Inside Toronto’s unique new musical experience

A limited multi-sensory musical experience is debuting in Toronto this weekend.

What Brings You In, the collaborative effort of violinist Leslie Ting, percussionist Germaine Liu, and a roster of designers, engineers, and experts in conveying experiences of both the visually impaired and disabled.

The endeavor, created by Leslie Ting, hybridizes sensory performances through music and narrative portrayals of various practices, including dreamwork, hypnotherapy, and movement.

YourcitywithIN.com sat down with Ting to discuss how, when in motion, this performance will take audiences beyond the confines of just their auditorium seats.

“I often find myself getting quite caught up in my head about playing the violin, especially when I came back to it after practicing as an optometrist,” Ting told yourcitywithin.com. “I found myself so often in my head that I would catch myself being out of my own body, which was bizarre for something so physical that demands awareness of yourself .”

This paradox of feeling both stuck in and out of body laid the groundwork for What Brings You In, as Ting would embark on a six-year process of mapping her own journey in therapies, while cataloging people’s experiences with disabilities and sensory practices.

[Photo, Curtis Perry]

The end result: an event that asks the audience to — quite literally — lend their ears, as they are taken through a soundscape that utilizes sensations otherwise left outside the traditional concert medium.

“I had a custom instrument made, specifically based on a session I had around sandplay therapy, which has now become a major part of the show,” says Ting. “It’s about conveying this slow searching where I know there is something for me here, but also know I’m not alone in searching for it.”

Ting went on to note that the show deconstructs the taboos of therapy and how the act of throwing oneself into music, or many modes of treatment, can become just as much about retreating as it can about finding something new.

What Brings You In is also a ‘blind friendly’ performance, using sensational aspects of therapy to drive its narrative home, while stripping away as much outside stimuli as possible to connect the audience with the performers.

“It was quite personal for me to work with the low vision and blind community, and collaborate specifically on accessibility. I have a professional history as a former optometrist, but also, my mother lost her vision before she died,” says Ting. “Watching that, well, it was one thing to learn about it in a clinical setting, another thing to watch someone go through it — that was my mother.”

The performance, just as much as it is steeped in senses within the body, also taps into how the body exists regardless of where its inhabitant is. An experience that, for Ting, who is Asian-Canadian, can be traced nearly all the way back to her childhood.

“I grew up in Kitchener and I’m pretty steeped in the culture of the province. But, connecting it back to kind of the somatic nature of this performance, when it comes to being in your body, when I was younger, I would forget what I looked like. I’d be hanging out with my white friends, and be startled by my own reflection,” says Ting.

[Photo, Curtis Perry]

To make What Brings You In as accessible as possible, two formats have been scheduled to run over the next week, including an online performance that will run in parallel. Digital programming comes complete with an audio transcriber, who will provide details on the instruments and settings before the performance.

“It has been important for me to come with that understanding. In the blind and low vision community, there is this constant and pervasive feeling that they are stuck in the background, and a major aspect of the show is built on that fact, highlighting not what we look like, but how we sound,” says Ting.

Despite all the dense trimmings of trauma, therapy, and the human relationship with sound, Ting has one major focus that she wishes people walk away with when attending What Brings You In.

“I hope people just laugh a little bit, because there is something about the topic of therapy, and especially contemporary music, that is just so, so heavy. But, there is also something about it that is kind of funny, like, I’m going to therapy to, well, one day not need to go to therapy — it’s all a little absurd.”

With a little bit of levity and a little bit of trust, Ting hopes the compositions she has worked on for the last six years will strike the right chord in the right place with audiences both at home and in person.

What Brings You In runs from Oct. 17 to Oct. 25 at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto.