The Tender Path from Ear to Heart 
A performance by Matt Shally

November 21st 17:00-18:00

The Tender Path from Ear to Heart is a performance about the distance between hearing and listening. While hearing is an involuntary physical act, listening is shaped by memory, experience and emotion. The work begins with a simple question: what happens when words are no longer received only through the ear, but through the heart?

Is generally accepted that popular music usually operates through familiar emotional conventions. A “sad song” is expected to evoke sadness or sorrow, a love song intimacy or endearment, a dance track movement and excitement. However, we rarely question these emotional codes because they have become part of our collective way of listening, or our musical conventions. Music often tells us how to feel before we consciously decide what we are actually hearing.

At the same time, every listener carries a private archive of memories that cannot be shared. A lyric that appears superficial, repetitive or even meaningless to one person may be inseparable from a decisive moment in another person’s life. It may recall a friendship, a loss, a relationship, a period of loneliness or a moment of unexpected happiness. In this sense, meaning is never fixed inside the words themselves. It emerges through the encounter between language and lived experience.

The performance explores precisely this fragile territory where public language meets private memory. Instead of treating popular songs as entertainment, The Tender Path from Ear to Heart approaches them as emotional documents whose significance constantly changes depending on who speaks them and how they are heard.

The material consists of fragments taken from contemporary dance tracks and popular hit songs. These lyrics are normally encountered in spaces filled with rhythm, movement and collective energy. Detached from their musical environment, however, they begin to reveal another potential. Removed from melody and rhythm, they lose the emotional framework that usually guides the listener and become strangely open, vulnerable and ambiguous.

During the performance, these fragments are reorganised into a sequence of spoken monologues. Rather than quoting the songs ironically or critically, the performer delivers them with complete sincerity, treating each line as if it belonged to a deeply personal confession. The familiar pulse of music is replaced by breath, pauses, hesitation and silence. Instead of singing, the performer speaks. Instead of spectacle, the work relies on presence.

The absence of music is not simply a formal decision but one of the central dramaturgical elements of the piece. While no songs are played, they continue to exist in the audience’s memory. Many spectators may recognise particular lyrics and unconsciously reconstruct the melodies themselves. The performance therefore unfolds between what is physically present and what is mentally remembered. Every listener completes the work differently, depending on their own experiences with the songs.

The body and the voice become the primary instruments of the performance. Meaning is produced not only through language but through rhythm, breathing, timing and the subtle shifts of emotional intensity that occur while speaking. The performer continuously negotiates the tension between quotation and confession, between cultural material that belongs to everyone and personal experience that belongs to only one individual.

As the performance progresses, familiar lyrics gradually begin to change their character. Sentences that once functioned as catchy hooks or disposable pop phrases acquire unexpected emotional weight. Their apparent simplicity starts to reveal contradictions, vulnerability and intimacy. The work asks whether words themselves are ever superficial, or whether it is only the circumstances of their delivery that determine how deeply they can affect us.

Rather than offering a reinterpretation of popular music or a critique of contemporary culture, The Tender Path from Ear to Heart proposes an experiment in listening in a social setting, in a shared place. It asks whether context alone can transform meaning.

The performance does not seek definitive answers. Instead, it creates a space in which listening itself becomes an act of empathy. Between the ear that receives sound and the heart that gives it meaning lies a fragile territory where familiar language changes its colour, its weight and its truth. It is within this delicate passage, from ear to heart, that the work invites its audience to remain.

Artist Bio 

Artist known by the name Matt Shally is an actor/performer/creative director from Georgia. He is known for work in film, underground, drag, theatre, and fashion performances. Recently, he has been working in the same capacity as a free performer/creative director and theatre actor and doing shows and concept performing/directing in the club scene and collaborating on different projects.

Performance curated by Ramiro Camelo
Kindly supported by Villa Elaintarha Artist’s Residence and Artist at Risk (AR)
Flyer designed by  san* IG @fm.pagan