“Are you deaf or what?”
“I don’t hear, but I don’t want to ask again… so I just nod and smile.”
“I don’t hear a cat meowing, but I hear when it jumps off the table.”
“Musical hearing is not in the ears, but in the body.”

I Have to Listen with My Heart is a documentary-based performance that explores the lived experience of people with hearing loss—moments of misunderstanding and embarrassment, but also resourcefulness and unexpected humour. The text and scenes are developed from the performers’ own stories, memories, and embodied practices.

The relationship between speech, sound, and the body is in constant flux—hearing is not a reliable channel, but one of many ways of perceiving the world. The performance creates a field of experience in which the audience is placed in a similar position of perceptual uncertainty. What does it mean to “understand” when information is partial? How does social behaviour take shape when it is not possible to hear everything?

This is a work about how to listen when you cannot hear—and how to truly hear another person. The performance invites the audience to notice, sense, and reflect, gently shifting familiar boundaries of communication and perception.