On 11 February 2026, Musicology and Dance Studies students shared the results of their research with artist Pol Pi on the idea of listening as a conscious act of connection at the Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts).
Sneakers squeak on the gym floor, guts are rumbling, a drumset collapses with a clatter, a bad orchestra is playing music, my ears are ringing. The audience sits in a U-shape around a still empty stage with the lights dimmed. We listen in on different voices penetrating our ears through the loudspeaker. They describe what sounds like entries in an audio diary of sorts. It starts in late October 2025 and ends today, 11 February 2026, here in this space where the students from the “Listening to Your Listening” research project appear one by one.
This evening about listening in dance is conceptualized as a presentation, but also as a shared practice, a public experiment, and a means of mutual perception and reflection. Together with dancer Pol Pi, Valeska Gert Guest Professor for the 2025/26 winter semester, the students spent the past few months practicing listening – to themselves and the outside world. Allowing themselves to be touched by sound, finding harmony with the world, themselves, and others through sound before translating this experience into movement, composing with it, and creating a shared space.During the majority of the four different scores performed for and, in part, with the guests during the evening, the students have their eyes closed. I continuously see bodies with closed eyes. Bodies with pricked up ears. Bodies setting sounds in motion or, how should I put it, letting sounds travel through them, move them.
Although this is not the first time I’ve seen something like this, although exercises in the “translation” of perception have been around since the 1970s with practices like Authentic Movement, Contemplative Dance Practice, and Katsugen Undo, there is still something captivating about it today. Is it the atmosphere of intimacy that arises? Is it the tenderness and vulnerability of surrendering with closed eyes, which at once evokes an enormous strength, especially in the context of the public space where we find ourselves? While the eye ascertains and measures distances and the purpose of the gaze extends beyond perception to communication, listening appears to blur boundaries, bringing the world closer. I ask myself what this means – particularly for dance, whose practice and reception is so deeply shaped by visual paradigms, by looking, by image and form. After all, I wasn’t merely listening tonight. I was – perhaps even predominantly – watching. And I found myself sometimes wishing that someone from the stage would look over to the middle of the room.
English translation by Melissa Maldonado
With Listening To Your Listening, Pol Pi and students of dance and musicology at the Freie Universität Berlin shared their research findings on February 11, 2026, at the Akademie der Künste.
