Chapter 3 | Sonic Spectres
// CHAPTER 3 - SONIC SPECTRES // As Edmund Husserl observes, when we hear a melody, we do not hear isolated notes. Each tone carries the trace of the one before it; the past remains woven into the now, already reaching toward what is yet to come. This fluid intertwining — through which consciousness itself unfolds, stretching beyond the present moment in every direction — may nowhere become more palpable than in the elusive presence of sound.
Chapter 3 — Sonic Spectres gestures toward this presence that always exceeds itself, a presence constituted at its core, by what is absent. Sound is always in transit — not only through space, but across temporalities. It does not necessarily move in a linear progression. It accumulates, overlaps, diffuses, lingers. It fills space, folds into itself, reverberates. Sound gives rise to space and situates us within it, placing bodies in relation to one another. In this capacity to organise space, sound is inevitably social, and therefore political.
Perhaps nowhere does this relational force become more tangible than in the voice, which binds what is most intimate to what lies outside us, placing us in relation both to ourselves and to others. To resonate with oneself, and through vibration, to resonate with another. The resonating body; the sonorous subject, as Jean-Luc Nancy writes. It is by listening to the resonances that pass through us that we become open to the world.
How do we experience resonance? How might we trace the spatialisation of sound? And how can we feel its weight — not only as vibration, but as something that settles within us, sedimenting as the voices of memory?
This chapter lingers with those diffuse sensations of sound that are at once visceral and affective, yet remain abstract, fugitive, resistant to capture. What better way to approach these elusive experiences than through the body and through movement? For sound — and rhythm in particular — not only shapes our being together; it constitutes one of the most fundamental dimensions of embodied existence: the cadence of the heartbeat, the rhythm of breath, of speech, and of listening.
HELMETING
“The helmets are not particularly designed as accessories, nor simply as prosthetic organs, so it can be everything and nothing, I think of them as temporary infrastructures for listening. They reorganise how sound travels between bodies, technologies and space, and in doing so they reorganise the conditions through which listening takes place. The sculpted ears are therefore not intended as realistic replicas of human ears. They occupy an ambiguous position between body and object. That ambiguity is important because it invites a simple question: where does listening actually happen?” - Zhuyang Liu
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SONIC COMMUNALITY
“I think of all three as choreographic tools because for me choreography isn't only visible movement. It can be the organisation of breath, distance, attention, response. Recitation brings bodies into a shared cadence. Whispering pulls them close. Whistling spreads them out while keeping them connected. And these sounds don't just produce alignment — they produce hesitation, friction, drift too. The group doesn't need to move as one body. It becomes a collective by continually listening and adjusting to itself.” - Aliaskar Abarkas
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Moving Discourse is a platform dedicated to performative thinking and choreographic practice. Situated at the intersection of choreography, performance philosophy and embodied research, it approaches movement not merely as an object of inquiry, but as a mode of thinking, knowing and being in the world.
Through video, text and workshops, it documents, theoretically engages with and physically explores performance, movement and choreography. Each quarter, a curated chapter unfolds around a specific theme, bringing together interviews, experimental and academic writing, performance documentation and video art. These inquiries extend beyond the page and screen into physical space through movement-based research workshops and reading groups, where ideas are encountered, enacted and put into motion.
The name Moving Discourse can be understood as expressing both a condition and an imperative. It acknowledges that thought is always unfinished, situated and embodied, while signalling a commitment to shifting the frameworks through which performance, movement and choreography are understood. It is a space for presenting movement-based artistic practices and a field for engaging with the theoretical currents that surround them.
Moving Discourse seeks to hold and to release: to construct an archive of gestures, ideas and the bodies that carry them, while remaining attentive to what escapes documentation, exceeds representation and resists containment. It approaches the archive not as a stable repository, but as a provisional and living constellation — one that preserves traces without claiming to arrest their movement. Rather than stabilising discourse into a definitive form, Moving Discourse seeks to sustain the conditions for its continual rearticulation, its unfinishedness — its very being in motion.