Opening our ears: learning to listen

A unique opportunity to take a ‘soundwalk’ from Bridport to West Bay with three local artists is being offered for free by Bridport based arts organisation PVA.

Listening is a creative act

The artists will be taking three different routes from Bridport to West Bay and encourage participants to focus on the background ambience we are all immersed in, uncovering hidden sounds along the way. Encouraging them to listen a bit longer and more intently then normal.

We will be asking participants to pay attention to the sounds in their environment with the same focus and awareness that they use to listen to music. Encouraging them to hear the place differently, to understand it in new ways. We will spend time foraging for interesting sounds in our immediate surroundings.

Pause for a moment, and listen. What is the dominant sound?

The more we will investigate, the more the world opens up in front of our ears. To those who find joy in listening, there are an endless symphony of sound around us, with infinite possibilities for engagement and exploration.

What is soundwalking?

This active, engaged approach to listening is echoed by the practice of ‘soundwalking’. At its simplest, a soundwalk is just what its name implies: a walk during which you simply pay attention to each sound you encounter.

Details

When: Sunday 7 March, 10am: meet at PVA MediaLab for tea/coffee. Start at 10.45am for approx 1-hour walk to The Salt House, West Bay. Please wear suitable clothing.

Collected material from the walks will be exhibited in the Foyer Gallery Bridport Arts Centre Tues. 9 – Sat. 27 March

Please register your interest with: Mandy Rathbone, Studio Manager, PVA MediaLab, 1 Kings Square Bridport, Dorset, DT6 3QE.

t: 01308 459071  *  e: mandy@pva.org.uk

The idea for The School Looks Around originated from General Public Agency’s rediscovery of the 1948 book, which promoted the idea of the local survey as an adventurous and open-ended process, a “voyage of discovery into the life, history and organisation of the locality”. “The local survey can help to bring the individual into sympathy with his/her surroundings, not passively, but as an active unit”. The book is amazingly contemporary in its holistic consideration of the environment and in empowering young people to protect and influence their environment.

The aim of the original surveys was to make the local area and issues of society and citizenship come alive for children, whilst establishing new and lasting connections between schools and their communities.

The School Looks Around is a one-year programme of environmental surveys carried out by young people and directed towards capturing the realities of contemporary urban and rural life in Britain. The programme will run over one year in four different secondary schools – two in an urban context and two in a rural context – with the aim of developing a national model. It will be galvanised by significant new partnerships between the schools, cultural institutions and library services. The findings of the action-research will form a usable archive resource, to be housed either within the school or within a local history archive.

The principles are:

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