T H E AT R E

AURALITY
LY N N E K E N D R I C K
 Theatre Aurality

“Lynne Kendrick has presented those of us who think about theater and per-
formance a useful challenge, namely to reconsider the uses of sound in this very
sonically-ordered set of practices. Noting and describing how theater—despite its
name, which suggests it is primarily ‘a place of seeing’—has long been in reality a
place of hearing and listening, Kendrick gets us to think more broadly about not
merely what sound serves in theater but what sound does and can do in theater.
Grounded in solid historical and scientific scholarship about both sonic and
theater research, Kendrick also presents us with case studies of the most current
sorts of sonic practices in theater production and audience reception, from cases
using new technologies to cases using new twists on long-standing practices that
now demand new forms of audience attention. The result is a book that should
challenge a number of the preconceptions dominant in performance and theater
studies.”
—Prof. James Hamilton, Kansas State University, USA
 Lynne Kendrick

Theatre Aurality
Lynne Kendrick
The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
London, UK

ISBN 978-1-137-45232-0 ISBN 978-1-137-45233-7  (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-45233-7

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Cover illustration: ‘Ring’ by Glen Neath and David Rosenberg, featuring Simon Kane‚ Fuel
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For James and Jacob
 Thanks To

First and foremost, my thanks go to all the sound designers and com-
posers, artists and theatre makers who generously shared their practice
and processes; in particular, John Collins, Tom Gibbons, Chris Goode,
Matthias Kispert, Glen Neath and Maria Oshodi. Thanks also to those
who shared their latest thinking, through previews of forthcoming pub-
lications, keynotes, and much valued conversations, including: Andy
Lavender, Josephine Machon, Dan Scott, Andreas Skourtis, Martin
Welton, Sam Cutting, Lee Campbell, Jennifer Bates, Griffyn Gilligan,
Jessica Kaufman and Miriam Verghese. Particular thanks go to those col-
leagues who took the time to read drafts and give valuable feedback: Gilli
Bush-Bailey, Ross Brown, Maria Delgado, Joshua Edelman, Tony Fisher,
George Home-Cook, Alice Lagaay, Robin Nelson, Tom Parkinson and
Gareth White.
I’d also like to thank the producers, company managers and admin-
istrators whose help in sourcing images, scripts, texts and permissions
is invaluable, including: Louise Blackwell and Kate McGrath at Fuel,
Joanna Lally and Lou Errington at Extant, and Ariana Smart Truman
at Elevator Repair Service Theatre. I am grateful for financial support
from the Research Office at the Royal Central School of Speech and
Drama, University of London, and I owe big thanks to Becky Gooby,
Dan Hetherington and Sarah Carter for their advice and patience. For
their unstinting support of this publication, I give special thanks to Vicky
Bates and Victoria Peters, Paula Kennedy, April James and Jenny McCall
at Palgrave Macmillan.

vii
viii  Thanks To

Finally, thanks to all those who have lent their ears over the years,
from colleagues and students on the BA Drama, Applied Theatre and
Education, at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, who were
privy to my early research into aurality and noise, to those colleagues
and students at Central’s MA in Advanced Theatre Practice who have
immersed themselves in my ideas and practice around theatre aural-
ity and composition. But most of all, my thanks go to those who have
been listening long-term, in particular to Kate Bowe, Shaun Glanville,
Alex Mermikides, Mr and Mrs C.L.T. Kendrick, Victoria Wainwright and
James Snodgrass (who listened to the entirety of this book, from first
ideas to final drafts), and Jacob Snodgrass (who slept through it all). This
book is written in loving memory of Ben; thanks for your brilliance.
 Acknowledgements

