Attuning to Spectralities: Senses, Whispers, and Other Connective Membranes – Bodies Carrying Exhibit Programming

Description by Esteban Donoso and Shalon T. Webber-Heffernan

This workshop offers an immersive, collaborative space for scholars, performers, visual artists, and curators to engage with embodied practices that attune to spectral presences. By experimenting with spectrality as a connective tissue that links us to ancestral pasts, we will explore expanded modes of perception that allow us to sense beyond conventional boundaries of time and space.

Participants will experiment with “tuning-in” to spectral traces—those unseen presences and memories that linger in bodies, objects, and environments. Through guided exercises, ritual, open discussions, and collaborative writing, we will examine how these traces are always already part of our embodied experience, inhabiting material objects, spatial environments, and our physical and emotional tissues.

The session includes grounding and attuning exercises, brief presentations by Esteban and Shalon on their methodologies, and a generative group writing activity to create a shared “score” reflecting our collective experience of the spectral.

About the speakers

Esteban Donoso is a researcher-artist from Quito, Ecuador currently living in Montreal. He recently completed his PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University in Toronto. His work focuses on dance and performance archiving and transmissions, oral histories, and practice-based methodologies. His artistic work has been shown in Ecuador, Colombia, Chile, Belgium, Switzerland, France, the U.S., and Canada.

Shalon T. Webber-Heffernan is a Toronto based writer and curator. She holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies and is a core member of the Toronto Performance Art Collective (7a11d International Festival of Performance Art). Some of her recent writing has been published in Theatre Research in Canada, Performance Research, Comparative Media Arts Journal, C Magazine, Peripheral Review, Performance Matters, and several other publications.

*Please wear comfortable clothing

Note: this event will take place in English, with the possibility of French translation.