I have been actively pursuing my fascination with the practice of ‘deep listening’ for more than five years since I was first introduced to the concept and practice in a workshop by a colleague at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. Kirstie Simson, (Dance Faculty), directed our attention to the reality of a fully embodied experience of listening, which is in actuality a state of being in the world. Listening from the fully-embodied mind is becoming aware of the multi-sensory process that is occurring at all times for every person. However, this level of listening often goes unperceived until the attention is called to it. In further pursuit of this practice, I discovered Contemplative Dance/’Authentic Movement’ (Mary Starks Whitehouse et al.), another embodied form that engages deep listening in the pursuit of expressing emerging awarenesses and subconscious knowing of the past and present, through ‘active imagination’ (C.G. Jung). During two years of training in this contemplative, intuitive, active, embodied practice, I have developed a further interest in how this practice of ‘deep listening’ can be applied to the detection of emergent properties of complex systems such as interpersonal relations, ‘wicked’ design problems, and the artistic creative process. It seems to me that ASC Conference will be an ideal venue to explore some of these ideas with others who might share similar interests and bring new concepts and experiences to the discussion. I am proposing both a performance and a workshop to have two levels of involvement. I hope to invite an initial reaction and response to ‘deep listening’ as displayed in practice through an improvised creative process by a performance group. And then, through a workshop, to engage a deeper dialogue with the more interested and intrigued after, and during, their own experience of the deep listening practice of Contemplative/Authentic Movement.
