Dance of Commoning: Forest Garden Effervescence as Sonic Resistance

This participatory performance-workshop invites earthbound acts of improvisation and kinship led by Sabina and Joesph Sallis.  

Dance of Commoning draws from forest garden ecologies, improvised Avant-gardes, quantum listening and ephemeral land practices to cultivate an ethics of attentiveness, mutuality, and sonic care. 

Recontextualizing David Tudor’s Rainforest and indeterminate methods of Cage and Cunningham by using somatic movement and foraged, hand-crafted sound devices. Sabina and Joseph will guide participants through an improvised sound and movement session, invoking a collective, multispecies kinship. 

This work enacts a speculative common—a space where art becomes a site of embodied participation rather than a detached output. It critiques technocratic epistemologies and colonial legacies of knowledge extraction, proposing instead a mode of artistic research akin to a foraging intuitive that is relational and deeply attuned to place. Through radical presence and durational acts of sensing, we explore how sonic practice can resist reductionism, reanimate the esoteric undercurrents of radical pedagogy, and ignite ecological renewal. What futures emerge when ART listens and gardens, rather than captures? How can improvisation refigure our relationships with land, sound, and each other? 

About the contributors:  

Sabina Sallis is an artist, researcher, and educator working at the intersection of land-based practice, speculative world-building, and radical pedagogy. 

Joseph Sallis has been a maker of traditional and experimental instruments for over 30 years and works as a woodwork technician at Fine Art, Newcastle University. 

About the Symposium:

The Sound and Environment Symposium has been organised by Newcastle University’s Sound + Environment Research Group, exploring the ways sound can deepen our understanding of environments and the communities inhabiting them.