Figure 1, featuring Simon McBurney in Complicite’s production of

The Encounter (by Complicite and Simon McBurney) at the Edinburgh
International Festival (2015), is reprinted with the kind permission of
Robbie Jack. Figure 3.1 (and cover image), with Simon Kane as Michael
in Ring (by David Rosenberg, Glen Neath and Fuel, 2013), is by
Suzanne Dietz and is reprinted with the kind permission of Fuel Theatre.
Figure 3.2, the ‘Auditory-Visual Overlap’ from Don Ihde’s (2007)
Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound is reprinted with the kind
permission of the State University of New York Press, Albany; and Fig.
4.1, featuring Scott Shepherd as Nick Carraway, Jim Fletcher as Gatsby
and Lucy Taylor as Daisy Buchanan in Gatz (by Elevator Repair Service,
dir. John Collins), is reprinted with permission from Tristram Kenton.
Figure 6.1 of Patrick Roberts wearing a spacelander suit and holding the
animotous of Flatland by Extant, director Maria Oshodi and Fig. 6.2
showing writer Michael Achtman testing the hospital zone of Flatland
(by Extant, dir. Maria Oshodi) photographed by Terry Braun, Braun
Arts, are reprinted with the kind permission of Extant Theatre.

ix
 Contents

Introduction xv

1 Aurality 1

2 Theatre Aurality: Beginnings 27

3 Listening: Headphone Theatre and Auditory Performance 51

4 Voice: A Performance of Sound 73

5 Noise: A Politics of Sound 103

6 Listening: Sonority and Subjectivity 133

Conclusion 157

Index 161

xi
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Simon Kane as Michael in Neath and Rosenberg’s Ring

(produced by Fuel Theatre, 2013), photograph
by Suzanne Dietz 53
Fig. 3.2 Don Ihde’s Auditory Visual Overlap (2007, p. 53) which
demonstrates how ‘the area of mute objects (x) seems to
be closed to the auditory experience as these objects lie in
silence, so within auditory experience the invisible sounds
(–z–) are present to the ear but absent to the eye. There
are also some presences that are “synthesised” (–y–) or
present to both “senses” or “regions”’ (ibid.) 56
Fig. 4.1 Scott Shepherd as Nick Carraway, Jim Fletcher as Gatsby
and Lucy Taylor as Daisy Buchanan in Gatz by Elevator Repair
Service (dir. John Collins), photograph by Tristram Kenton 93
Fig. 6.1 Audience member Patrick Roberts, wearing a spacelander
suit and holding the haptic device referred to as the
‘animotous’, in Flatland by Extant, (dir. Maria Oshodi),
photograph by Terry Braun 137
Fig. 6.2 Michael Achtman (the production’s playwright) testing
the Hospital zone of Flatland by Extant, (dir. Maria
Oshodi), photograph by Terry Braun 139

xiii
 Introduction

The Encounter

It is time to begin. The smallest thing, a sign, a gesture, an attitude is all it

takes to detonate peace. The voice in the centre sings this tranquillity; describes
and produces it; makes it, yes, but receives it also. This is a circular movement,
like mouth and ear for a single body, and this cyclical return is what produces
theatre itself, its form and its structure (Serres 2008, p. 87).

So if you’ll put on your headphones, and if I were to breathe in your ear your
brain would tell you that I was really breathing in your ear and it might even
start to get hot … (Complicite/Simon McBurney, The Encounter 2015).

It’s the opening night of Complicite’s latest production and, while

waiting for house clearance, Simon McBurney is onstage having an infor-
mal chat with the audience. He talks directly to us and we listen. And
while we fiddle with the Sennheisers in our laps, waiting for the show
to start, we don’t fully realise that it has already begun. By speaking,
live and unmediated, he brings our attention to what the production
will centre on—the sound of his voice. Our ears and McBurney’s voice
are the territory of what we are about to encounter, they will become
a circuit through which his, ours and other bodies may travel. This is,
as Serres’ quote at the beginning of this book suggests, the form and
structure of theatre, ‘like mouth and ear for a single body’ (Serres 2008,
p. 87). Although in this production there is no ‘single body’; the mouth
is of one body, McBurney’s, and the ear is of many others, the audience.
Yet he speaks only to us; it is only our ear that is about to get hot …
xv
xvi  Introduction

