Sounding Out ‘the Scenographic Turn’: Eight Position Statements

This article was downloaded by: [Adrian Curtin] On: 04 June 2015, At: 05:36 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Theatre & Performance Design Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rdes20

Sounding out ‘the scenographic turn’: eight position statements a

Adrian Curtin & David Roesner

b

a

Drama Department, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

b

Theaterwissenschaft, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany Published online: 04 Jun 2015.

Click for updates To cite this article: Adrian Curtin & David Roesner (2015) Sounding out ‘the scenographic turn’: eight position eight position statements, statements, Theatre & Performance Performance Design, 1:1-2, 107-125 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23322551.2015.1027523

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the t he accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications publications on our platform. However However, Taylor Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever whatsoever as to the accuracy, accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, exp enses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms Terms &

Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/termsand-conditions

5 1 0 2 e n u J 4 0 6 3 : 5 0 t a ] n i t r u C n a i r d A [ y b d e d a o l n w o D

Theatre and Performance Design, 2015 Vol. 1, Nos. 1 – 2, 107 – 125, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23322551.2015.1027523

Sounding out the scenographic turn : eight position statements ‘

’

Edited by Adrian Curtina* and David Roesnerb* With statements from Ross Brown, Adrian Curtin, George Home-Cook, Lynne Kendrick, David Roesner, Katharina Rost, Nicholas Till and Pieter Verstraete a

Drama Department, University of Exeter, UK; bTheaterwissenschaft, Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversität, Munich, Germany


This multi-authored article collects a range of position statements made by leading scholars/practitioners in the fields of theatre aurality, music theatre/opera and sound design. Contributors independently prepared short statements in response to a central provocation – namely, the mooted ‘scenographic turn’ and its implication for theatre sound studies. The article provides snapshots of current opinions about theatre sound design and scenography. It does not advance a single, unified argument but rather outlines some key ways in which sound/music and scenography are operating, and have operated, in theatre, and have been discussed in aesthetic theory. The article ultimately reinforces the importance of attending to sound and scenography as co-constitutive elements, and suggests there is no single or best way of doing this.

At the launch of this new journal on theatre and performance design, we, the editors of this multi-authored article, wish to draw attention to an area of design traditionally neglected in academic discourses and the rituals of validation in the creative industries: sonic design. Two examples of this neglect may indicate that there is still a need to trumpet all things sonic in theatre: in June 2014 the US-based Tony Award for best sound design was scrapped, and in Germany the largest annual survey of 44 theatre critics singling out best actor, set designer, director, theatre etc. still has no category for ‘best sound design’ and/or ‘best incidental music’. There has, however, been a sonic/acoustic ‘turn’ in recent decades, which has informed scholarship in the humanities and social sciences (see Meyer 2008). Theatre and performance studies have begun to attend to acoustic phenomena with greater frequency and depth. There is a growing body of scholarly work that analyses a continuum of theatre sound, noise and music, both contemporary and historical. 1 Moreover, there is a proliferation of theatre artists in Europe and elsewhere who are creating sound designs and musical compositions for productions that encourage audiences to attend to what they hear – and, more broadly, what they perceive – in new ways. Now, another ‘turn’ has been mooted: the ‘scenographic turn’. Does this mean the sonic/acoustic ‘turn’ is at an end? Are we turning from ‘the sonic’ to ‘the scenographic’? What is the significance of enfolding the former in the latter? Or is this a false problematic? *Corresponding authors. Email: [email protected]; [email protected] © 2015 Taylor & Francis

108


Adrian Curtin and David Roesner

Assuming the ‘scenographic turn’ is not just a rhetorical contrivance, but identifies something about the state of current scholarship and artistic practice, what is the role of sound in this? Put differently, are sound and scenography interacting, or being theorized, in new ways? Does the ‘scenographic turn’ have an identifiably sonic component? If so, what is it? Branching out, what positions are scholars and artists taking with respect to the current status and future development of theatre sound design and theatre sound studies? (How) does scenography figure into this? We put these questions to a group of scholars/practitioners who work in the field of sound design/theatre music and who variously examine the sonic and acoustic aspects of theatre in relation to meaning making, performativity, architecture and space, and the politics of perception. We asked each contributor to provide a position statement that responds to the above questions, and we have collated their texts here. They are, as we hoped, quite diverse and touch on different aspects of the interplay(s) between the sonic and the scenographic. We have deliberately not sought to harmonize the statements or create smooth transitions between them, but rather have left each in its unique tone – hard cuts rather than fade ins/fade outs. One of the features of scholarship on sound in the humanities is its general lack of unity as a field. Diversity of opinion, focus and approach need not, however, be taken as signs of intellectual incoherence or divisiveness, but rather as indications of vital, vibrant discourse that is progressing in multiple directions simultaneously. There are indications of this here, as well as evidence of shared positionality and thematic consonance. Sound often works to position us as listening subjects in a particular place, and may be used in performance design to help create imagined or imaginary space. Conversely, sound (as noise) can be an imposition; it can intrude upon consciousness and displace our attention. Taking a position with respect to sound means situating oneself somewhere – taking a stand, as it were – even if this means only being able to attend to what is within local earshot. Multiple position statements may therefore call to mind a greater range of ideas and relevant phenomena, and capture a range of current opinions about the relationships between sound and scenography, both in theory and in practice. This article presents snaphsots, provocations, lines of thought, musings, theses, possibilities – not a traditional scholarly argument. It is a deliberately ‘heteroglossic’ (Bakhtin) attempt to emphasize and remind us of how intricately the mise-en-scène of performance – both historical and contemporary – is intertwined with modes of sounding, musicking, echoing and listening. Each position statement has been prepared independently. Between us, we cover a range of aspects that engage the provocation of a potential ‘scenographic turn’. We point to the philosophical, phenomenological and cognitive links between space and sound, the visual and the aural. We emphasize that sound and vision are inextricably linked and co-constitutive, and that collaboration and innovation in the interplay of sound design and stage design have great productive potential, as evidenced by a number of theatrical examples (Roesner). We indicate little-known historical connections between sound, aesthetics and scenography in theatre (Till, Brown). We highlight the socio-political consequences of the post-dramatic ‘musicalization ’ of theatre (Verstraete) and query the perceptual challenges offered by ‘theatre in the dark’, where visuality falls short (Kendrick). We affirm the importance of thinking about sound in relation to the

Theatre and Performance Design 109 other senses (Home-Cook, Curtin), hypothesize new, geological ways of conceptualizing sound design (Rost) and posit ‘atmosphere’ as a paradigm for thinking about theatrical design (Home-Cook). Finally, we acknowledge the contrariety and multiplicity of audience reception, and the convolutions of academic ‘ turns’ (Curtin). Ultimately, it is our hope that this article will help advance the ongoing scholarly conversation about sound, scenography and theatre, and will stimulate future debate. 1. Sonic scenography (David Roesner)


