Saturn Walk Embodying Listing is a social performance practice and participatory art experience by visual sound artist China Blue with dance artist Andrea Nann/Dreamwalker.

 

Saturn Walk is a hexagonal labyrinth replicating the cloud pattern over Saturn’s North Pole with sounds generated from Saturn’s rings as uncovered by China Blue for NASA. 

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Saturn Walk: Embodying Listening is a portal for individuals to extend the awareness of one’s self in relationship with time, patterns, place, environs and others.  The experience grounds participants in the practice of ancient maze walking, connecting human consciousness with Earth and Cosmos in a contemporary urban context.

 

Public Engagement

As a self-guided art encounter visitors can follow prompts and curated questions designed to activate embodied listening and thoughtful reflection so they can move with heightened awareness along the concentric line path outlined on the ground.  The artists will also offer performance experiences, facilitating mindful meditations on sound walking and relationality in the context of listening for and bringing into consciousness all that is present, including unconscious forces and internalized beliefs that shape our experiences of ‘self in the world’, forces which might otherwise go unnoticed.

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Saturn Walk: Embodying Listening is also a portal for performance practice.  Guest artists Laura Colomban (U.K/Italia) and Jennifer Dahl (Canada/Italia) will be invited to spend time in the labyrinth moving and listening into their own bodies –  their unique lived experiences – and will be invited to explore ways that embodied listening can impact human experience in the world.  The performance practice may take the form of improvised dancing, sounding, music making, stillness, silence, conversation, dialogue or other shared expression. 

Through the labyrinth experience people will engage in deep embodied listening.  This is an offering that generates meaningful transformation by giving the public the authority to notice and potentially change the way they perceive themselves in and of their world. As groups experience this practice it will impact communities and bridge social gaps resulting in societal change.

 

Listening for the Unheard

The hallmark of China Blue’s audio work is based on listening for the unheard. Her activities recording the voice of the Eiffel Tower, a sonic impact that leveled a forest in Siberia, listening on Mars, discovering the sounds produced in Saturn’s rings, documenting the sounds heard from the vantage point of a tree, lending an ear to our brain waves, the humble crickets and fireflies sets a jumping off point to consider amplifying the voices of the disenfranchised.

 

Embodying the Unheard

Andrea Nann/Dreamwalker’s recent works including Windows of Time (2022) and Firehorse and Shadow (2021) take form through Nann’s embodied memory work process which is sensorial movement and gesture based work developed in practice with long time collaborator Sarah Chase. Investigations into lived experiences and stories that have been silenced, concealed or sealed off from public view –sometimes through generations – lead to questions around what is held and carried in our bodies and how to support healing, flow and release.