Deep listening is a term that Aboriginal elder Miriam Rose Ungunmerr Baumann uses to translate “Dadirri”. She says: “To know me is to breathe with me. To breathe with me is to listen deeply. To listen deeply is to connect. It is the sound of deep calling to deep. Dadirri is the deep inner spring inside us. We call on it and it calls on us.”
This workshop will explore deep listening in relation to breath, sound and voice. Each of our bodies has an internal resonance that informs how we listen and how we live. If our lives were a song that were improvised minute by minute, how can deep listening take our final improvisation, that of our death, to a place of integrity?
Deep Listening is also a term coined by American composer and musician Pauline Oliveros, She describes it as… “listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what one is doing.”
Deep Listening, as developed by Oliveros and the Deep Listening Institute, explores the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the voluntary, selective nature – exclusive and inclusive -- of listening.
Every breath ends, every sound decays but how present we are in our deep listening determines the quality of every breath and every sound.
Annette Tesoriero was born in Sydney, Australia and studied Linguistics and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney. Her early music training was in piano and she has continued to study classical singing both in Australia and in Europe. She has a Masters in Management in Arts Management from the University of Technology, Sydney. Her artistic practice is the intersection of sung and spoken text in contemporary performance making.
In 1995, an accident while bushwalking led her to an understanding of internal body resonance and the importance of touch for trauma victims. This understanding informs her vocal pedagogy and she now facilitates vocal explorations using this information.
Her work explores the emotional range of voice and the essential eroticism of the sung voice in contrast to the privileged position of image. Intimacy is encouraged in her work, as a space where the voice-making body can be experienced.
Highlights of her performance career include multiple seasons with the Sydney Front, Calculated Risks Opera Productions and Chamber Made Opera and she has premiered major works with these companies. In 1995 she co founded the opera Project with Sydney artist/director Nigel Kellaway and within that company co-created and performed in three critically acclaimed major works: The Berlioz – Our Vampires Ourselves, The Terror of Tosca and Tristan.
As well as creating and presenting her own contemporary performance works she has collaborated with many theatre practitioners, writers, musicians, composers and visual artists to create new works. She is often invited to create and perform customised vocal recitals for art galleries and museums. She has made several recordings for ABC Radio.
In 2014 Annette moved to the Shoalhaven Region of NSW where her business Shoalhaven Health and Arts works with local communities to creatively explore both mental health literacy and death literacy. She is an accredited instructor in both Mental Health First Aid and in safeTALK (an internationally recognised suicide alertness program). Annette is currently a lead artist in the Bundanon Local project through the Bundanon Trust.