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Performances

AURAL ACTS, SONIC DISTORTIONS

AT PERFORMANCE SENSORIUM
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 9 AT 2:00

THE SOUND FEAST

By Grace Overbeke

LIKE A STRAIGHT(?)
AMERICAN, TOUCHED
FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME
By Didier Morelli

SOUND = LIFE

By Eddie Gamboa

MUSE:REDUX

By Elizabeth Hunter

TRACK 2: LABOR REMIX

By Kelly Chung

AND THE CROWD

GOES WILD
By Bonnie Bright

PET SOUNDS
By A.C. Leone

NON-INVASIVE

By Jonathan Magat

GENIUS LOCI
By Liz Laurie

COMPOSING LISTENING
By Amy Swanson

Performance Sensorium
Performance Studies 515
Professor Ramn Rivera-Servera
Alvina Krause Studio
Annie May Swift Hall
1920 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL 60208
Phone: (847) 491-7315

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Friday, February 6, 2015

CONTACT: Elizabeth Hunter/(205) 999-4757/ebh@u.northwestern.edu
Jonathan Magat (650) 201-0410/jonathan.magat@u.northwestern.edu
(Evanston, IL) On Monday, February 9, 2015 at 2:00 pm, Dr. Ramn RiveraServeras Performance Sensorium seminar presents a free afternoon of short
performance works. Titled Aural Acts, Sonic Distortions, this event features ten
pieces that variously explore the performative dimensions of soundthat is, what
sound does, enacts, brings into being.
These pieces offer us an opportunity to meditate on both the role of listening and
sounds encounters with other senses. Offering a rich array of performances, these
artists invite us to consider how sound harnesses the potential to both create and
distort our sense of space, time, and memory. In doing so, they demonstrate how
sound not only exists, but resonates across multiple facets of our social worlds.
Grace Overbekes The Sound Feast begins the afternoon with a participatory
examination of sounds transsensorial properties. Staging a multi-course dinner party,
Overbeke tests the limits of Michael Chions description of sound as a transsensorial
phenomenon that can make spectators believe they have seen something they have
not. Extending this idea to senses other than sight, Overbeke asks how sound might
make us collectively believe weve tasted and smelled.
Didier Morellis Like a Straight(?) American, Touched for the Very First Time
also explores the potential and power of sound by repurposing sound iconic sound
bytes ingrained in U.S. American collective memory and popular culture, namely
Senator Joseph McCarthys 1950 speech Red Scare and Madonnas Like a Virgin.
Through manipulating and reinvigorating, Morelli looks to test the limits of
communicability and transmission of recitation as sound waves become distorted by
everyday substances and material objects.
Eddie Gamboa too mobilizes sounds from U.S. American collective memory in
Sound = Life, drawing inspiration from the HIV/AIDS activism slogan Silence =
Death. While this campaign was designed to spark particular conversations in its call
to action, Gamboas performance stretches its limits, inverting the terms to question
under what conditions Sound = Life. Noting that the possibilities of sex as a worldmaking project are often tied to visual or kinesthetic realms, Gamboa here turns to
sounds so often relegated to the background.
Background noise becomes inescapable in Elizabeth Hunters MUSE:Redux, an
examination of the echoes of her own performance archive. Hunter splices together
audio from her original Shakespeare productions at a landmark industrial site in
Alabama, newly captured audio from the same locations, and live speech,
interrogating the power of unavoidable sonic distortion to disrupt the cultural
authority of canonical text.
Industrial sounds permeate throughout Kelly Chungs Track 2: Labor Remix, an
exploration of the durational nature and its toll on the working, laboring body. Chung
also attends to the increasing absorption, cutting, and sampling of factory work by
current artists to produce experimental music. Through the convergence of digital

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audio synced with live movements and sounds, Chung examines how sounds of labor fill up and extend into space. In the
process, Chung prompts audience members to reorient how they hear labor by way of what scholar Alexandra Vasquez calls
listening in detail.
In And the Crowd Goes Wild, Bonnie Bright resonates with Chungs commentary on listening, asking how the listener
tunes-in to chaotic sound. Traversing the sounds of riots, protests, celebrations, competitions, and war, Bright attempts to
demonstrate how crowds are read through the ways they sound. Through audience participation and soundscapes of crowd
roaring, Bright also interrogates the processes by which audiences develop ideas of what occurs and whose bodies are
present.
PET Sounds, by A.C. Leone, similarly asks the audience to listen to and with each other. Leones performance hinges on the
sounds of the polysemic PET: the domestic animal with which many hold intimate conversations, Commodore
International personal computer, and Positron emission tomography scanners that fully immerse the living subject into a
machine. An orchestrated performance of forced closeness and sensory immersion, Leone asks how the non-human noise
begins not only to sound, but to "speak.
Similarly drawing on the sounds of biomedical technology, Jonathan Magats Non-Invasive continues exploring the
interplay of the chronically ill body and time. The Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine (MRI) are known by medical
professionals for its non-invasive capacity to capture images of tissue and by patients for its loud, jarring noises. Magat
comments on how, for the ill body inhabiting the MRI, jarring noises from the machine may introduce a rhythm of time not
only by virtue of its noise, but by way of its absencein turn heightening the sound of ones everyday bodily sounds, such as
a heartbeat or a breath.
Liz Lauries Genius Loci expands the breathing space to the borders of the academic classroom. Identifying everyday
noises that turn empty rooms into rooms that fulfill a specific function, Laurie isolates elements of the soundscape of the
classroom. Inspired by Toby Butlers analyses on composer John Cages work, Laurie seeks to highlight the background
noises that transition us from one purpose to another throughout the day.
Amy Swansons Composing Listening incorporates audience participation into her experiment in heightened listening,
seeking to uncover the often-overlooked communicative potential of non-verbal aural information. This work suggests a
future in which production is a collective, egalitarian effort, requiring attentive listening to oneself and to others, and in
which the means of production is valued more than any resulting object. Swansons performance concludes Aural Acts,
Sonic Distortions, encouraging audiences to question the potential and practice of listening in a world seemingly dominated
by the visual.
Admission to this event is free and open to participants and their guests.
Performances will be followed by a talkback with the artists, as well as a brief discussion of the pieces cited below.
Blesser, Barry, and Linda-Ruth Salter. Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?: Experiencing Aural Architecture. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2007. 1-9.
Kheshti, Roshanak. Touching Listening: The Aural Imaginary in the World Music Culture Industry. American Quarterly, 63,
2011. 711-731.
Copies of the documents for discussion will be provided upon request.
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