I will start with an anecdote. A friend of mine who is a theatre musician and works very successfully in the German theatre circuit told me once that almost invariably when he’d turn up to the so-called ‘Bauprobe’ for a new production – a first try-out and mock-up of the model stage design for a new production on the actual stage, which usually happens weeks if not months before the actual rehearsals begin – he ’d ask the stage designer: ‘… and where do the speakers go?’ These had usually been forgotten and had to be accommodated retrospectively into the design. There is then, on the one hand, an old rivalry between the sonic and the visual in theatre and theatre design, and on the other, mutual incomprehension and potentially quite conflicting priorities. The fact that in most professional theatres the artists and respective technical departments responsible for each design aspect are strictly separated furthers the divide. In my – perhaps optimistic – understanding of the idea of the ‘scenographic turn’, however, there is plenty of potential (and in the current theatre aesthetic quite some evidence) that the ‘scenographic ’ and the ‘sonic’ can coexist quite happily, actually more than that: can inspire and enhance each other. The scenographic turn, as I understand it, is not (just) a paradigm suggesting we should pay a bit more attention to the stage design of theatrical productions; it is a profound re-evaluation of the aesthetics, the dramaturgical function and the visceral experience of spaces and images for performances; an understanding of scenography as emancipated from merely illustrating or furnishing the realization of a dramatic text on stage. While described and discussed as a recent phenomenon, we can trace such ideas back historically at least to one of the pioneers of stage and lighting design, the Swiss theatre practitioner and writer Adolphe Appia (1862–1928). Surprisingly, perhaps, it was Appia’s passion for music and his quest to enhance the rather dusty operatic practices of his day that led to his visionary scenographic ideas about ‘rhythmic spaces’ and light that has ‘an almost miraculous flexibility’ and can ‘ create shadows, make them living, and spread the harmony of their vibrations in space, just as music does’ (Appia 1993, 114). Recent and current theatre practitioners such as Pina Bausch, Karin Beier, Filter, Heiner Goebbels, Ruedi Häusermann, Christoph Marthaler, David Marton, Katie Mitchell, Eimuntas Nekrošius, Einar Schleef, Sound&Fury, Michael Thalheimer and their creative collaborators integrate stage design intimately with a keen musical and sonic sensibility (for a wider context, see Meyer 2008). A number of terms have even been coined for this already: ‘sound scenography’, ‘acoustic scenography’, ‘sonic scenography’ or ‘Klangszenographie ’.2 This may take a number of forms. In Katie Mitchell’s ‘multimedia’ productions, for example, the acoustic separation of the diegetic narrative world from the artificially

110



live produced soundtrack we hear is not only a performative device, but also – through the visibility of the Foley artists and their work – a main design feature of the performance space. Karin Beier and her team often create stages that have a mixture of conventional elements (tables, chairs), musical instruments (both mobile and static) and elements such as water or mud, which not only have significant impact on the visual development and symbolism of the stage actions, but also have a sonic materiality that features strongly and interacts with the spoken word and the – often experimental – music. Michael Thalheimer – with scenographer Olaf Altmann’s rhythmic spaces and Bert Wrede’s music and sound design – uses the rhythms of rapid speech, long pauses, echoing walls, long walks on high heels, etc., to create an often highly stylized and yet surprisingly organic theatrical style. Filter’s performances, particularly their adaptations of Shakespeare, look and feel like slightly messy concerts. Instruments, retro electronic sound devices, cables, microphones, etc. litter the space but also evoke – both sonically and visually – the wood of Athens (in A Midsummer Night ’s Dream) or Olivia’s mansion (in Twelfth Night) (for more details and a more in-depth analysis of all three examples, see Roesner 2014, 236–256). It has often been said that in Shakespeare ’s theatre words evoke all the scenery (‘Wortkulisse’ or ‘verbal scenography’); Filter largely passes this task on to music, song and sound effects. Finally, there are an increasing number of theatre productions that include live musicians in their stage design, often creating hybrid spaces that are both fictional and real and at once theatre stage and concert venue. Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch’s Shockheaded Peter (1998), for example, was based inextricably on the music and the physical presence of the band The Tiger Lillies , whose musical style and musical personae (see Auslander 2006) – consisting of a wild mash-up of Victorian-Gothic-Vaudeville-Cabaret-Circus-Itinerant Balladeers – were formative for the stage and costume design. In all these cases, theatre makers have found ways to ensure a dialogue between the scenic and the sonic, by changing entrenched production rhythms, faciltating early interplay and exchange between all the creative contributors, and questioning assumptions about established hierarchies of production and aesthetics. These revised processes ensure that stage design, composition and sonic design are intimately linked in artistic practice. Commonly, however, their institutional separation in conservatoires and theatres remains, and more mutual acknowledgement and reciprocal inspiration would be more than welcome. 2. Theses for a sceno-sonic turn (Nicholas Till)

Modernist taxonomies of artistic media, such as that of the neo-Kantian philosopher Susanne Langer, invariably characterize sonic arts as being essentially temporal, and arts such as sculpture and architecture (and perhaps scenography?) as being essentially spatial. According to Langer (1953, 135), each artistic medium occupies its own ‘primary illusion’, that of music being ‘time made audible’. Langer considered the concept of space in music to be but a ‘secondary illusion’ (1953, 117). She also held that there could be no straying from the essential virtual field of each art; that there could be no valid intermedial combinations (1957, 86). So where did that leave theatre? We’ll come back to that.

Theatre and Performance Design 111


Space first assumed centrality in the architectural thinking of early modernists such as Peter Behrens and Adolf Loos (Forty 2000, 256–275). At the Bauhaus, László Moholy-Nagy (1932, 62) insisted that in architecture, ‘Building material is an auxiliary … the principle means of creation is the space itself ’. But as Henri Lefebvre (1991, 1; 287) pointed out, the modernist architect’s concern with space is abstract: a Euclidian space of mental ratio rather than a lived place defined by all the modalities of embodied social experience. And a correlative of this emphasis upon abstract space has been a reification of architecture – and perhaps space – as essentially visual: ‘Everything is in the visual’, Le Corbusier asserted (1991, 231). But if there is one thing that the postmodern spatial turn of the 1960s, initiated by thinkers such as Foucault, McLuhan and Lefebvre himself, and the more recent acoustic turn in social and aesthetic thinking have taught us, it is that sound and space must be understood dialectically, since full awareness of space involves awareness of the relationship of sound to space, and vice versa. Modernist assertions of the medial exclusiveness of sonic and spatial practices assume a very restricted ontology for each of the practices in question. Music, for instance, is as much spatial as temporal: it is performed in space; what is heard is shaped by the specific disposition of the performers in that space; and its sonic qualities are determined by the acoustic properties of the space in which it takes place. Sound art is often even more responsive to the specifics of space. Furthermore, sound brings into being a listening subject whose selfhood during the time of listening is spatially and corporeally defined. As Jean-Luc Nancy (2007, 14) puts it, ‘To listen is to enter that spatiality by which, at the same time, I am penetrated…’. Architecture, on the other hand, is experienced not simply as a visual object in space but also through the embodied senses of touch, sound and smell, and the modalities of time, association and social use. We often hear in a built space what we cannot see: footsteps upstairs; a creaking door. Both music and architecture, sound and space, are inherently multimodal: sonic and scenographic at once. Sceno-sonic. Modernist theatre theorists were no less reductive in their search for the essence of theatre, although they inevitably disagreed upon what constituted the essential medium of theatre. For Eric Bentley it was language ( ‘every dramaturgic practice that subordinates the words to any other medium has trivialized the drama without giving full reign to the medium that has become dominant ’ [Bentley 1987, 87]); for Kantor it was space; for Grotowksi it was the human body. It was not the least of Adolphe Appia’s insights that, although he held to the modernist attributions of space and time to scenography and music respectively, he recognized that in opera the human body and light served as mediating elements between the fixity of his scenographic spaces and the temporality and fluidity of music (Appia 1962). Theatre enacts the dialectic of showing and concealing that underpins the tension between epistemology (that which is shown is true) and metaphysics (that which is concealed is true). And it questions the testimony of eye and ear through deception and illusion: theatrical narratives often turn upon whether we can trust the evidence of our senses – what we see, what we hear, what we are told. The current practices of site-specific theatre and theatre in the dark are perhaps the clearest evidence of a sceno-sonic turn that plays directly upon these modalities and their perceptual unsettling in the dissolution of the sceno-sonic boundaries between the real and the virtual. A sceno-sonic turn that responds to, and questions, the flickering to and fro of the real and virtual in an increasingly mediated world.

