Multidisciplinary artist Akeelah Bertram was the fourth Cavendish Arts Science Fellow at Girton College.
She brought an interest in exploring spirituality, collective narratives and immersive technologies to her conversations with physicists. She is now busy developing new experimental work emerging from the Fellowship.
In Episode 38 of this podcast produced by the Cavendish Laboratory, Cavendish Arts Science Fellow Akeelah Bertram talks with Kevin Lim, Postdoctoral Researcher in Physics at the Cavendish about how different ways of knowing shape our pursuit of knowledge and creativity.
Akeelah developed a new experimental work-in-progress in response to her encounters with physicists as Cavendish Arts Science Fellow.
Working in collaboration with producer Aron Kyne and artists THABO, Zola Marcelle, Laurie Mompelat and Jabez Walsh, they created the first iteration of Sonic Ceremony - a gathering where a congregation creates a common emotional current using the principles of Sacred Architecture. Rather than audience members watching a performance, participants become congregants engaging in collective vocal practice through testimony, call and response, and spontaneous collaboration.
Stripping away amplification and digital tools - all the seductive technology Akeelah would have previously typically relied on - the ceremony explored what happens in the internal landscape of each person, and how individual expression serves collective emergence.
The work focuses on resonance within relationships - dropping below intellectual relation toward another layer of existence. Emotional resonance, spiritual resonance. The kind of knowing where you feel someone has entered a room even when you can't see or hear them. Resonance becomes material, a plane to stretch, shape, explore, be subjected to.
Sonic Ceremony in Girton College Chapel. Photo: Phil Mynott
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