Radical Listening: Activating Rear-Space Cognition in Performance Practice

Listening is commonly understood as auditory attention. This workshop reframes listening as embodied, relational attunement to spatial forces, with particular focus on the under-theorised dimension of posterior orientation. Contemporary spatial organisation privileges frontality: the face, the screen, and the forward vector of attention dominate architectural and performative environments. The space behind the body is rarely cultivated as an active perceptual and decisional field.

The workshop introduces rear-space cognition as the capacity to navigate, compose, and make decisions in relation to spatial fields that cannot be visually confirmed. Through structured embodied protocols, participants will decentre frontal visual dominance and amplify awareness of the posterior field, gravitational alignment, and cross-modal orientation. Guided movement scores and collective spatial tasks will investigate how activating back-space reorganises bodily presence, relational sensitivity, and three-dimensional coordination.

Participants will explore how shifting attention into the posterior field transforms the organisation of the body in space, producing a more volumetric presence and heightened responsiveness without reliance on direct gaze. The workshop situates rear-space cognition as an artistic research tool that expands perceptual hierarchy and challenges the assumption that spatial intelligence is primarily forward-facing. Rather than proposing a therapeutic practice, Radical Listening offers a transferable methodology for cultivating multi-directional awareness and reconfiguring how collective decisions emerge in performance and shared environments.