112


3. On vibrate: the new scenographic picturesque (Ross Brown)


The art of practical noises-off reached its peak between the 1860s and the 1930s (Brown 2010, 18–30; 63–73). This was not noisemaking required by classical dramaturgy, where the action is carried forward by a continuous momentum of consequence, which passes, transitively, through the scenic structure towards the final resolution. Rather it was that required by a new intransitive dramaturgy of serialdiscontinuity, where each scene builds to a situation where forward motion is halted in a moment of stasis or suspense, and from which the next scene begins afresh (Meisel 1983, 39–42; 97). Rather than performing the disruption and resolution of cosmic order, it enacted the atmosphere and life of the stage picture. Made backstage, but in the same acoustic world in which the actors spoke, moved and were seen, this noise had a materiality whose phenomenology was more than acoustic, and a scenic integrity that proved elusive to phonographically reproduced noises or subsequent electroacoustic technologies. Loudspeaker sound lent itself more to extra-diegetic framing, as a mediating gauze that bled the aural focus between frontcloth immediacy and intra-diegetic world, usually at the beginnings and ends of scenes. Record players and tape recorders also lacked sensitivity as instruments, playback being less flexibly interactive than playing , and operating less expressive than performing . Theatre, in the mid-twentieth century, lost patience with scenic noise. In the late 1980s and 1990s, plasticity of noise and the potential for synchrony and dynamic interaction between electroacoustic soundscape and stage performance returned with the arrival of digital sampling and MIDI (musical instrument digital interface), which allowed recorded sounds to be played polyphonically, with touch sensitive expressivity. This suited the devised mise-en-scène of physical and visual or design-led theatre, where it brought a precise organicity of sonic experimentation and enabled a filmic, edited quality. At around the same time, cinemas acquired surround sound and, in an immersive turn, live theatre also began to address the dialectic between the aural space of audience and the scenic construct. Even where plays remained largely acoustic, stage and audience were now placed within a transparent, continuous and intermedially indexed sphere of electroacoustic potential – phenomenologically more than a sonic turn: a multimodal auralization of scenic space. From around 1994 I started to hear the word ‘ scenography’ used to imply a more kinetic process than ‘stage design’. It formed part of an exotic new academic terminology in UK theatre design, which included various ‘dramaturgies ’ (of light, action, objects etc.), synergy, allusions to the neurological condition of synaesthesia and talk of a paradigm shift from the literary to the material . Material , I then argued, was habitually and lazily equated with visible , which perpetuated an ocularcentric bias in post-enlightenment episteme. My argument is now differently nuanced: that in theatre history (if not historiography), concepts of picture and spectacle have never been visual, but always sensorily multimodal. Indeed, the theatre provides a trope of multimodality to other disciplines. That the visual might be atmospheric, or noise might be dramaturgically organized into what we might now call soundscape (the pictorial connotation of the suffix – scape is often overlooked) are notions arising from eighteenth-century scenic art. The scenic revolution institutionalized at Drury Lane in the 1760s –1770s is a familiar chapter in histories of visual culture. Less well known is that Garrick wanted ‘scenic virtue to form the rising age’ through ‘the charms of sound’ (as well as the

Theatre and Performance Design 113 ‘pomp


of show’ [Johnson 1749]), or that his scenic artist, de Loutherbourg, was equally celebrated for his ‘Picturesque of Sound’ (Baugh 2007; Brown 2010). The Picturesque is traditionally a footnote to Romanticism, but its discourse was conceptually anti-Romantic, pursuing neither immanence nor the sublime, but a synthetic aesthetic of pictorial composition and effect. It did not fetishize truth but valorized contrivance in art, and saw a beauty in surface irregularity, roughness and decay. Its viewpoint was touristically mobile and aural. As Dr Syntax says in Combe’s cartoon parody of the movement, ‘… we the picturesque may find in thunder loud, or whistling wind; and often, as I fully ween, it may be heard as well as seen’ (Combe 1812, 111). If the scenographic turn of the 1990s aspired Romantically, like Appia, to the holistically singular (Brown 2010, 46–48; 106–112), I detect a resonance of the Picturesque in the immersive, intermedial scenography of the current moment. At this turn, scenography seems to delight in an atomized plurality of scenic effect; in distractions, fragmentation, entropy; in alert and notification rather than signal; in surface rather than deep vibration. The new picturesque of a new weather: of vibrating phones, not cosmic vibes? 4. Designing vibrational space: from aesthetic to socio-political enquiry (Pieter Verstraete)

Antonin Artaud’s ‘cathartic’, vibrational theatre,3 which was to surround the audience, ‘attack the spectator’s sensibility on all sides’ (Artaud 1958, 86) and break with the old proscenium theatre, was perhaps the most radical attempt in modernist theatre to which both a sonic and scenographic turn today are still indebted in many regards. Vibrational space was a bold effort on Artaud ’s part to use the full potential of sound design, including the architectonics and acoustics of the theatre space, to activate the individual spectator through general discomfort and unfamiliarity with new sounds, resonating from instruments of ‘new alloys of metal’ and overly loud sounds ‘or noises that are unbearably piercing’ (Artaud 1958, 95). In spirit, Artaud’s scenographic ideas may be understood to respond to the ideas of ‘total theatre’ in ways that are much indebted to, but also diverge strongly from, the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk . His ideas about the spatial reverberation of voice may recall Wagner’s experiments with a soundboard and pillars in his Festspielhaus that projected the sound of the orchestra from under the stage into the auditorium, or as Artaud formulated it, ‘A cry uttered at one end of the room can be transmitted from mouth to mouth with amplifications and successive modulations all the way to the other’ (1958, 97). Yet Artaud’s revolutionary vision about the purpose of sound as bodily titillating wavelengths resonates more with post-Marxist notions of collective experience, ‘mass spectacle’ and social change than with Wagner’s democratic principles of ideal listening, formulated as an imperative: ‘abandon individual psychology, enter into mass passions, into the conditions of the collective spirit, grasp the collective wavelengths, in short, change the subject ’ (Cahiers de Rodez V: 153, quoted in Weiss 1992, 279). It is in this political spirit that Artaud ’s ‘cruel’ sound system proposed ‘ to seek in the agitation of tremendous masses, convulsed and hurled against each other, a little of that poetry of festivals and crowds when, all too rarely nowadays, the people pour out into the streets ’ (Artaud 1958, 85). Artaud’s desire to channel passions and energies against distraction is not of an equal order to Wagner’s aspiration to channel the spectator through synthesis and

