Listening Acts Performance – Now or Never 2025

Listening Acts Performance presented with Now or Never Festival and Melbourne Recital Centre

Friday 22 August – Saturday 23 August 2025

The space between making sound and hearing it holds intimacy and possibility.

In this multi-disciplinary project, Chamber Made activates Melbourne Recital Centre with Listening Acts – a series of live performances and installation works that explore listening.

Grounded in the artists’ personal histories and diverse cultural perspectives, these works reveal listening as both solitary and collective – shaped by technology, yet profoundly human.

Listening Acts Performance

A series of live performances that explore listening and its role in memory, belonging and identity. You are invited into stillness and asked to consider how we perceive, process, and hold sound – whether through medical devices, recording technologies, or the quiet resonance of everyday objects.

Song to the Cell by Biddy Connor transforms an IV machine into an instrument in this intimate performance. A vocalist and a medical device entwine in a unique duet of hums, beeps and mechanical rhythms, exploring ideas of healing, dependency, and transhuman connection.

Tactile Piece for Human Ears by Aviva Endean creates an intimate listening experience, capturing sounds through binaural microphones which are designed to replicate the acoustic properties of human hearing. Working with sounds which are on the edge of human perception- wind currents, pipe tone and vibrations heard through bone conduction, Aviva builds acoustic landscapes shaped in real time to feel like they’re happening just for you – immersive, strange and quietly communal.

sounding forms / forming sounds by Alexandra Spence is an evolving electroacoustic performance that highlights the physicality of sound and listening. Beginning as a solo and expanding into a trio with Biddy Connor and Aviva Endean, it uses tuned sinewaves to resonate and vibrate custom-built perspex instruments and drum skins – illuminating the animation of space, bodies, and objects.

This is a 70 minute performance work that takes place in the Primrose Potter Salon.

This immersive sound journey will be complemented by Listening Acts / Installations, six installations throughout Melbourne Recital Centre, offering a meditative gateway to listening as a practice.

Book for Listening Acts Performance

Each work invites audiences to consider, in different ways, what it is to listen. These experiences will be complemented by Listening Acts Installations, six installations throughout Melbourne Recital Centre, offering a meditative gateway to listening as a practice.

Listening Acts Performance runs for approximately 70 minutes.

Listening Acts is generously supported by Now or Never, City of Melbourne, Creative Australia, the University of Melbourne’s Science Gallery Melbourne, Sia Ahmad and Ainslie & Gorman.