Blanc Sceol

• 2023

We are Blanc Sceol (Stephen Shiell & Hannah White), an artist duo whose practice has emerged & expanded throughout our years of working together across performance, improvisation, composition, participatory actions, deep listening facilitation, somatic & ritual gatherings. We create performances that have been described as ‘transcendent’ ‘other-worldly’ & ‘ethereal’, reflecting our attempts to expand ourselves, through listening & sound, beyond our physical limits & to extend this personal/performance practice into the collective.

Our compositions, interventions and performances express our experience of place, anchored in what is found in a landscape but re-imagined into new territories. We create encounters to connect both materially and energetically to our surroundings. As certified Deep Listening® practitioners we regularly run workshops and sound walks exploring listening and sound making in public spaces. We have worked with a variety of experimental platforms such as Anti-university, Fort Process, We’re All Bats, MIA festival and Art’s Birthday and cultural institutions such as Ashmolean Museum, The Royal Academy, ZKM | Karlsruhe and Oxford Contemporary Music. In 2018 we established Surge Cooperative, a collaborative effort to benevolently occupy the Channelsea river in London. Our research seeks to live with, listen with and act with this vital living system, finding new ways to tackle problems of neglect and misuse whilst navigating ancient acts of parliament and institutional backwaters.