114



integration of all the senses. Susan Buck-Morrs (1992, 26) has criticized the superimposed, all-encompassing, comforting unity of the senses that is based on the concealment of alienation, the sensual impoverishment and fragmentation in the individual’s experience of modern existence. Artaud, on the contrary, aims at an implicit awareness of the individual entering into mass passions through an immersion that causes dread and discomfort. In this way, Artaud’s vibrational theatre is rather a contrivance that calls for a critical understanding of the power that sound and audio scenography can convey, ‘ especially in a domain where the endlessly renewed fatigue of the organs requires intense and sudden shocks to revive our understanding’ (Artaud 1958, 86). This exemplifies a rupture with the tradition of the Gesamtkunstwerk , and instates a new ‘total’ theatre that serves to shake the individual by ‘sudden and unforeseen electricity’ (Cahiers de Rodez IX: 43, quoted in Weiss 1994, 51). Artaud’s theatre gave us a glimpse of what the scenographic turn in sound design and devising has arguably become today. After Artaud, our theatres have begun to embrace the potential of sound not only to communicate other, non-verbal or selfreferential aspects of drama and human experience, but also to push the barriers of our inner sense perceptions. The scenographic turn gives us at least two good reasons for a different sensory rationale: the first is spatial thinking; the second is a return to a theatre that has a logic in common with pre-dramatic forms. The former materialized in the use of spatialization of sound for the stage, embracing immersive technologies; the latter was most prominently formulated as ‘musicalization ’ (Lehmann 2006; Roesner 2003; Varopoulou 1998) and ‘chora-graphy ’ as post-dramatic traits which liberated the contemporary theatre stage from the restraints of goals (‘a space beyond telos’), hierarchy and causal logic, hitherto defined by a verbal theatre text (Lehmann 1997, 56). In both developments, a choreographic turn was immanent, which would enable us to conceptualize the physical, experiential and cultural barriers that sound seeks to transgress. However, when thinking about how spatialization and musicalization take centre stage in a larger scenographic turn to sound design, and how these aesthetic strategies are also grounded in a larger historical body of knowledge about the use of sound on the modernist stage, I cannot but think how culturally and historically contingent these principles are with regard to the audiences they try to activate and satisfy. Surely, on-stage sonic experiments from the 1980s onwards did have political meaning in a larger sense of a politics of the sensible (Rancière 2004), or in an anarchist-inspired breaking with all hierarchies within the theatre sign system, which led to Lehmann’s formulation of the post-dramatic as a larger paradigm shift regarding spectatorship and devising. The post-dramatic theatre experimentations were envisioned to reach other audiences whose senses – mostly visual – were already being reshaped by mass media as well as rapidly evolving cinema aesthetics. So the post-dramatic theatre sought again a greater integration of the audience in the meaning-making process, or as Lehmann contends: [P]ostdramatic theatre is not simply a new kind of text of staging – and even less a new type of theatre text, but rather a type of sign usage in the theatre that turns both of these levels of theatre upside down through the structurally changed quality of the performance text: it becomes more presence than representation, more shared than communicated

Theatre and Performance Design 115 experience, more process than product, more manifestation than signification, more energetic impulse than information. (Lehmann 2006, 85, original emphasis)


Despite the renewed communal aspects of this new way of experiencing theatre ’s sign systems – much like Artaud’s concrete language of signs as ‘hieroglyphs’ (Artaud 1958, 90) – on a practical basis, most of those investigations seem again to favour the highly individual experience of the postmodern spectator. Moreover, it appears now that we are slowly coming to an end of the post-dramatic paradigm, as it has been criticized more recurrently for its ‘ passé postmodern tools to describe an environment in which harmless simulation of conflicts is a distant dream ’ (Stegemann 2009, 22). As new abrasive forms of applied, community and storytelling theatre indicate, a more local and socially engaged outlook – with renewed attempts towards a repoliticized theatre – is emerging, which embraces again the importance of the word (and thereby the logos , both in its specific and widest sense) to discuss or at least pose some questions to the problems of our late-capitalist times. It is in this transitional space, from theatre as aesthetic investigation to social interaction, from hyperindividual to an ever-recurring collective experience, that the ‘sonic’ – with all its transgressive and intangible potentiality as ‘vibration’ beyond metaphor – is in need of redefinition. Artaud was onto something: sound in the theatre can make us ‘abandon’ our individual selves without necessarily losing ourselves. Now we must stay put and take the potency of the social, with all its derisive and paradoxical mechanisms, seriously.

5. Scene in the dark (Lynne Kendrick)

Scenography is not without sound. As an ‘ orchestration’ of potentially all that which constitutes theatre (see Butterworth and McKinney 2009), relinquishing the sonic is not the aim of the scenographic. However, the idea of a post-sonic, scenographic turn suggests a move away from sound, an implication that one belies the other. This invites old divisions – of the sonic versus the visual, or ear versus eye – back into the conversation, but perhaps this is for good reason. Sound has recently penetrated theatre-making practices in ways that suggest the opposite turn, a move towards sound, might be the case. The sound designer has, according to Carolyn Downing, 4 recently emerged from the ‘tech box’ and, taking a position within the rehearsal room, has embedded the sonic in the mix of theatre making. This, in turn, has brought sound designers as theatre artists to the fore, Melanie Wilson and Adrienne Quartly to name but two. This attention to the sonic is not merely a trend, often dismissed as the happenstance of technological advances, or as symptomatic of collaborative practice models. These instances of sonic scenography are emerging because of possibility: theatre makers are drawn to the potential of sound for its ability to generate scenography where visuality falls short. Nowhere is this more apparent than in theatre in the dark, its scenography is almost entirely sonic. This is an emergent form of theatre that is garnering much interest, particularly in the UK, and it is one that takes the ‘blackout’ of mainstream theatre – the negative space of stage and auditorium convention – as its base material, the ground from which its scenography springs. In the darkness of

116



Rosenberg and Neath’s ‘sound journeys’, the haptic dramaturgies of Extant Theatre and the ‘white-out’ spaces of Lundahl and Seitl’s performance events, the ‘scene’ is carved out of sound in all its incarnations. The visual space may at points appear – seeded by visual prologues, or glimpses of shapes, contours and shades invented in half-light – but the design is entirely sonic and, as such, the scenographic encounter is primarily an aural experience. Thus, theatre in the dark places the perceptual emphasis on audience rather than spectatorship; indeed the growing popularity of this form of theatre is predicated on the less certain terrain of listening and the unpredictable experiences this may offer. Any scene can be conjured in the dark. When the first experiments with darkness took place at the Playing in the Dark season (Battersea Arts Centre [BAC], London, 1998) some joked it was a neat solution to budget cuts. No need for lights, no need for any material that makes theatre visually evident. Yet the sonic scenography of darkness is more than visual absence. Theatre in the dark entirely reinvents scenographic spaces, transporting audiences and immersing us within them. This produces an aesthetic of uncertainty which frequently re-casts us as various subjects within its midst, questioning our identity and our processes of identification. However, this is not a case of ‘not seeing’; in the darkness we are invited to visualize a myriad of spectacles, but we see through ears. Visuality falls short because it remains the object before us; separated and distinct, it can only be gazed upon for all its pomp and expense. Sound, it is often said, moves us and moves through us, and it is this subjective property that can transform a scenographic design from object to an experience. My response to the question as to whether a sonic or scenic ‘ography’ now takes its turn, would be to ask: how much is the latter predicated on the former? Not in terms of genealogy, but materially, in the case of theatre in the dark, entirely. It is not necessary to seek a position for sound in all this; the sonic im position is that a visual can be entirely cast by sonic means. Moreover, this potential is ever present because sound is never not present. It stalks scenography, haunts its perimeter, threatening to challenge any residual visual bias. In this way sound is the noise in the scenographic turn, but it is not an annihilation of it. Rather, as sound designers/theatre makers have demonstrated, sound has the capacity to extend the reach of scenography, not only beyond the finite realm of the visual object but beyond what we might understand scenography to be. This development of what constitutes scenography is integral to its emergence. As Patrice Pavis recently stated, ‘scenography extends its power just as it loses its specificity’ (Pavis 2013, 73). Perhaps it is sound that signals a scenographic turn? 6. Sensing atmospheres (George Home-Cook)

