Category: Programme

Listening to the Sounding Body : Joanna Penso

Workshops :

Session One 10 October 2026 Saturday 2pm
Session Two 10 October 5pm
Session Three 11 October Sunday 2pm
Session Four 11 October 5pm

£12 | 8 places per session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets
* £10 for students/unwaged

This workshop gives participants the chance to explore sounds of their own body from a point of curiosity rather than judgement. Tracing the history of auscultation, we’ll look at how medical tools have physically distanced patients from doctors and question our societal reactions to bodily noise. Using stethoscope microphones, pinard horns and other hand held tools the group will look at sounding together, building a trusting relationship with their own body and with others.

The workshop will be comprised of:
– An introduction to Body/Gut Listening, history of auscultation, gastromancy and attitudes towards the body over the centuries
– Participatory exercise using bespoke postcards challenging ideas towards the body
– Listening to the body (the self or others) with bespoke sculptures and microphones
– Sounding together in chorus
– Q&A

Duration: around 1.5 hours

Participants have the option of using stethoscope microphones which will amplify the sound from the body for everyone to hear. There is no pressure to do so, as we will have hand held acoustic versions as well as ambient microphones if you would rather not place instruments directly onto your skin. There are an infinite amount of interesting points to listen to on and with the human body. These include chest, joints, stomach and eyelids but we will encourage you to investigate others, including sounds you can make with movement (footsteps), body percussion and with breath which do not require use of an amplified microphone. 

For any questions please feel free to email Joanna beforehand on pensostudio@gmail.com

Dorich House Museum 2024. Photo credit: Maliha Haider

Joanna Penso is a Yorkshire artist based in London. Her work centres sounds of the body and Gut Listening as a vehicle to understanding oneself, one another and the environment around us. Her research paper: The Body as Site was delivered at the Centre for Research into Sound Art Practice in 2024 and forms the basis of her on-going practice-based research. She previously performed Body Talks , an exploration of body amplification at DIVFUSE Sound Projects 2025 and has delivered workshops for Dorich House Museum, exhibited at Pushkin House, York Art Gallery, APT Gallery, Southwark Park Galleries and at St Ives September Fest.

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Orbit : Blanc Sceol

Performance + Conversation

Session One : 28 November Saturday 3pm
Session Two : 29 November Sunday 3pm

£10 | 8 places per session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets

The Orbit is a decagon shaped instrument played by two musicians simultaneously. The body is spun by one set of hands, as the other hands hold a bow to the ten strings. As the two musicians work together the Orbit leads them into a cosmos of dynamic, pitch-shifting drones and harmonic rhythms, invoking lunar cycles and planetary time signatures.

The Orbit is an instrument created to be heard and seen in person. Across an intimate weekend of performance and conversation, we will gather to consider the architecture of the Orbit — its construction, its logic, the physical and sonic decisions that shape how it sounds. Across the weekend’s short performances we will explore four distinct tunings, each one reorienting the instrument’s voice and opening up different relationships and harmonic possibilities. After each performance there will be time to share more about the methodology, construction and lineage behind the instrument. 

“Between the players and the played there is an attentiveness to being-with that is explicit in ways other playing is not. Through the artists attunement to their instrument, to one another, to the spaces and times of their performances through deep listening practices, we are offered an utterly new sono-social experience that surpasses and/or renews many historical traditions, opening and inspiring new musical and aural possibilities to current and future artists.” Jol Thoms, Radio Amnion

Blanc Sceol are an artist duo who compose, perform and record experimental music, and perform with the ‘Orbit’, a unique self-made two player instrument. They instigate participatory gatherings, connecting their sound practice with environmental awareness and creative actions on behalf of the more-than-human, exploring healing modalities as tools for collective transformation. Their compositions, interventions and performances express situated experiences of Place, with deep commitments to reimagining landscapes and ecologies. Their work is a spiral within the space-time continuum.

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