Literacy of the Throat

August 9, 6 - 9 PM

A Meeting with Bill Dietz, Chris Mann, and Hong-Kai Wang.
If speech is a kind of music, how does that impact politics?
At a moment when “rational critical discourse” proves itself ever more dangerously inadequate, the need to rethink the mediation of aesthetics & politics is urgent. We ask: how might we listen to traditions attuned to registers of politics & infrapolitics that Western paradigms, even at their most radical, struggle to hear? 

What about musics in which timbre & grain are understood as forms of intelligence - in, for instance, practices of self-taught musicking among Hakkanese agrarian laborers and Indonesian migrant workers in Taiwan, or even in para-American music histories such as that of the Shakers? 

How might we acknowledge and consciously occupy the limits of our abilities to hear? What if embarrassment is precisely the condition and starting point of a move toward hearing differently? How might we become a chorus of failing ears?

Composer and writer Bill Dietz; composer, poet and performer Chris Mann, and artist Hong-Kai Wang called a “Meeting” - an evening in which they invited us to join them in bringing our throats to bear on these questions. Co-produced with Blank Forms. Sponsored by Taiwan Ministry Of Culture.