We tend to associate ‘scenography’ with the scenic, and hence with the seen. Scenography, moreover, as the act and art of staging , is also, and fundamentally, about design. Yet what precisely is design and how is it experienced ? What is the relationship between the sonic and the scenographic? And what part does the audience play in shaping theatrical experience? In response to the suggestion that we might be experiencing a ‘turn’ to scenography within theatre and performance studies, I offer the following provocation: that rather than shifting our attention from the sonic to the scenographic, and thus from one sensory faculty to another, we should instead pay closer attention to the manifold ways in which audiences sense,

Theatre and Performance Design 117 and make sense of, designed theatrical environments or ‘atmospheres ’. Theatre is ‘something perceived’ (Styan 1975, 30), and scenography is manifestly sensed . To properly account for (and begin to understand) the ‘scenographic’, we must first explore what it means to sound scenography. The notion of scenography (at least as originally conceived) assumes that the world of light, whether designed or otherwise, is quite separate from that of sound. ‘Scenography ’, writes Ross Brown (2010, 134), ‘is traditionally associated with perspective, whereas sound immerses not just the psychoacoustic mind, but the whole body’. Yet how does such a distinction tally with the perceptual particularities of lived experience? How accurate is it to depict visual perception in terms of detachment and distance, while figuring sonic experience in terms of an all-encompassing, spherical subjectivity? To compartmentalize our experience of visual and aural design in this way is not only unhelpful, but phenomenologically untenable. 5 1 0 2 e n u J 4 0 6 3 : 5 0 t a ] n i t r u C n a i r d A [ y b d e d a o l n w o D

[T]he environment that we experience, know and move around in is not sliced up along the lines of the sensory pathways by which we enter into it. The world we perceive is the same world, whatever path we take, and each of us perceives it as an undivided centre of activity and awareness. (Ingold 2007, 10)

Audiences make sense of the phenomenal affordances of an environment (or ‘atmosphere ’) through a dynamic, embodied and intersensorial process of attending (see Home-Cook 2015). The notion of ‘ atmosphere’ not only provides an effective means of bypassing the audiovisual (sonic/scenographic) divide, but also allows us to reconsider (the phenomenology of) theatrical design. ‘In general, it can be said that atmospheres are involved wherever something is being staged, wherever design is a factor – and that now means: almost everywhere’ (Böhme 2013, 2). Atmosphere, theatricality and design are thus intimately interwoven. Indeed, not only is atmosphere fundamental to the phenomenon of theatre, but theatre would appear to present itself as the readiest model for an aesthetics of atmosphere (Home-Cook 2015). Design is fundamental to theatre, as are its definitive characteristics, namely, playfulness, contrivance and manipulation. Theatrical design consciously strives to manipulate audience attention, and hence to shape our perception of the theatrical event. Yet, crucially, this is not a one-way process (cf. McKinney and Butterworth 2009, 4): theatrical experience is manifestly shaped not only by the machinations of design, but by the inter-subjective attentional enactions of the audience. How we attend affects our perception of what we perceive. Design may well demand our attention, but how does the phenomenon of attention (and the inter-subjective act of attending) shape our perception of theatrical design? What role does the listenerspectator play in the process of shaping theatrical atmosphere(s)? What is thus called for is a more dynamic and broad-ranging conception of performance design that not only recognizes the essential enmeshment of the senses, but also acknowledges and explores the inevitable slippage that exists (and that is continually played out) between production and perception. Theatre and performance design consists of a variety of different (and often quite disparate) components, one of which comprises the scene/seen. However, rather than segmenting the senses, and pitching sound against scenography, we should instead begin to explore the manifest ways in which we ‘sense’ or feel our way around the

118


designed theatrical environment. If we are to unravel the secrets and phenomenal complexities of theatrical design, then perhaps it is to atmosphere(s), not scenography, that we should turn our attention. 7. Sonic caves, walls, drifts and flood waves (Katharina Rost)


Contemporary understanding of scenography does not exclusively focus on the things actually visible on stage, but more on the processes effected, felt, transmitted or evoked between the stage and the audience – thus, on the performative dimension of what is experienced (see Bohn and Wilharm 2013). The term ‘scenography’ in this sense does not refer to a static setting, but to a dynamic and fragile process, a ‘component of performance’ (McKinney and Butterworth 2009, 3). Sound, thus understood, is a means, among others, to generate the scenographic effects of the performance. But even though sound is specified as a dimension of scenography in contemporary theatre theory (see McKinney and Butterworth 2009; McKinney and Iball 2011), the dominance of the visual might still easily prevail as, firstly, some approaches still abide by the predominance of visuality (for example, a notion of scenography as a primarily visual art form is found in Balme 2014, 347; Collins and Nisbet 2010, 1; Pavis 2009, 314; Tabacki 2014, 19).5 Secondly, sound enhances the ephemerality of the relevant processes, which are therefore even more difficult to grasp.6 Sound possesses specific qualities that are often described as fluid, dynamic, diffuse and immersive see Kahn 1999, 27; Kim-Cohen 2009, xviii; Toop 1995; Toop 2010, 36; Voegelin 2010, 5, 10).7 Because of these qualities, sound is conceptualized as transitory and poses a challenge to theatre studies. On the one hand, sound has to be ‘put into words’ for an analysis of the auditory dimension of performances, but on the other hand, an adequate terminology to describe what was actually heard and experienced aurally and physically during performances still has to be refined, if not firstly developed in many cases. In addition, the various and complex ways in which sound and scenography are connected in contemporary theatre performances have not yet been fully recognized by theatre studies. The employment of sound often exceeds or differs from an illustrative, atmospheric or musical support of the stage setting. Instead of just being a supportive means to convey a certain mood or to signalize a specific social setting like birdsong, machine noise or music, in many theatre works sound becomes one of the central aesthetic components and can even function as a way to ‘set the scene’. In abstract, conceptual and mostly post-dramatic forms of theatre, sound is employed non-realistically, but also at the same time not just musically. For example, in Falk Richter ’s and Anouk van Dijk’s Trust (Berlin, 2009), the scenography consisted in its visual components of an empty forestage with a few standing microphones, a sofa and a lamp hanging from the stage ceiling, and high scaffolds in the back, which could signify a construction site or a building torn open on one side. It is an abstract scenographic structure that is open for interpretation and possesses an affective impact in its specific material qualities, its height, its metallic nature, its dark colours and its potentially temporary, changeable constitution. Beyond what is seen on stage, the sounds open up other spatial dimensions, and in this regard can be described as a means to ‘set the scene’. Malte Beckenbach composed the sound design in a way that during the first few minutes of the performance the bass sounds evolved out of each other, like a series of increasingly



