SENSIBLE ACTIVITIES
Ongoing, nomadic
Sensible Activities is a project centred around experimental approaches to group listening, sensing, and performing outdoors. It explores performance strategies which transpose mediated ways of seeing and hearing into environments removed from, or in unstable relationships with digital technologies and infrastructures. technology.
Sensible Activities takes the form of guided participatory (usually) night-time excursions into the outdoors to realise a series of composed sensory experiments designed for hyper-specific locations and contexts, and often involving local collaborators (past iterations have included local musicians, performers, seaweed harvesters, tailors, boat captains, and tour guides). I think of this as a kind of Radical Colloquialism.
Excursions like these are not bound up like galleries, theatres, and concert halls with codes and rules of behaviour. Time functions differently away from Acts and Intervals in favour of more unpredictable and unquantifiable forces; the length of a day, the fork in the road, the serendipitous encounter, the turn in the weather, the cold, the humidity, hunger, thirst. Sensible Activities is appropriately open to these forces in all their slippery, dreamlike character.
A key part of the project also involves exploring and using local foliage as musical instruments; developing electronic, or synthetic-sounding techniques from the most ubiquitous, modest, and sustainable natural materials.
Each iteration contributes to a growing archive of scores, exercises, techniques, recordings, and other ephemera.
Sensible Activities has been realised with the support and collaboration of many valued friends and colleagues including:
art quarter budapest, Lahmacun Radio, Resonance FM, Toyooka Fringe Festival, POST, Teatro All'Improvviso Mantova, Mahler-Lewitt Studios, Venice Biennale, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Tårnby Park Festival, Malmo Konstmuseum, Palazzo Te, Bielefeld Kunstverein, Kinosaki International Arts Centre, Birmingham Conservatoire, AMOKAthina Vahla, ARCO, Adam de la Cour, Benedict Taylor, Chihiro Ono, Guy Robertson, Saya Namikawa, Satoko Doi-Luck, Araki Masamitsu, Yuichiro Yoshida, Sarara Takagi, James Greer, Mauricio Piantelli, Cameron Dodds Monika Czyżyk, Anna Makay, Aaron Portoleki, Joseph Kohlmaier, Musarc, Neda Kovinic, Accidental Records, Cours de Poetique, Peter Wesley Gray, Takahiro Tomatsu, Arts Council England, PRSF, and many more.
Monsieur, Azonnal Kövessen Engem, Bitte?
BUDAPEST, HUNGARY 2026
An iteration of Sensible Activities held in Budapest, supported by a residency at art quarter budapest, and Akademi Schloss Solitude.
Budapest is a key centre of Hollywood film production, and the area I was working in is connected to the landscapes in one particular film shot entirely there; Blade Runner 2049. This SA was a kind of 4.5-part refraction of a tiny slither of that film.
It involved desiccated plants, pitch black underground mines, AI Ryan Gosling visualisation exercises, industrial ping-pong acoustics, oversized orchestral whips, a yeast factory, and analogue VR-headset-veils.
The event featured musicians Áron Porteleki and Anna Makay.
The event was also expanded by a "Radio Primer" broadcast by Lahmacun Radio (Budapest), and Resonance FM (London).
Ryan Gosling visualisation exercise
Images by Barnabás Neogrády-Kiss
Radio Primer
TAKENO, JAPAN 2025
In September 2025, I realised an iteration in collaboration with sound artist Masamitsu Araki, and POST Association (Yuichiro Yoshida, Sarara Takagi) as part of Toyooka Theatre Festival.
Themed around the idea of the "hyperlocal", and the creation of moments that played explicityl with cinematic tropes, this version was configured as a 4 hour work. The first phase of the performance was in daylight, manifesting as a series of installations and performances around the small coastal fishing town of Takeno. After nightfall, a walk was led from the town, across a beach, into the mountain foothills culminating in a performance in a cavernous sportshall. Throughout the day and evening we were joined by 8 local performers, as well as Butoh Dancer Toru Iwashita.
Ma che odo ohime lasso?
MANTOVA, ITALY 2025
In June 2025, in collaboration with Teatro All'Improvviso (Saya Namikawa) I realised 90 minute journey in Mantova, North Italy. The seat of the Renaissance Gonzaga family, and the birthplace of Virgil, Mantova also has an important presence in history of opera; Monteverdi wrote his masterpiece Orfeo for the Gonzaga court. As such, this walk played on the Orphic myth, and the idea of the backwards glance, the backwards listen. The walk began in the garden of the Ducal Palace, and included tuning exercises using local reeds, echolocation exercises, a love duet between two side street electrical boxes, a tightly choreographed frequency interaction with public fountains. THe walk culminated in a newly composed work written for Theorbo player Maurizio Piantelli, and a final boat journey into the heart of the Lago Superiore for a collective theatrical reading, under the gaze of Orpheus' Lyra constellation.
