“Listening is when you’re not waiting to speak.”
For violinist, performer, and creator Leslie Ting, this deceptively simple insight was the doorway into her newest work What Brings You In — a genre-defying confessional concert that unfolds as both performance and collective meditation. Presented by Theatre Passe Muraille (TPM) from October 17 – 25, the work blurs the lines between concert, therapy, and theatre, inviting the audience’s listening to become a transformative act.
A collaboration between Leslie Ting Productions and TPM, What Brings You In features Ting on violin and Germaine Liu on percussion. Based on interviews and personal experiences with talk therapy, hypnotherapy, dreamwork, somatics, and Reiki, the performance explores when and where our truest selves emerge through sound. Whether experienced live in TPM’s Mainspace or online through an interactive web app, the piece invites audiences to step inward, to listen deeply, and to consider the question that gives the work its title: What brings you in—to the theatre, to yourself, to the act of listening itself?
What brought Ting in
Before devoting herself fully to the arts, Ting worked as an optometrist—a vocation that sharpened her fascination with perception, light, and ways of seeing. Today, she is known as a boundary-crossing, classically trained violinist whose projects merge music with movement, sensory experience, and storytelling. Her acclaimed 2020 theatrical concert Speculation, inspired by her mother’s blindness, marked her emergence as an artist who bridges the analytical and the emotional, the clinical and the poetic. That shift from studying vision to exploring inner perception is at the heart of her artistic evolution. What Brings You In continues her search for new ways of knowing and connection.
Ting’s path to the show originated with questions that were as personal as they were creative. “I talk about some of the reasons in the show,” she explains. “Some of them were more vague, like a general sense of feeling ‘unwell’. And some of them were very specific, like my mother dying.” The exploration of therapy, dreamwork, and energy practices arose from equal parts necessity and curiosity. “Some of the modalities came out of my creative research for the show, and a general question… why did other people go to therapy? People talked about reiki, or their friend who did dreamwork, so I explored those also.”
“I think an undercurrent around therapy – or one of the reasons I wanted to talk more deeply about the impulse to go to therapy – had to do with not wanting to feel alone, or feel shame around it,” she affirms. The impulse to turn private discomfort into collective conversation became central to What Brings You In. Her earlier work hinted at that vulnerability. For example, she had been surprised by the way in her previous production Speculation, “people responded to a very personal context of music pieces (Beethoven and John Cage) that, in the way that I learned and performed them, was never about the person performing them.”
Throwing open the door
If Speculation cracked open the door between performer and audience, What Brings You In bursts it wide open. “In a traditional western classical concert setting, you’re in a hall. The lighting is very clearly delineating the listener and the musicians: they play the music, and the audience ‘takes it’,” Ting reflects. “At least that’s how it increasingly felt to me from the stage.”
Her new work aims to change all that. “Western classical music like Mozart and Beethoven has a bit of a reputation now as music you knit to, or have the best nap of your life to (a friend told me this, ha ha),” she smiles. At the same time, “contemporary Western classical music can be so challenging and intellectual that it’s almost impenetrable—I’ve felt this myself as an audience member not invited in.” Through What Brings You In, Ting is “interested in changing the dynamic of being in front of an audience with the violin – where usually people are quite passive, and just take whatever I give them, and then leave. What I hope is that in bringing with that a bit more of myself, that also changes our relationship. If the offering is different, I’m hoping the way it’s received can be different.”
As aids to this intent, accessibility and perception are woven right into the fabric of the project. What Brings You In was developed with Blind and Low Vision artists, to reshape how all audiences experience performance. “The collaboration came from me wanting to think about a Blind audience member (Blind including Blind and Low Vision) and a sighted audience member experiencing the show at the same time,” Ting explains.
Sound and silence
Her curiosity about multisensory experience is not a new thing: “When the pandemic started and I started making the online show, I also started thinking about a Blind and sighted audiences at home, remotely,” she recalls. Working with creative technologists, Ting redesigned every interaction from the ground up: “At first we used sound effects for the interactions, but it wasn’t particularly meaningful as a sound. And so eventually we redid all of the interactions to be what they are now – which was doing all of our testing first, with nothing on screen: a black screen and a plain arrow cursor.” They tried “to make all of the interactions sound first, rather than something visual that had a sound effect added onto it later. Thinking about people guiding their cursors with their ears first, rather than with what they see, was fascinating work.”
Her collaboration with Blind dramaturg Jess Watkin and other consultants led to ongoing conversations about how silence itself can be meaningful. “Having someone describe what they think is meaningful has created some very deep conversations in the team,” Ting notes. “One of the discussions has been around intentional silences. They would normally be described, but that interrupts my main interest, which is a deeper, closer listening to the music and to yourself.” So those silences aren’t absences: they’re invitations. They ask you to sit in the in-between, where listening turns inward.
In its online form, What Brings You In extends its philosophy of listening into the digital realm. “With a lot of iterating and testing with online audiences, Blind and sighted,” Ting discovered that online attention is its own thing: “How people listen online, how they are when they’re at home with a computer, versus how they are in a room being held by fellow audience members is very different. Getting people to just listen – and not feel like they’re missing something on the screen – required, eventually, a very explicit invitation to relax their eyes. Otherwise, people would just sort of wait, watching the screen.”
Discovery, invitation and inquiry
The online version is an immersive experience where “music that we have taken a lot of attention with—it’s binaurally broadcast live, meaning listening with headphones – will give you a sense of immersion and directionality with the sound, rather than sound in stereo, where everything is coming from in front, left and right.” Online participants even appear as anonymous cursors, who can play together in subtle ways.
“In developing the show, we watched emergent play happen,” Ting recalls. “A couple of people told me how they felt different as an audience member online: better able to listen because they aren’t as distracted by others, or even to discover a different part of themselves. One friend who is more introverted in person told me that in our setting of being anonymous cursors, she found herself taking almost a leadership role in the playfulness online. She discovered a different side of herself, in a sense. I thought that was beautiful.”
After six long years of creation, the title What Brings You In still resonates with Ting, as both an invitation and an inquiry. “The title is a question and a statement at the same time. What brings you into a venue to gather to see a performance? Into presence with others? What brings you into yourself?” she asks. “I didn’t want to take this long, and I was already interested in exploring form when the pandemic happened. But it took me some time to understand why I was making the work. Relating therapy to contemporary music performance – that’s a stretch, isn’t it?”
“Ha!” she snorts, “I suppose what’s new is that I know why I’m asking the question now, and the show is about why I’m asking that question.”
What Brings You In, a Leslie Ting Production in Partnership with Theatre Passe Muraille, continues at Theatre Passe Muraille until October 25, 2025. Tickets are available at passemuraille.ca.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