powerful explosions, and simultaneously seemed to ‘move deeper’, thereby creating in my perception the auditory impression of spatial depth in the direction of the stage. The stage floor was flat and stretched out almost evenly in front of the audience in the Schaubühne, but the sounds created a sonic landscape that I perceived as interfering with the visual. For a short moment, there was a ‘depth’ in front of me that I could not see, but hear – and feel. The bass sounds were so strong that they made my whole body vibrate, and I could sense the sonic depth and width physically. It therefore felt real, even though it was not visually verifiable, and it not only created a sombre atmosphere as a background mood for the presented dance movements and spoken text sequences, but it also caused physical and attentional alertness in me through the deep bass sounds and vibrations. As the title suggests, Trust deals mainly with the question of the (im-)possibility of trust, and thus, the shaking of the ground on which we, the audience, are seated might not only stand as symbolic for the ‘earthquake’ that broken trust might provoke (i.e. the ‘earthshattering’ insight that one was deceived by one ’s beloved partner or that all one’s savings are gone due to the risky investments of the bank), but can also directly produce that concrete impression in the listeners. 8 Other examples of contemporary theatre in which sound is employed primarily in a spatial and material way include: Gisèle Vienne ’s Kindertotenlieder (Brest, 2007), in which I remember how the bass sounds of the electronic noise music produced an effect in me as a listener of confronting ‘hardness’; Meg Stuart’s Violet (Essen, 2011), in which the musician Brendan Dougherty produces layered sound streams that in my listening experience did not mix or melt into one, but stayed separate in a simultaneous juxtaposition in their temporal as well as spatial extension; and Romeo Castellucci/Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s The Four Seasons Restaurant (Avignon, 2012), in which the sounds of a black hole were heard at such a high volume that the seats and bodies trembled from the strong vibrations in the air so that I felt overwhelmed by the heard, almost unbearable noise.9 How are sound designs to be described that are neither predominantly illustrative nor primarily musical, but instead lead to the creation of sonic spaces and forces that are not visible but audible and palpable? How can we write about and express the experience of such diverse ‘sonic scenographies’? Sonic scenographies cannot merely be categorized as ‘sound sculptures’, because they are embedded in a performance that simultaneously consists of visual, audible and tactile perceptions that are deeply intertwined.10 I suggest generating a vocabulary – or borrowing it from other domains – that might allow us to describe felt sonic sensations. Regarding the previous examples, I propose adopting terms from geology and transferring them to auditory perceptions, thus speaking of a deep, hollow ‘sound cave’ in Trust, a ‘ sound wall’ in Kindertotenlieder , parallel ‘sound drifts’ in V iolet and a powerful, strong 11 By using geological terms in ‘sound flood wave’ in The Four Seasons Restaurant . this metaphorical way to describe the listening experience in the aforementioned performances, it becomes possible to clarify and point out the spatial, material and physically affective dimensions of the sounds.12 Through sound, the scenographic effect of the performance can feel smooth or broken, plain or bumpy, distant or near, hard or soft, and thus has an impact on the listeners through this specific materiality. Sound is not merely audible, but also sensible – and consequently it also possesses qualities comparable to visible things, i.e. resistance, hardness, jaggedness, or layeredness. Sound can create and shape space, and when it does it is a scenographic

120


process (see Birringer 2013).13 Sound design in this way demonstrates that appearance, spatiality, plasticity, perspective, encounters, collisions or distance are not bound to visual perception and visibility, but can be effected by sonic scenographies that should be explored further in the future as essential scenographic elements of theatre.14

8. Turning (Adrian Curtin)


There’s a saying of Gertrude Stein that I sometimes think about when at the theatre: ‘I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it ’ ([1933] 1990, 4). The contrariness of this position – acknowledging a view but opting not to attend to it, deriving pleasure from turning away – amuses me, and I have sometimes used it to justify closing my eyes at a performance and only focusing on what I can hear. This is, admittedly, a somewhat perverse thing to do, as few theatre pieces, with the exception of ‘theatre in the dark’-style experiments by British company Sound& Fury, for example, hone in on one sense to the apparent detriment of another. Theatre typically works to engage the senses holistically so that what one sees is invariably inflected by what one hears, and vice versa, often without our full awareness. Consequently, when analysing theatre sound one must be mindful of the sight, touch, feel, smell and perhaps even taste of performance, and account for the potential interaction of these modalities—and not just in ‘immersive’ theatre. As I have written elsewhere, ‘[t]he goal is not to disentangle sensory effects but rather to reveal the significance of their entanglement and highlight aspects that might go unnoticed or unremarked in the experiential flux of perception’ (Curtin 2014, 6). Does it matter, then, that some audience members may attend performance contrariously or in an idiosyncratic fashion? I think it does. The mooted ‘scenographic turn’ would appear to promote a holistic engagement with the intersensorial aspects of performance, as opposed to the ostensibly more niche concerns of sonic enthusiasts. And yet this supposed turn of events does not ring true. Semioticians and other theorists of mise-en-scène have long endeavoured to analyse the constituent elements of performance and explain their complex interplay. Similarly, sound scholars have sought to understand how hearing works dynamically with the other senses; they have not tried to institute a ‘ countermonopoly of the ear’, to borrow a phrase from Erlmann (2004, 4). Therefore, attempting to plot a linear ‘progress ’ narrative with respect to scholarship on sound and scenography is tricky, and possibly misguided. After all, ‘sound studies’, as a perpetually emergent, notquite-cohesive-or-unified interdisciplinary field, has not advanced a singular set of interests, apart from helping to dismantle ocularcentrism. There is a shared vocabulary, yet some terms remain contested and vaguely used (e.g. soundscape). It has never been clear where sound studies is ‘going’, if anywhere, how it will develop or if it will get folded into ‘ sensory studies’. The intersection of sound studies with theatre and performance studies is equally uncertain in this regard. One cannot suppose, then, that the sonic/acoustic ‘turn’ is necessarily at an end, or has been made redundant by the recent, renewed interest in the conceptual possibilities and sociocultural importance of the ‘scenographic’ (broadly construed). We should be wary of blindly following the latest academic ‘turn’, especially if this involves a turning away from other, still potentially productive, areas of enquiry. Scholarship in the humanities does not follow neat paradigm shifts. This may be a good thing. As Doris Bachmann-Medick remarks:

Theatre and Performance Design 121 Are we really progressing in our knowledge of culture? Findings from cultural studies don’t simply make their way rung by rung up a progressive ladder of paradigms, one replacing the other. Instead, they emerge because of the recurrent, new changes of theoretical attention from within a theoretical landscape where the eclectic coexistence of ‘turns’ becomes productive. (Bachmann-Medick and Buden 2008)


