Vajda David Bodnar

‘how are we Being’ is an immersive sound-light-movement piece exploring the embodied qualities we share in space, in the present moment — inside us, around us, between us, human and non-human alike. Hearing is our most porous sense: we cannot close our ears, cannot choose what touches us. To listen is already to be in relation.

Its starting point is an intuition found on both sides of the world: Kitarō Nishida called it 'pure experience' — a field before the split into subject and object, self and place. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, from within the Western discourse, gave this shared texture its name: the flesh of the world. What is fundamental is not the categories that separate us, but the qualities of relation between us. This view is ethics as much as description: if what I call 'me' is a fold in a wider field of relations, why would I harm anything that might be part of me?

Multichannel audio and interactive electronics map these self-environment relations, tracing dramaturgical arcs of lack, emergence, presence, and decay in continuous flux. The piece unfolds in three acts: the self in becoming, its meeting with the environment, and the sensing of interrelations — the way we are Being together in a shared experience.