My Heart Cannot Hear Yours From Here

premiering 27/02/2021 a short film on the theme of ‘Liveness’ for Newcastle University Performance Research Department. Captions can be enabled in youtube.

My Heart Cannot Hear Yours From Here

A yellow social distance floor marker circle with the words ’ please keep your distance, thank you for practicing social distancing’ and a black and white outline of two stylized people and a double headed arrow between them which has 2m above it.

Humans ‘know’ that we are alive, as we breathe and sense the other in same space/time/place. Our species is tribal and collective. Like most mammals we seek to associate in groups and we communicate and sense via Heart Connection (electro-cardiac impulses) - perceiving the other within a critical 3 feet of our hearts - and co-regulating to the nervous system of one another.

Science validates this powerful, unspoken resonance. It’s why we seek out gathering - to connect and to feel part of; alive and whole. All other communication is secondary; The body feels relationship - proximity - and commands the brain against reason or logic to defer to ‘sense’. Being together matters because without heart connection we start to feel bereft; without reference point or sense of human agency-in-community. We are compelled to find resonance in space and time and place to feel real.

The voiced expression of this connection - this liveness - this mutuality of experience - is story. And story sustains us, but it cannot replace the felt sense of temporal and spatial proximity. Collective bodily experiencing.

The filmed group experienced live-ness then as pure connection (other sense redundant). Before story; In the beginning. The viewer here is left free to create story from the visual - there are no imposed clues or caveats. Viscerally, the watching soma in this iteration is not in that screened live-ness and feels the frailty of secondary sensing.