The challenge for contemporary scholars is to engage the coexistence of multiple theoretical turns, integrating insights from the linguistic turn, the spatial turn, the performative turn and so on into their analyses without simply being faddish. I turn to some thoughts on the future of scholarship on theatre and performance sound. Scholars will, I hope, continue to examine the sociocultural significance and historical specificity of how audiences individually and collectively make sense of sound in performance, highlighting the peculiarities and contrariety of these processes. We should protect against making assumptions that are transhistorical, universalist or ableist (i.e. that normalize able-bodied people). There are many ways of responding to sound in performance and all are potentially valid. Yet there is not enough scholarship on deaf theatre or on how differently-abled audience members make sense of theatre sound, for instance.15 Formalist, taxonomic studies that treat the ‘performance text’ as an autonomous entity, a closed circuit, are defunct. We have only begun to sound out the acoustic aspects of theatre history. The promise of the ‘scenographic turn’, as with all scholarly turns, is that the ‘theoretical landscape’ in which scholarship takes place might be revitalized and reimagined. The ‘scenographic turn’, if this is more than just a turn of phrase, could (or should?) be sonorous, if not downright noisy. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes 1. See, for example, Brown (2010); Curtin (2014); Home-Cook (2015); Kendrick and Roesner (2011); Ovadija (2013); Roesner (2014); Symonds and Taylor (2014); Verstraete (2009). 2. See, for example, http://soundscenography.com/post/94140598815/fruehling-erwachen-klangs zenografie-im-theater; http://xmodal.hexagram.ca/ projects/interactive-real-time-acoustic-scen ography-for-live-stage-environments; or http://www.hands-on-sound.com/?lang=en (all acces‐ sed 7 October 2014). 3. See Kahn (2001, 356–357) on the notion of vibrational space in Artaud ’s Le théâtre et son Double (1938). 4. Downing, speaking at the Theatre Sound Colloquium, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (RCSSD), Association of Sound Designers (ASD) and Royal National Theatre (RNT), June 2013. 5. Even though the editors Jane Collins and Andrew Nisbet include sound-related articles in their publication, in their introduction they define scenography as the ‘visual composition of performance ’ (Collins and Nisbet 2010, 1). In his dictionary article on ‘Scénographie’, Patrice Pavis speaks of scenography as an art form that is related to primarily visual art like sculpture and architecture, although his definition as ‘la science et l’art de l’organisation de la scène et de l ’espace théâtral’ (Pavis 2009, 314) might be employed to include the kind of ‘sound scenography ’ that my text is highlighting. 6. To comprehend the sonic dimension of scenography it is necessary to let go of the importance of visibility and visuality. In this regard the term ‘effect’ and the metaphor of ‘magic’ are central in Heiner Wilharm’s and Ralf Bohn ’s publication on scenography and its impact (cf. Bohn and Wilharm 2013, 19–20).

122



7. Because of the ascription of these qualities, sound was often described by the analogy to an ‘ocean’ in which the listeners are immersed (cf. Toop 1995). It is a traditional trope within theories of listening and sound and in my opinion it can be connected to and aligned with the proposal of further geological analogies in my text. 8. Scenographic elements and processes are perceived in two modes: in the semiotic and the performative dimension, because they can be understood as signs for something referred to on stage (i.e. a social setting) and they possess a specific materiality which can have an affective impact on the audience (cf. Fischer-Lichte 2001). The same can be said about ‘sonic scenography ’ as the sounds tend to provoke the ascription of a reference (of an ‘earthquake’, for example), while at the same time through their ‘materiality’ (which is their specific ‘sounding’), they might have a direct physical effect on the listeners. Both dimensions are only heuristically separable, but for the analysis of ‘sonic scenography’ it is important to differentiate them. 9. The music for Vienne’s Kindertotenlieder is produced live on stage by the collaborative project KTL, consisting of Stephen O ’Malley and Peter Rehberg. For Castellucci ’s The Four Seasons Restaurant , the sound design was created by Scott Gibbons. 10. They also do not fall into the category of ‘aural architecture’ because that term is defined as primarily referring to the way that architecture manifests itself aurally to the perceivers/ listeners, but not as the manner in which sound itself is used to actually create ‘architectural shapes ’ in space (cf. Blesser and Salter 2007, 2–3). 11. These are only a few examples of how sound actually shapes, or rather generates, the space of the performance. Many other works could be mentioned in this context. Also, I thank Adrian Curtin for highlighting that the theme of the 2014 International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR) conference was ‘Theatre & Stratification ’ and posed the question ‘How is theatre stratified? ’ (see http://iftr2014warwick.org/theme/ ). It emphasizes the relevance of further analysis of the forms and the impact of ‘sonic geology’. Besides a more metaphoric – historical, dramaturgical or social – employment of the term ‘stratification’, it could be shown that theatre can be concretely stratified sonically insofar as different ‘layers’ of sound are created and arranged side by side or intertwined in a complex manner. 12. To draw such a terminological analogy between audible and geological phenomena has its limits, as the materiality of the denoted phenomena differs in its specific qualities (as a visible rock is harder than a ‘rock-like ’ sound, etc.) and because these terms might only be applicable to a series of particular and highly distinctive theatre sound compositions. Still, in my opinion there is a lot to gain from this terminological analogy since it becomes possible to highlight the strong, diverse and complex affective impact some sound designs possess and it permits us to go further than just emphasizing the spatial and material dimensions of sound: it gives us tools to begin to differentiate certain shapes and forms of various sound spatialities. Even though a visible rock might be ‘harder’ in the way that we cannot pass through it, unlike a rock-like sound, the experience of touching the rock or being ‘ touched ’ by a rock-like sound might be similar and comparable. To employ the geological terms opens up the possibility to emphasize, describe and classify the affective, physical effect of the audible. 13. This could almost seem like an inversion of the relation of space and sound according to room acoustics after which the spatial proportions, conditions and the used materials define the resulting sound. In the mentioned examples, digital audio technology is employed to create sonically defined shapes and spaces. But instead of an inversion I suggest to assume an overlayering of different spatialities; the sonic does not erase the visual space, but they enter a relation of mutual influence and interference. 14. Regarding the question of methodology, it would be possible and interesting to continue this exploration in various ways, i.e. through further descriptive-interpretative analyses of listening experiences by theatre scholars, but also through empirical qualitative research, questioning the audience about their listening experiences to derive further ideas for adequate terms and further potential fields of analogy. 15. For some notable exceptions, see Kochhar-Lindgren (2006) and Kendrick (2011).

Theatre and Performance Design 123 Notes on contributors Ross Brown is Professor of Sound and Dean of Studies at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. He has been researching the dramaturgy of sound since 1994, prior to which he investigated it for 10 years as a professional composer and performer of theatre noise and music. Adrian Curtin is a Lecturer in the Drama Department at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and assorted articles and book chapters on theatre sound, music and modernism. George Home-Cook is an independent theatre practitioner-researcher, based in the UK. He is the author of Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).


Lynne Kendrick is a Senior Lecturer in New Theatre Practices at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. Her publications include “A Paidic Aesthetic,” in Theatre, Dance and Performance Training (2011), Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance co-edited with David Roesner (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011) and “Mimesis and Remembrance,” in Performance Research: On Technology (2012). Lynne is a founding member and trustee of Camden People’s Theatre, a north London venue that produces contemporary experimental theatre and performance. David Roesner is Professor for Theatre and Music-Theatre at the Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversity, Munich and has recently published his monograph Musicality in Theatre (Ashgate, 2014). Katharina Rost is currently finishing her PhD in Theatre Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin with a focus on listening and attention dynamics in contemporary theatre performances in Germany. Her main research interests are sound and listening in theatre performances, gender and queer theory, pop music and star images, performance theory, phenomenology and methodological questions of Theatre Studies. Nicholas Till is a theatre practitioner, theorist and historian working mainly in opera and music theatre. He is currently Professor of Opera and Music Theatre and Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Sussex. Pieter Verstraete is Assistant Professor of American Culture and Literature in Hacettepe University Ankara and Honorary University Fellow at the University of Exeter. He has published in Sonic Mediations (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), Performance Research (2011), Theatre Noise (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), The Legacy of Opera (Rodopi, 2013), and has also co-edited Inside Knowledge (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) and Cathy Berberian: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality (Ashgate, 2014).

