Civil Twilight: listening between day and night

Carolyn Roy is a freelance dancer, writer and teacher. A practitioner channelling the somatic processes and understandings we use as dancers through dance and other art forms, her body of presented/published work includes poetic and critical texts, sound narratives, film and photographic projects as well as live performances and political actions. Recent work has focused on examining philosophical concepts and social issues through the materiality of bodies. Interconnectivity is its underlying theme.

Her PhD in dance examined the affect and compositional potential of resonance in the space between human (and non-human) bodies. Recent performance and text projects have explored what it is to be with others in this world, what it is to be-with as dancers, the politics (and pleasure) of dancing, with reference to Jean-Luc Nancy’s Being Singular Plural and Anne Dufourmantelle’s The Power of Gentleness. Currently supported by an ACE grant, she is developing a collective listening project, Receivers, working with openwave radio, VLF listening and attuned bodies. Working within the independent dance sector for 30+ years as an improviser, choreographer, collaborator, writer and teacher, she has shown her work in theatres and galleries in the UK, Japan and Europe. Alongside, she has collaborated with choreographers and artists including Gaby Agis, Marina Collard, Vivienne Dick, Sarah Dobai, Kiera Greene, Florence Peake, Tino Sehgal and Rajni Shah. Her primary interest now is in situated and relational practice and process, moving between public performance, small scale interventions and collective experiments in workshop and residency settings. Commissions and events in 2025 included, in London, The Power of Gentleness, Chisenhale Dance Space and Siobhan Davies Studios, Interval and Touching Words, Chisenhale Dance Space, Why speak of a Rose in Winter, the Wash Houses, Bête Noire cabaret, The Blue Posts, Towards; proximity and distance, the South Downs, Eclipse, Luca School of Art, Ghent.

Since 2023 Carolyn has been a member of Musarc performing as a vocalist in work by Keiji Heino, Jennifer Walshe, Ed Atkins, Lin Chiwei and Heleen Van Haegenborgh amongst others, as well as writing the libretto for Into the Garden of Chimerical Delights, performed at the Fashion in Film Festival at the Barbican Centre. She is a part time lecturer at Trinity Laban and The Place, teaches regularly at Independent Dance and is on the Artists Committee of Chisenhale Dance Space.

“The starting point for this research was sensing an analogy between bodies and open-wave radio receivers as technologies for exploring our relations with our world and each other. Our bodies are open to receive continuous signals from the environment – some easily perceived, and translated into sensorial data, while others are less evident. We are not usually conscious of the electromagnetic field that we coexist within, yet increasingly they have become part of our habitat. In cities, the urban ‘noise cloud’ generated by data systems and electrical transmissions, which all operate at a very low frequency, screens the natural radio signals that are always present. This part of the South Downs seems removed from urban infrastructure but is in sight of one of the busiest shipping lanes globally, criss-crossed by communications networks.

In addition, it is marked by changing patterns of inhabitation and migrancy, inviting contemplation of proximity, distance, movement and time within the complex ecology of historical, social and political resonances that touch this landscape.

I live with unilateral hearing loss and I am particularly interested in finding ways to appreciate the aural landscape that we inhabit together – how bodies listen, and how they process the information they receive. In our fractured society where isolation and disenfranchisement are increasingly common, it matters to me that my work encourages being and doing with others – collective experience and relation. As a dancer, I am curious about how bodies use sound as a way of relating to place and other beings, how this relationship can be manifest as dance and ways that the robust materiality of bodies meets the ephemerality of sound. Radio signals captured by analogue devices echo the fragility and randomness of experience. My VLF receiver can pick up natural radio signals produced by storms or astral events, which the human ear is unable to sense, as well as the numerous manmade signals produced by the electromagnetic infrastructure that we depend on – power lines, mobile phone communication etc. – that populate the air. The openwave receiver can capture multiple radio signals simultaneously – or none! Radio waves are continuous and intrinsically relational, but also unpredictable, fragile and elusive, arriving as fragments, micro-details, or are barely perceptible. Moments of their interception seem to capture the fugitive, temporary nature of our lived experience.

I am wanting to listen in to and share with others what is actually present here, now. “ Carolyn Roy

Ezra Roy is a London-based freelance music producer and artist interested in exploring the potential of analogue radio technologies to generate samples of our sonic environment that can be woven into sound tracks.