‘Bring your poems, your voice and your prayers – to read, sing and make sounds together.’ — Aliaskar Abarkas

This participatory performance centres on an eight-metre-long chain of beads, crafted by the artist to serve as a physical score for a collective soundscape. Participants hold the beads, made from a range of everyday materials, and interpret them through touch, rhythm, voice and sonification, generating a shared, circular composition that unfolds in real time. The work explores alternative systems of notation, following how sound moves through people. Collective listening and attunement shape the experience, blending sense and nonsense, body, poetry and light.

Duan’s six-hour performance is a form of continuous dialogue between the artist and the audience, using puppetry and other objects, drawing, video, sound, music and light as interconnected mediums. In response to the theme of Reverberance, past, present and future realities resonate with dreamscapes the artist conjures onsite. Following the logic of a rehearsal, the work has no fixed beginning or end. It continues to be reworked, emerging and transforming over time. As audiences engage with the artist, they bring their own experiences into the process, becoming part of a shared journey.

Not Yet Still (Runaway Self-Referential Loop) is a newly commissioned installation and performance exploring how ritual shapes attention and alters perception. For the six-hours of the programme, Li will occupy YDP’s Conservatory, positioning her work as a living clock that measures time through vibration, repetition and continuous movement. Visitors may enter and leave at any moment, much like glancing at a clock in a room or noticing one’s own breath. The sensation of duration subtly unsettles the certainty of time moving forward. Time becomes not something that passes, but something that is actively occupied.

Relics: An Eye Once Blind began with an exploration of the artist’s family history, tracing it back to their great-great-grandfather, Sentaro Esaki, a Japanese migrant worker who arrived in the Philippines in 1909. From this point, the artist delves into forgotten narratives and traces the erasure of an identity bound to an imaginary warrior lineage.

Debuting in the UK, an excerpt of the work at YDP marks the first collaboration between Serafin, multi-instrumentalist Gorkem Sen, and sound designer Pierre Bayet (aka Fake Moss), who come together to create an expanded sonic experience. This work was first commissioned by the Rockbund Art Museum for the Wan Hai Hotel, with further development of the work supported by Waking Life (Portugal), HORST Music & Arts Festival (Belgium), KAPUT Manila and ART SG Singapore.

‘Blabryng fleschely tonge’. Repeat this phrase as it was originally written by an anonymous fourteenth-century contemplative, in The Cloud of Unknowing: ‘blabryng fleschely tonge, blabryng fleschely tonge, blabryng fleschely tonge’. Feel how the words accentuate the fleshy muscle of the tongue and how saliva accumulates, adding a sloshy wetness. Feel how the tongue slips awkwardly around the words, each letter sharp and straight like a bit in a horse’s mouth. Feel how your tongue moves like an eel in water. In 2019 and 2020, trackers placed on twenty-six European eels confirmed that the spawning place they instinctively returned to was somewhere in the spinning gyre of the Sargasso Sea. Its precise location, however, remains unknown. Blabryng fleschely tonge tracks the journeys of these silver eels, building a spiral of coordinates of knowledge that progresses by degrees without ever coinciding with its object. Along the way, resonances with a fourteenth-century meditation manual, in which animal consciousness is offered as an exemplar of the ability to experience not only what one is but that one is, swell, gather and recede.

Swilipino has offered a culinary thread woven throughout the events of Living, Rehearsing… over the course of the programme. Marking their third participation, Swilipino presents their version of a kamayan – a Filipino communal feast in which food is laid out on banana leaves and eaten by hand. A pre-colonial tradition, the Tagalog term kamayan derives from kamay (hand), carrying associations of collectivity, place and shared action, and is often the beating heart of birthdays, holidays, gatherings and fiestas.

'Every room creates specific conditions for potential resonances, waves and reflections. Through feedback, these phenomena can be revealed and observed. If we understand language as a recordable and translatable signal, it becomes possible to generate a real-time, site-specific feedback event — one that activates new kinds of signals before we can fully comprehend them.’ — Yan Jun

The musician and poet Yan Jun presents a performance of resonances, feedback loops and transmissions that move between signal and noise, in collaboration with an ensemble of participants who blend into the audience and space. Encouraging a fluid encounter between conductor, performer and environment, cues and responses gradually start to reveal themselves. The result is an atmosphere of collective attentiveness, where physical reactions, absurdist movements and non-verbal communication flow freely together.

Performers: Joe Baldwin, Alexis Bamforth, Jackson Burton, Shuyi Gao, Susan Sentler and Hao Zheng