References Appia, Adolphe. 1962. Musique et le mise en scène (1897 ), translated as Adolphe Appia ’s Music and the Art of the Theatre . Translated by Robert W. Corrigan and Mary Douglas Dirks. Coral Gables FL: University of Miami Press. Appia, Adolphe. 1993. “Actor, Space, Light, Painting (1919). ” In Adolphe Appia: Texts on Theatre, edited by Richard C. Beacham, 114 –115. London and New York: Routledge. Artaud, Antonin. 1958. The Theater and Its Double . Translated by Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press. Auslander, Philip. 2006. “Musical Personae.” TDR: The Drama Review 50 (1, T 189): 100–119. Bachmann-Medick, Doris, and Boris Buden. 2008. “Cultural Studies – A Translational Perspective.” EIPCP: European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. http://eipcp.net/ transversal/0908/bachmannmedick-buden/en. Balme, Christopher. 2014. “Szenographie.” In Metzler Lexikon Theatertheorie , edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte, Doris Kolesch, and Mathias Warstat, 347 –349. 2nd ed. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler.

124



Baugh, Chistopher. 2007. “Philippe de Loutherbourg: Technology-Driven Entertainment and Spectacle in the Late Eighteenth Century. ” Huntington Library Quarterly 70 (2): 251–268. Bentley, Eric. 1987. The Playwright as Thinker . 4th ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Birringer, Johannes. 2013. “Audible Scenography. ” Performance Research 18 (3): 192–193. Blesser, Barry, and Linda-Ruth Salter. 2007. Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bohn, Ralf, and Heiner Wilharm. 2013. “ Einführung.” In Inszenierung und Effekte. Die Magie der Szenografie, edited by Bohn and Wilharm, 9 –40. Bielefeld: transcript 2013. Böhme, Gernot. 2013. “The Art of the Stage Set as a Paradigm for an Aesthetics of Atmospheres.” Ambiances. http://ambiances.revues.org/315. Brown, Ross. 2010. Sound: A Reader in Theatre Practice . London: Palgrave Macmillan. Buck-Morrs, Susan. 1992. “Aesthetics and Anaesthetic: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered.” October 62 (1992): 3–40. Butterworth, Philip, and Joslin McKinney. 2009. The Cambridge Introduction to Scenography . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collins, Jane, and Andrew Nisbet. 2010. “Introduction.” In Theatre and Performance Design. A Reader in Scenography , edited by Collins and Nisbet, 1–3. Routledge: London. Combe, William. 1812. The Tour of Dr Syntax in Search of the Picturesque . Illustrated by Thomas Rowlandson. London: R. Ackerman. Curtin, Adrian. 2014. Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity. New York: Palgrave. Erlmann, Veit. 2004. Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity . New York: Berg. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2001. Ästhetische Erfahrung. Das Semiotische und das Performative . Tübingen and Basel: Francke. Forty, Adrian. 2000. Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture . London: Thames and Hudson. Home-Cook, George. 2015 (forthcoming). Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ingold, Tim. 2007. “Against Soundscape. ” In Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice, edited by Angus Carlyle, 10 –13. Paris: Double Entendre. Johnson, Samuel. 1749. “Prologue Spoken by Mr. Garrick at the Opening of the TheatreRoyal.” Bartleby.com. http://www.bartleby.com/333/76.html. Kahn, Douglas. 2001. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kendrick, Lynne. 2011. “Applied Aurality: Noise and the Aesthetics of Access in Graeae ’s Reasons to be Cheerful. ” In Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance , edited by Lynne Kendrick and David Roesner, 174–188. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Kim-Cohen, Seth. 2009. In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art . New York: Bloomsbury. Kochar-Lindgren, Kanta. 2006. Hearing Difference: The Third Ear in Experimental, Deaf, and Multicultural Theatre. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Langer, Susanne K. 1953. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key. London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul. Langer, Susanne K. 1957. Problems in Art . New York: Scribner. Le Corbusier. 1991. Precisions: On the Present State of Architecture and City Planning . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space . Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 1997. “From Logos to Landscape: Text in Contemporary Dramaturgy.” Performance Research 2 (1): 55–60. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. Postdramatic Theatre. Routledge: London. McKinney, Joslin, and Philip Butterworth. 2009. The Cambridge Introduction to Scenography . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



McKinney, Joslin, and Helen Iball. 2011. “ Researching Scenography. ” In Research Methods in Theatre and Performance, edited by Baz Kershaw and Helen Nicholson, 111–136. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Meisel, Martin. 1983. Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in NineteenthCentury England . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Meyer, Petra Maria. 2008. Acoustic Turn . Tübingen: Fink. Moholy-Nagy, László. 1932. The New Vision: From Material to Architecture . New York: Brewer, Warren and Putnam. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. Listening . Translated by Charlotte Mandel. New York: Fordham University Press. Ovadija, Mladen. 2013. Dramaturgy of Sound in the Avant-Garde and Postdramatic Theatre . Montreal: McGill University Press. Pavis, Patrice. 2009. “Scénographie.” In Dictionnaire du Théâtre , edited by Patrice Pavis, 314– 317. Paris: Armand Colin. Pavis, Patrice. 2013. Contemporary Mise en Scène . Translated by Joel Anderson. London and New York: Routledge. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible . Translated and with an Introduction by Gabriel Rockhill. London and New York: Continuum. Roesner, David. 2003. Theater als Musik. Verfahren der Musikalisierung in chorischen Theaterformen bei Christoph Marthaler, Einar Schleef und Robert Wilson . Tuübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Roesner, David. 2014. Musicality in Theatre – Music as Model, Method and Metaphor in Theatre-Making . Farnham: Ashgate. Stegemann, Bernd. 2009. “After Postdramatic Theater.” Translated by Matthew R. Price. Theater 39 (3): 11–23. Stein, Gertrude. [1933] 1990. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas . New York: Vintage. Styan, J. L. 1975. Drama, Stage, and Audience . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Symonds, Dominic, and Millie Taylor. 2014. Gestures of Music Theater: The Performativity of Song and Dance . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tabacki, Nebojsa. 2014. Kinetische Bühnen. Sean Kenny und Josef Svoboda. Szenografen als Wiedererfinder des Theaters . Bielefeld: transcript. Toop, David. 1995. Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds . London: Serpent ’s Tail. Toop, David. 2010. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. New York: Continuum. Varopoulou, Helene. 1998. “Musikalisierung aller Theatermittel? Postmodernes Theater und Gesamtkunstwerk!” Unpublished paper given at the Internationale Sommerakademie “Der Schauspieler als musikalischer Körper ”, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt am Main, August 4–15. Verstraete, Pieter. 2009. The Frequency of Imagination: Auditory Distress and Aurality in Contemporary Music Theatre . Enschede: Ipskamp Drukkers BV. Voegelin, Salomé. 2010. Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art . New York: Continuum. Weiss, Allen S. 1992. “Radio, Death, and the Devil: Artaud ’s Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu.” In Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde , edited by Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, 269–307. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Weiss, Allen S. 1994. Perverse Desire and the Ambiguous Icon . Albany: SUNY Press. Weblinks http://www.adriennequartly.com/ http://extant.org.uk/ http://www.fueltheatre.com/projects/ring http://www.lundahl-seitl.com/ http://www.melaniewilson.org.uk/

Sounding Out ‘the Scenographic Turn’: Eight Position Statements

Recommend Documents