intention is the willingness to be open and transparent: to undergo this process through performative research in public spaces. Participants uniform themselves in blue to be accountable, as they inhabit crowded spaces hoping to connect, listen, and learn. Their presence is unspectacular: there is no entertaining or provocative spectacle. Yet for people willing to engage, there is the relational experience of connective mindfulness. Afterwards, they meet again to speak not of what they heard, but of what they learned about the act of listening to society. Sometimes, the school process culminates in a formal durational performance called The Listeners sited within an emblematic building, for the sake of communicating the dignity of collectively forming a listening vessel to contain psychic material, listening to lives in silence over hours as public servants. And then, The Listening School Project will migrate and disappears until another institution or venue wishes to host it on these terms.

NP: Why did you create this set of experiences? What inspired you?

EP: I created this project and performance because it is my way to poetically but experientially address the increasing fragmentation of our American society. I am an artist; I am in the business of metaphors, of generating relevant aesthetic experiences. I am inspired by the listening that is happening in communities across the globe around human rights and ecological issues, but that we miss in America due to the end of the American century, by the end of empire, and thus, an increasing resentment, isolation, and aggressive fear of the rest of the world.

NP: How are downtown Manhattan and Federal Hall incorporated into The Listening School and The Listeners?

EP: Lower Manhattan Cultural Council curator and producer Danielle King and I spent days scouting the Lower Manhattan area for public and semi-public spaces, plus emblematic buildings that spoke to the mythology of democracy. Much also had to do with logistics across a highly surveilled area nevertheless accessed through cultural partnerships. Ultimately, we selected the noontime period and spaces most likely to have people having lunch, on break, at momentary rest, more able to be gently engaged.

NP: How is the audience incorporated into the work? What kinds of choices can the participants make?

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EP: The audience is the piece. The audience is the true performer of human content. You see, traditionally, art speaks and audiences listen. The artist speaks and the public listens.

But here, it is the audience that speaks and the art listens. The public speaks and the artist listens. So the dualism of audience and work is abolished as much as possible: the audience is the work.

If you come to see The Listening School, all you will see are people dressed in blue co-inhabiting parks, plazas, courts and atriums. They seek to speak with New Yorkers about their experiences, thoughts, and opinions on listening. And they will ask New Yorkers to choreograph them: “Where should we listen? To what should we listen? To who should we listen?” So, there is nothing to see but much to experience. And during The Listeners performance at Federal Hall National Memorial, the only way “to see the piece” is to enter the hall, one at a time, and sit to speak privately with a listener. Because credible, true listening requires a set of conditions that are unspectacular.

NP: How are you designing around audience agency, consent, and safety?

EP: As I said before, the audience is the agent of the piece. The art is but an excuse to create a moment for listening without interruption, advice, or judgment. The artist’s body is but a tool and a listening vessel. As for consent, the documentation of the piece is very limited. We are not voracious; we are not consuming our own experience. The identity of the public will never be exposed in the images shot at a distance across public spaces, and there will be no documentation at Federal Hall. That is off limits. As for safety throughout the experiences, we will have each other as a listening group. I am not listening alone, it is a “we” who is listening. I can always respectfully end an exchange that has become abusive, or call upon a fellow listener for support. But sometimes listening means patiently and generously encompassing someone’s long-held rant.

We realize that this is a very angry moment in America, but we also believe in people.

NP: Who is the ideal audience member for this show?

EP: For The Listening School’s public engagement: residents of Lower Manhattan, office workers, security guards, tourists, pedestrians; anyone who happens to be having lunch or walking by.

For The Listeners evening performance: anyone and everyone who came across the promotion of the event and wishes to speak and be heard. This is a populist piece, in the original sense of populism before the extreme right kidnapped the term.

NP: What do you hope participants take away from the experience?

EP: I am consistently humbled by social immersion. This is a barefoot practice. I call it the practice of embarrassment. I always enter it hoping to mindfully generate meaningful experience. Regardless of class and color, many people are walking around feeling unheard. And that has generated a collective anger that is destroying us. I do not want us to be abused, but my performers and I are willing to take the risk to listen. I hope participants feel listened to. It may take years to listen.