07. Sympathetic resonance
On two performances, and the tension between being seen and being heard
Hello again, it’s been a while. I hope you’ve been keeping healthy and sane enough to enjoy the summer, wherever you are. If you’ve been thinking about scheduling a sound session with me, you can find the details for that here.
I’ve also put up some new recordings on my Soundcloud page. These are baby steps towards a project I hope to be sharing with you further down the line. For now, I hope you enjoy this month’s newsletter. It’s about two collaborative performances I participated in as a chant singer: one in 2017 in Manila, and another just this May, in Berlin.
07.01 Seen sounding
What does it mean for sound to be seen?
I find myself wondering about the place of visuality as I intentionally pursue a practice that centers sound in different, sometimes conflicting, spaces of performance and meditation.
There are a few layers to this. To begin with, my pursuit of sound heeds the call of sound theorists and practitioners to question the predominance of the visual. Think of how our metaphors privilege the sense of sight as the primary register for making sense of the world: we perceive things from a point of view, we see eye to eye when we have a mutual understanding. Sight can seize reality as a totality in an instant (in the blink of an eye). It operates through a binary split between the seeing subject and seen object. Taken too far, its logics tend towards totalitarianism and objectification.
Sound, so they say, can counter this over-fixity through its natural qualities of transience, receptivity, and embodiment. It doesn’t fix space so much as fill it. Or maybe sound isn’t counterposed to sight so much as it permeates beyond the visually perceptible. Sound and its sister silence are our companions at the thresholds where it gets too dark or too bright to see: the in-betweens, the not-yets, and the ends of things.
Think about how hearing is the last sense to go when we die; or how ultrasound waves assist us in seeing what’s inaccessible to the naked eye; or even the way we will close our eyes when we sing, the better to feel the thing inside that wants to emanate through air and flesh to become the distinct sound of our voice in song.
There’s a more mundane sense to this. The point of my work is to use my voice to amplify listeners’ innate capacity for inner seeing and experiencing through trance states. Singing for people whose eyes are closed lets me off the hook: I don’t worry about how I look, I have no concern about being seen. This would not be a problem to begin with if I weren’t already-always a performer, or perhaps a less anxious one, or maybe even one who wasn’t still wrestling with the complications of being a female singer in a culture that prizes a certain kind of feminine singing as an artistic ideal. But the space of performance lends a different urgency or promise: to break into ordinary consciousness in broad daylight, as it were, materializing in mutual perception what would normally be visualized through the psychic screen of inward seeing.
Like many other people I find it disconcerting to be seen sounding, to be observed in the act of doing something which calls for(th) vulnerability. As a chorister in my teens and twenties, I always felt a mild shock whenever we would transition from the rehearsal room to the stage, even though we were producing the exact same sonic experience. Keeping my eyes fixed on the conductor was a convenient way to deflect the discomfort of making eye contact with the audience; and sharing the stage with others lessened some of the burden of bearing sighted scrutiny.
Still, there was the matter of needing to manipulate the muscles of my face while singing so as to avoid making inadvertently comical expressions that might distract the viewer’s listening experience. And for women singers, there is the gendered pressure to be pleasing or at least inoffensive to the eye. (This is a huge vibe-killer for the hugot of singing from the inside-out, honestly.)
It was in this spirit of rebelling against being-seen that my collaborator Isabel Gonzalez-Toro and I initially conceptualized our performance at the Ballhaus Naunyanstrasse in May as a performance without performers. We wanted to create a cocoon of colors that would envelop our listeners in shifting waves responsive to the sonic trajectory we proposed: a funnel of chants that would open out into a reverberating club beat (blasted through six speakers around the house). A ten-foot, three-panel screen and a pristine white sheet on the floor served as our slate for projecting the colors.
The idea was to stand behind the screen and show ourselves only when we took our bows at the end. We were aware that we might be construed as thumbing our noses at the theatre’s explicitly political aesthetics of representing post-migrant artists in Europe, primarily through visual means.
