In April 2022, through DOTE’s Rituals Of Change programme, we invited artist Ian Nesbitt to convene a monthly space to weave itself through the period of our year of listening. He began hosting monthly sessions in what he calls ‘co-listening’, a form that focuses on deep listening as a transformative collective practice. He made a commitment to a year’s cycle of sessions, ending in April 2023. After a short break, a new round of sessions begins in late September 2023.
Co-listening as a practice focuses on transformative listening by freeing participants from the need to respond, allowing us to listen for understanding rather than agreement. The form holds space to circle, to dwell, to deepen, to make a shift in the company of others away from the received urge to ‘progress’. The co- prefix could refer to those beings we share space with, human or otherwise, or nod towards principles such as co-operation, co-llectivism, and co-mmoning.
Each month the opening prompt is the same – ‘Where do you find yourself?’ – a question designed to call us into dialogue with our surroundings, to notice with whom or what we are entangled, and to hold space for individual and collective yearning, for the griefs that emerge from our localities and our globality, and for that which does not make sense yet.
There is no map for this work, no outcomes, no pathway, nothing that is supposed to happen either individually or collectively, beyond a commitment to showing up and leaning together into the darkness beyond modernity.
Ian reflects on the practice:
“Each month new and now familiar faces arrive, and what I have been most struck by as the sessions have progressed, is how each time is so markedly different. The rhythm and feel of each session is distinct, held by the growing experience within the group, and also invigorated by those experiencing it for the first time. We listen to each other speaking and we listen to each other refrain from speaking. We listen together to sounds from our individual environments that punctuate the silence that holds us: children playing in Amsterdam, birds in a tree in Alexandria, a coffee being delivered to a cafe table in Palermo, the dusk falling in Paris, a laptop overheating in Sheffield. We listen to the silences that we build together, which have something of a healing quality for the knowing that we have built them together.”
For those wishing to dive deeper, Ian’s journal of the year, along with reflections by other participants, can be found in DOTE’s online magazine.
Sessions take place on the last Thursday of every month (except December). Each session takes about 1,5 hours from 19:00 – 20:30 CET (or 18:00 BST / London).
To sign up for each session please email to office@dancingontheedge.nl or info@iannesbitt.co.uk
