Balcony Whispers
Yinzhe Qu & Aaliyah
Author
Yinzhe Qu & Aaliyah
Category
Review
Subject
Performance & Ritual
Photography & Materiality
Body & Space
Artists Featured
Siyuan Meng
Siyuan Meng is a London- and China-based dance filmmaker and choreographer working at the intersection of screendance, ritual, movement, and somatic healing. Rooted in East Asian philosophy and shaped by a global nomadic experience, her practice explores embodied memory, diasporic identity, and sensory intimacy.
Nov 9, 2025, 12:00 AM
When the Old Waiting Room at Peckham Rye Station opened its doors for Everything Then is Now – Alter Peckham, the inaugural edition of SPIRA9’s nomadic series Othering, the historic site became more than a venue. It was reactivated as a resonant collaborator, holding layers of history, memory, and transit. In this charged setting, Siyuan Meng presented Balcony Whispers, a work that wove together installation, photography, choreography, and live sound into a ceremony of fragility and resilience.
Fragility as Material and Method
At the heart of Balcony Whispers was a meditation on fragility, articulated through a precise attention to materials. Meng experimented with printing her photographs on handmade papers, each surface chosen for its porous texture, its tendency to absorb, crease, or tear. The fragility of the paper became part of the image itself, embodying the vulnerability and impermanence that the work sought to reveal.
These prints were mounted on a folding screen — a structure historically linked with women’s domestic interiors, shelter, and privacy. In Meng’s hands, the screen became both display and metaphor: a fragile architecture of concealment and exposure, intimacy and revelation.
A hand-crafted photobook, housed in a wooden box, further extended this material vocabulary. The box suggested containment and protection, while the tactile quality of the handmade book transformed memory into an object one could hold, open, and return to. Each material — paper, screen, box — was carefully chosen not as neutral support but as active collaborator, carrying symbolic and sensory resonance. Together, they created a fragile yet persistent architecture for memory and presence.
Throughout, live sound moved in dialogue with the dancer — sparse drones and fragile pulses at first, then expanding in density as gestures grew more urgent, finally dissolving into silence after moments of intensity. The musician responded directly to the performer’s shifts of breath and movement, allowing each sonic layer to emerge as a form of listening rather than illustration. The sound did not accompany but co-created: breathing with the performance, holding space as carefully as the body itself. In this reciprocity, body, sound, and space became inseparable presences, shaping and sustaining one another in the immediacy of the moment.
Site as Collaborator
The Old Waiting Room itself was not a backdrop but a co-creator. Its peeling walls, echoing vastness, and the steady rhythm of trains became part of the score. The site’s suspended state — between abandonment and reuse, past and present — echoed the performance’s own oscillation between fragility and eruption, silence and voice.
As the body moved and sound reverberated, the trains outside folded into the composition, situating the work within a continuum of time and memory. Balcony Whispers did not seek to erase the space’s history; it allowed the site’s weight to permeate the performance, amplifying its presence as a fragile but enduring sanctuary.
Interdisciplinarity as Inquiry
What distinguished Balcony Whispers was its seamless interdisciplinarity. Photography became material, installation became threshold, performance became ritual, and sound became breath. Each element was essential, yet none dominated. Together, they formed an ecosystem where fragility itself was the connective thread.
This experimental layering reflects Meng’s broader practice, which draws from somatic movement, ritual aesthetics, and craft-based processes. Her work is experimental not only in medium but in its inquiry: asking how fragility might be revealed as strength, and how presence might be sustained across bodies, images, and spaces.
A Ceremony of Presence
Ultimately, Balcony Whispers resisted spectacle. What it offered was ceremony: a space where fragility was made visible, where presence lingered raw and unshielded. It was intimate yet fierce, minimal yet eruptive, nostalgic yet immediate. The work balanced personal memory with collective resonance, creating a temporary sanctuary where body, sound, and architecture coexisted.
In partnership with SPIRA9 and the London Design Festival, Balcony Whispers transformed a dormant Victorian hall into a site of encounter — not through restoration, but through embodied resonance. It exemplified what interdisciplinary practice can achieve when rooted in depth and originality. Through its delicate details and ritual structure, Meng’s work asked how art might reclaim fragility as resilience, and how presence might endure — unguarded, intimate, and raw — in the ruins of history.
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