Perhaps I was unconsciously thinking along a similar line of resisting visibility five years ago, when I produced and performed in a small show at UP Vargas Museum with Anam Cara, my trio project with Ryan Villamor and Tusa Montes, and our invited collaborators Project Yazz. Apart from the three-way improvisation with Ryan and Tusa, I decided to put myself out on a limb and perform one of my Tagalog prose poems. (It was, a little too appropriately, an invocation to compassionately witness one’s life falling apart!) I thought it might also be a cool idea to invite a dancer, Buboy Raquitico, and a visual artist, and Pauline Vicencio-Despi, to perform the piece with me.
In retrospect I wonder if I might have been transferring the burden of visuality to two artists whose primary mode of audience engagement is through sight. I’d had some experience reading my poems aloud, and I’d improvised on my looper many times before, but I’d never done the two together. Some part of me surely felt overwhelmed by my own determination to go where I had never gone before—in front of a much larger audience than I’d anticipated. While plumbing vulnerability is just par for the course in meditation, it takes on a different charge when it assents to collective beholding, becoming an object of spectacle.
Something got transmuted in the visual resonance of this conflict. I remember Pauline projecting shards of my words in radioactive blues and reds. I remember Buboy inching across the gallery space, hunched shoulders and searching eyes, closing in on himself before striking out in postures of defiant stillness.
07.02 Generosity begets symmetry
The night before the first Ballhaus show, Isabel and I did a run-through of the piece for our curator melê yamomo and our dramaturg Fabian Larsson. They gently but firmly interrogated our decision to absent ourselves from the audience’s view.
“We know that what you are doing is creating a space of mind. But we are longing to see you—to be in the same room with you, the source of the sound,” they said.
We came to a compromise: Before I began my solo part, I entered the stage, faced the audience, and turned my back to them so that I too could direct my gaze and my chant to the shifting waves of color. In the concluding section of the piece, Isabel and I took our posts on opposite ends of the stage, facing each other as we did a call-and-response between her whistle and my voice. In this way we allowed ourselves to be beheld in a carefully calibrated half-light, deflecting direct visibility.
There was no such cloak of light and shadow at the Vargas show. It was a Sunday afternoon and we held our show in a gallery with glass-panelled walls that showed the trees and fields of the UP Diliman campus. Just as plainly visible was the audience, the looks on their faces and the postures of their bodies. I positioned my gaze to the space just above their heads (that old chorister trick).
To see oneself being seen in the act of sonic presencing can feel like a breakage of inner space, caused by the dissonance between inward- and outward-flowing currents of feeling. While I work intentionally with tears in my contemplative practice, it was not my desire in that moment be seen or heard performing (in) tears. This was not a confessional. At the time, I was stressed and tired from putting together the show, and secretly despondent about leaving Manila to move to Hong Kong for work. I felt like I was leaving something for good (I was right: my father passed away a year later.) Some tears are cosmic and ineffable; and some tears hit a bit too close to home, thick with granular specificity.
A curious thing happens when the eye cannot see what it produces itself: “In alchemy, tears belong to the operation of solutio; they represent a softening or melting of those aspects of personality that have hardened and become inflexible. Tears are an emblem of both bitterness and of the bitterness that in being shed can be transmuted into wisdom.”1
Scanning the room in that moment, I glimpsed my father in the audience. I remember now the image of him there: arms crossed and eyes screwed shut, he listened with utter concentration, totally indifferent to how he looked to others around him. He may have seen in that moment the conflict I tried to veil but ended up revealing anyway, through the sound. And so he met me halfway: unseeing, all ears.
At my father’s wake, an older cousin who was also in the audience brought up this memory of him. She enfolded me in her arms, tears in her eyes. “Your papa was really your number one fan,” she said. “How he loved being there to support you.”
There is a mode of seeing that seeks to seize. There is another seeing that only knows how to soften—and thus becomes a kind of listening, a willingness to reciprocate perception with reception. Here the act of seeing seems to emit its own frequency, a sympathetic resonance, as it arranges itself to the source of sound.
We might remember that the other function of the ear is to maintain balance. Perhaps there is a geometry of intimacy to this world when we dare to live it from the inside out, and the outside in. Generosity begets symmetry. In one’s hearing we are seen.
Excerpt from ‘Tear’, from The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images, by the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (Taschen, 2010).