Exploring a Theatre of Sounds

Honours year research paper, supervised by Amy Jephta.

2017

Sound perception plays an important role in the individuation process, both in the womb and as the sense most directly linked to the speech act. The presence of mechanized noise in urban environments has been criticized both by ecological modernists and adherents of information theory’s emphasis on clear signals and the elimination of noise. This essay rejects these forms of utopianism, as they do not address the quotidian reality of the individual dealing with human resource enforced employee efficiency. Instead a form of individuation enacted by the speech act in a group setting is embraced as an aesthetic form enhanced by the technological sublime, where the presence of noise is a catalyst for remapping quotidian behaviour.

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.

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

2015

The question of attention in theatre remains relatively unexplored. In redressing this, Theatre and Aural Attention investigates what it is to attend theatre by means of listening. Focussing on four core aural phenomena in theatre - noise, designed sound, silence, and immersion - George Home-Cook concludes that theatrical listening involves paying attention to atmospheres. Such matters are examined as they have arisen in some of the most sophisticated works of theatre sound design of recent years, including Sound & Fury's Kursk, Romeo Castellucci's Purgatorio, Complicite's Shun-kin and Robert Lepage's Lipsynch. In suggesting how theatre works to direct the audience's aural attention, the book also carries out an important enquiry into radio drama (Beckett's All That Fall, Embers, and Pinter's A Slight Ache). This ground-breaking study will be of interest to drama students, sound theorists, practitioner-researchers, performance philosophers, and to anyone curious to explore what it means to attend theatre.

2012

2014

As the complicated relationship between music and theatre has evolved and changed in the modern and postmodern periods, music has continued to be immensely influential in key developments of theatrical practices. In this study of musicality in the theatre, David Roesner offers a revised view of the nature of the relationship. The new perspective results from two shifts in focus: on the one hand, Roesner concentrates in particular on theatre-making - that is the creation processes of theatre - and on the other, he traces a notion of ‘musicality’ in the historical and contemporary discourses as driver of theatrical innovation and aesthetic dispositif, focusing on musical qualities, metaphors and principles derived from a wide range of genres. Roesner looks in particular at the ways in which those who attempted to experiment with, advance or even revolutionize theatre often sought to use and integrate a sense of musicality in training and directing processes and in performances. His study reveals both the continuous changes in the understanding of music as model, method and metaphor for the theatre and how different notions of music had a vital impact on theatrical innovation in the past 150 years. Musicality thus becomes a complementary concept to theatricality, helping to highlight what is germane to an art form as well as to explain its traction in other art forms and areas of life. The theoretical scope of the book is developed from a wide range of case studies, some of which are re-readings of the classics of theatre history (Appia, Meyerhold, Artaud, Beckett), while others introduce or rediscover less-discussed practitioners such as Joe Chaikin, Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Michael Thalheimer and Karin Beier.

International Symposium - Towards a History of Sound in Theatre: Acoustics and Auralities, CRI/University of Montreal – CNRS/ARIAS, Montreal, Quebec

The theatricality of today’s performance greatly relies on its own orality/aurality, that is, dramaturgy of sound. The current emergence of dramaturgy of sound is not merely an issue of artistic technique or theatre style; rather, it demonstrates a conceptual change in our theatrical discourse. The theatres of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio and Robert Wilson are examined here as the case in point of the legacy of the historical avant-garde’s sound poetry and performance in which vocal gesture has been used to dislocate verbal meaning and make words/sounds resonate both within the body and in the space In contrast to the way logical speech flattens theatrical space, as Jacques Derrida interprets Artaud’s point, sound reinstates the volume of theatrical space: “Once aware of this language in space, language of sounds, cries, lights, and onomatopoeia, the theatre must organize it into veritable hieroglyphs.” Such hieroglyphic “writing” of theatre and performance that coordinates phonetic elements of language with visual, pictorial, and plastic elements of stage clearly prompted the corporal/erotic and the abstract/architectural impulses in Castellucci’s and Wilson’s current production practice