Contested Spaces of Acoustic Community in Post-Migrant Theatre

This book is a timely contribution to the emerging field of the aurality of theatre and looks in particular at the interrogation and problematisation of theatre sound(s). Both approaches are represented in the idea of ‘noise’ which we understand both as a concrete sonic entity and a metaphor or theoretical (sometimes even ideological) thrust. Theatre provides a unique habitat for noise. It is a place where friction can be thematised, explored playfully, even indulged in: friction between signal and receiver, between sound and meaning, between eye and ear, between silence and utterance, between hearing and listening. In an aesthetic world dominated by aesthetic redundancy and ‘aerodynamic’ signs, theatre noise recalls the aesthetic and political power of the grain of performance. ‘Theatre noise’ is a new term which captures a contemporary, agitatory acoustic aesthetic. It expresses the innate theatricality of sound design and performance, articulates the reach of auditory spaces, the art of vocality, the complexity of acts of audience, the political in produced noises. Indeed, one of the key contentions of this book is that noise, in most cases, is to be understood as a plural, as a composite of different noises, as layers or waves of noises. Facing a plethora of possible noises in performance and theatre we sought to collocate a wide range of notions of and approaches to ‘noise’ in this book—by no means an exhaustive list of possible readings and understandings, but a starting point from which scholarship, like sound, could travel in many directions.

2022

Migration is a worldwide phenomenon that has significantly impacted societies across the globe, creating culturally diverse communities. This work focuses on the representation of migrants’ point of view in contemporary performance and aims to explore how sound is used by migrant artists to communicate their experiences with migration in their performances. At a more specific level, this research investigates the importance of sound in migrant dramaturgy and how it invites the spectator to have a bodily experience through listening referring to being a foreigner. As a methodology, this thesis consists of a theoretical framework mentioning key authors on this subject such as Yana Meerzon, Katharina Pewny, Mieke Bal, Natasha Davis, Lynne Kendrick, George Home-Cook and a dramaturgical analysis following the relational approach proposed by Groot Nibbelink and Merx. The main focus of the analysis is on performances created by migrant artists. To achieve that, I chose two case studies: Internal Terrains by Natasha Davis, a Croatian-born performer and visual artist based in London, and Cosmic A* by Charlie Prince, a Lebanese performer and choreographer based in-between Amsterdam and Beirut. In this sense, by analysing dramaturgical structures and strategies regarding the performances’ composition, spectatorship, and social context references, with this work I intend to contribute to the performance studies field, bringing the spotlight to the artwork produced by migrant artists and discussions about migration from their point of view. I hope that my research contributes to the contemporary art field promoting recognition of what migrant artists have to say. Their voices play a more important role in promoting different ways to share their stories using sound, as well as inviting spectators to reflect on migration in a more empathetic way by making them experience a fragment of migrant life through experience.

2008

2022

This text was originally a brief contemplation on the conversations, debates and shared concerns circulated among the participants of a music forum entitled Soundings: Assemblies of Listenings and Voices Across the Souths that occurred in August 2022 at the Akademie Der Künste in Berlin. A few weeks after the forum, the outburst of urban manifestations and civil upheavals in Iran in search of gender equality and social justice, followed by the sustained resistance of the Iranian people against oppression, stunned the world. The events of the consecutive months, alongside the ongoing war in Ukraine and several other concurrent conflicts around the globe, support the conjecture that more artists would probably keep crossing the borders to land in diaspora. In contrast, many others struggle to avoid becoming strangers in their homelands. In this text I describe both groups as migrant sounds: those who actually migrated and those who managed to project their voices beyond the border, even if they never physically crossed it. Considering the socio-political complexities of our time and the conditions of the migrant sounds, I believe we can still extend the arguments of this text to other artistic disciplines in similar situations. Yet, the ambivalences of the art of the migrant voices, especially those of the sound artists and composers, still begs further inquiry, to which this text serves as nothing but a preliminary step.

Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 2019

Performance and Participation: Practices, Audiences, Politics is a valuable book to anyone working on participatory performance across its many forms and settings. It broadens the discussion of practices of audience involvement to include more diverse ways of being engaged through performance or of responding to political and cultural participation through performance. It's a rich and wide-ranging discussion. Anna Harpin and Helen Nicholson set their stall against false binaries and the simplification of participation and its issues, dynamics and especially its politics. They note cultural shifts that leave behind 20 th -century binarisations of agency and alienation, or activity and passivity: politics and dominant culture now depend on and activate participation rather than preventing or effacing it. In this context non-participation is as often resistant as it might appear complacent, so that we cannot assume the politics of participation, and that it is not a good in itself is argued several times through the book. Another focus is the materiality and immateriality of the circumstances and phenomena of participation, manifest in affective characteristics, in matters of authorship and in the labour carried out by participants with and without professional performers (and as professional performers too). The book has three sections, themed around recognising participation, the labours of participation, and authoring participation. In the first, Deirdre Heddon's chapter gives a reading of Adrian Howells' well known Foot Washing for the Soul through Jean-Luc Nancy's idea of "singular plural beings" (27). The sense of this piece as a 'one-to-one' performance is put into question: it is a performance of listening, and through the idea of a resonant subjectivity, Heddon opens up how the self that is addressed is revealed as layered, multiple and imbricated. In his essay, Liam Jarvis identifies an impetus in immersive performance towards experiencing with another's body, and some different ways of being immersedfor example in the work, in information, or as the work. He examines the processes at play in his own work in Analogue's Re-Enactments, in which a headphoned audience witness and re-create an armed robbery, and points out the importance of the participant becoming their own spectator, a theme that could be followed

2018

This thesis is an analysis of the theatre work directed by Ramin Gray, Artistic Director of ATC (Actors Touring Company), from 2010 to 2015. It has been informed by my privileged position as ethnographer within the company as part of an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award project. In the thesis, I argue that Gray’s work explores questions of how we might negotiate living within contemporary, diverse communities, particularly in the light of recent scholarly critiques of community, and contemporary British debates about identity, migration, and community. The narratives and dramaturgies of ATC’s productions during this period draw attention to what Chantal Mouffe has called the ‘democratic paradox’, whereby liberal drives towards inclusivity and plurality are held in tension with democratic drives towards unity and consensus. Gray’s work for ATC stages this paradox as politically productive, exposing it in all its discomfort, rather than as something to be repressed or eliminated. I use theoretical frameworks by Theodor Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, Chantal Mouffe, Jean-Luc Nancy and Richard Sennett, particularly Mouffe’s ‘agonistic democracy’ and Sennett’s concept of the ‘dialogic’, to support my account of how ATC’s theatre has interrogated the concept of community. I examine three major productions where the tension between multiple voices and consensus has emerged in different ways, as Gray’s relationship with the company has evolved. This evolution has been observed in rehearsal, in production, and through my access to company personnel, meetings and archives. The productions are: The Golden Dragon by Roland Schimmeplfennig; a double bill of Crave by Sarah Kane and Illusions by Ivan Viripaev; and The Events by David Greig. I describe how ATC’s dramaturgical structures make explicit a link between the paradox of the individual’s relationship to the larger community and tensions pertaining to the role of the spectator in the larger theatre audience. In seeking to create this tension affectively within the body of the spectator, often creating unease or embarrassment, Gray’s work foregrounds the paradox physically as well as intellectually, a practice which I argue is fundamental to his work for ATC. This thesis suggests that contemporary debates around the term community are overlooked in much current scholarship on contemporary political theatre, and that theories of community can make a significant critical intervention in scholarship in this field. It offers a new exploration of the work that contemporary theatre and the theatre director can do to discuss, trouble and embody the concept of community. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.826514

Historia Contemporanea, 2018

By exploring the experience of the industrial town of Huddersfield in West Yorkshire, where the West Indian population contributed to sound system and reggae culture out of proportion to its size, it can be shown that sound system culture developed differently in different urban contexts in Britain in the late twentieth century. The essay uses more than thirty oral history interviews of people who ran sound systems or were audiences for them. They were collected by the Sound System Culture project initiated by Let's Go Yorkshire, which focuses on aspects of local cultural heritage hidden from and unrecorded by mainstream history. Their project provides an opportunity to explore questions of identity in relation to sound systems, reggae and urban Britain with a focus on a specific place and its configurations of space. The essay examines the importance of the location of a West Indian club in the town centre, enabling the African-Caribbean population to visibly and aurally contribute to the Huddersfield's sense of its own identity.

New Theatre Quarterly, 2015