Images by Agata Torelli & Dario Moretti
Die Salamander
BIELEFELD, GERMANY 2025
In October 2025 I led a walk for Bielefeld Kunstverein in collaboration with Monika Czyzyk, into the forest outside the city. The walk was designed and executed within 2 days.
Images by Luca Finkl
Bamboo Shortwave Security Conversations
KINOSAKI ONSEN, JAPAN 2024
In October 2024 in partnership with Kinosaki International Arts Centre I staged two evening walks through the centre of a small Onsen town in Japan. Dominated by the sounds of rivers and hotsprings, wild deers calling across the mountains, and air conditioning units we duetted with waterfalls, communed via bamboo noise machines with the wildlife, made basalt investigations in carparks, appreciated aircon tonalities, and shared an intimate moment with pinecones.
Sensible Activities in Kinosaki Onsen, Japan. Devised through Kinosaki International Arts Centre Residency programme.
October 2024.
撮影：igaki photo studio
提供：城崎国際アートセンター（豊岡市）
photos by igaki photo studio
courtesy of Kinosaki International Arts Center (Toyooka City)
Open Backed Binaural Onboarders
SPOLETO, ITALY 2024
In May 2024 I led an hour long walk at night through the historical centre of Spoleto, Italy. Around 20 participants were led through four new activities designed in, and for Spoleto responding to the built environment. The city at night allows for a variety of listening ‘perspectives’. Tight, high walled medieval streets lead onto wide open piazzas, all surrounded by the mountains and valleys of Umbria.
We performed a variation of an analogue VR onboarding exercise designed for the Venice Biennale. We played local horse chestnut leaves in reverberant spots of the eco-chamber-like Cathedral Square. We conversed and sang with the city’s public fountains, and explored echolocation pockets by playing privet leaves around the archways of a Roman aqueduct.
Sensible Activities in Spoleto, Italy. Devised through Mahler & LeWitt Studios Andrew Mangold Residency programme.
May 2024. Photographs by Guy Robertson, Claudio Sica, Neil Luck.
Those Theydon Boys
EPPING FOREST, UK 2024
In March 2024 I led a 2 hours long walk through London’s Epping Forest with around 12 participants, 3 members of ARCO, and Athina Vahlar. Taking a largely ‘off-piste’ route, we enacted 8 Sensible Activities at various stages in the forest. We tested simple perceptual exercises, formed a telepathic choir (with two passersby joining), projected affects onto focused grape-eating, formed a leaf choir, and channeled the spirits of Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze through bird interactions.
Sensible Activities in Epping Forest. Devised in collaboration with Athina Vahla. March 2024.
Photographs by Dominick Tyler.
Lust Lake
STUTTGART, GERMANY 2022
In December 2022 I led a prototype walk "Lust Lake" for around 4 hours, at night, through the forest at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany. Devised in collaboration with Monika Czyzyk, and with textual contributions from Athina Vahla and Peter Wesley Gray, the walk happened with around 7 participants and 3 members of ARCO. We explored a series of perceptual exercises, explored different ways of walking in silence and blindfolded, performed scripted moments of theatre, formed telepathic choirs and leaf choirs, danced with wild boars, ate and drank at a tavern in the centre of the forest, and followed voicemail instructions from an absent choreographer. Some further info can be found here.
Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart Germany. Devised in collaboration with Monika Czyzyk, with contributions from Athina Vahla and Peter Welsey Gray. December 2022. All photographs are video stills by Adam de la Cour.
Lust Lake film, by Adam de la Cour
OTHER APPLICATIONS
Sensible Activities have also been used, and introduced into a variety of other situations and projects. These include workshops with university students, applications on Salthom Island in Denmark, and as an intimate 1-1 experience at the 2024 Venice Bienale opening week in conjunction with a showing of the VR work Mycelium Orgasm Report.
Cross-cut Finger Pressure on Salthom Island, Copenghagen
Traveling bodies. Neda Kovinic, Neil Luck, Simonida Zarkovic, Nevena Radulovic. Production Tarnby Park Performance Festival and Stanica. Photo Max Morris Doherty
SCORES / GUIDE
A collection of Sensible Activities has been published as a collection of score extracts and guidebook by Cours de Poetique/Accidental records, available to buy here.
Sample pages, and an accompanying tutorial video below.
Film by Adam de la Cour & Neil Luck.
LEAF PLAYING
In tandem with Sensible Activities, i've developed a practice of leaf blowing; exploring the possibilities of different trees, bushes, and other plants as noise generators. I am interested in creating sounds that feel almost synthetic or processed, rather than playing conventional melodies. Leaf blowing has now become a key part of several organised events.
I have been cataloguing these sounds since 2022, and have produced a body of scores, recordings, and videos outlining various techniques.
Ensemble leaf performance with Musarc, June 2023