What Brings You In is an interactive, binaural, deep-listening experience. Based on interview research and personal experiences with talk therapy, hypnotherapy, dreamwork, sandplay, somatics, and reiki, it is an exploration of when and where our truest selves emerge through a series of sound pieces. The words “what brings you in” are treated as a question and a statement - what brings us in to a performance venue or communal space? And What Brings You In is also offered as an experience that aims to bring us inward to discover more about ourselves through listening.
Working towards decentering vision in collaboration with Blind and Low Vision artists, What Brings You In is an invitation to all to disengage visually. Between five pre-recorded, experimental, new-music compositions performed by Germaine Liu (percussion) and Leslie (violin), audiences play with online interactions, while Leslie serves as a ‘live audio-guide’ providing descriptions of the screen and a personal, evolving context for the music.
Leslie Ting is an artist who combines her practice as a classical musician with creative work in theatre, installation art, and experience stemming from her former career as a practicing optometrist. Her definitive work, Speculation, garnered her multiple award nominations, including the Pauline McGibbon Award for Emerging Theatre Director (2021).
Creative accessibility is a throughline of Leslie’s artistic practice. Often developing projects in dialogue and collaboration with Blind and Low Vision artists and audiences, she invites all of her collaborators to integrate the de-centring of vision into the core of a project and reflect on our relationship with vision and listening.
The National Creation Fund’s investment of $95,000 supports the ongoing development of the work, which will ultimately exist as a live performance, installation, and a home version, which will be a more solo, flexible web-browser based experience. Through a series of workshops, the creative team will focus on fully developing, integrating and testing new visuals with the sound-based interactions, further developing the work with the blind and low-vision community, and exploring asynchronous connections.
What Brings You In has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts Digital Now, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, Why Not’s RISER and Theatre Passe Muraille.
Developed with support from the National Arts Centre’s National Creation Fund.
Premiering in 2024.