This ‘trippy aural adventure’ (The Guardian, 9 August 2015) was

Complicite’s production of The Encounter, for which the entire audi-
ence sat comfortably in their seats, alone together, with headphones on.1
While we watched director and performer Simon McBurney recreate his
encounter with Petru Popsecu’s book Amazon Beaming (1991), what
we heard was transmitted through headphones throughout; our audi-
ence to this production was entirely adjacent to our ears. The ‘encoun-
ter’ of the story was with Loren McIntyre, a photographer for National
Geographic, who in 1969 undertook a solo expedition to take shots of
the Amazonian Mayoruna who were, at that time, so rarely seen they
were rumoured to be extinct. This story of his discovery and subsequent
capture by the Mayoruna, of ritual and communication, of the spoken
and unspoken was played alone by McBurney with an arsenal of sonic
effects and a design/operating team that included Gareth Fry and Pete
Malkin. While on-ear and in-ear experiences have recently flourished in
arts centres, museums and in small-scale and alternative performance
venues, this was the first time I had sat in a largescale auditorium with
headphones on, which brought an intimacy to the experience of main-
stream theatre. This intimacy was not just an experience of auricular
close-up; the design for listening via headphones brought McBurney into
our heads because The Encounter was about the interiority of communi-
cation and the experience of languages heard but unspoken. The crea-
tive team wanted to recreate the feeling of this between McIntyre and
the Mayoruna because, as McBurney tells us, ‘empathy and proximity are
connected’ (Complicite/McBurney 2015, p. 7). The use of headphones
in this production was by no means a gimmick, or a case of tapping into
a trend of experience-led audience engagement; it was an entirely appro-
priate means for performing this story about hearsay (in all its attendant
meanings from rumour to telepathy), and it was an appropriate form
of audience because The Encounter was, in many ways, theatre made
through sound.
Though Loren McIntyre’s photographic quest was its subject, it was
sound that formed the material of The Encounter: the whole set was a
sound stage backed by a large cyclorama of acoustic baffle, that tex-
tured material found in anechoic studios, which forms a backdrop for
the production—not just for its sound but also for the projections of
the Amazon and McIntyre’s hallucinogenic visions of it. The space was
equipped with the usual sound designer’s kit, including microphones
of various kinds, effects pedals, one (never quite big enough) table,
snacks, Foley props, numerous bottles of water, a mobile phone, reams
 Introduction   xvii

of VHS tape (used to make sound, not for its visual content) and fea-
tured a binaural head centre-stage, which transmitted a live and loopable
feed throughout, around which McBurney created the three-dimensional
experience of The Encounter (see Fig. 1). The binaural head also played
its part in the production; not only did it at fleeting points stand in for
other characters, its presence as device for non-visual media stood for the
uncanny presence of the Mayoruna. The Encounter was self-consciously
theatre made through sound: it included a number of references to other
forms of sound performance; of solo music performance, of theatre in
the dark, even a few moments of ASMR2 featured in this production
that, at moments, also had the qualities of storytelling not unlike that by
the late Spalding Gray.
McBurney began The Encounter with a preamble that was part house-
keeping (such as, phones to be turned off), part technical test (are our
headphones on the right way round?) and also functioned as a pro-
logue for the production. Should we be new to headphone theatre, we
were quickly acclimatised to on-ear listening as a form of audience. The
relaxed, pre-show informality also prepared us for the particular collab-
oration about to take place between theatre and sound: in many ways
we were primed as much to hear Fry’s binaural sound design and live
production as we were McBurney’s performance. The extent to which
sound played a part in this production almost merited Fry and Malkin
credits in the cast list; as a note to the published text states, this produc-
tion was designed to be ‘performed by the actor and two sound opera-
tors’ (Complicite/Simon McBurney 2015, p. 3). This performance was
designed specifically for headphone listening, which also had the effect
of teasing apart sound from its source and/or visible reference points,
which in turn drew attention to the difference between the visual and the
heard, not by forcing them apart but through glimpses of the acousmatic
(those sounds whose source is not, or not yet visible). This arrangement
changed sound’s relationship to what we were seeing; if nothing else,
it made us aware that there is a relationship because we paid particular
attention to these sounds and how they referred to the visual. This estab-
lished a story that was staged in two modes in two seemingly distinct
places: first, the visual world played out at a distance on the stage in front
of us, and second, the aural world, which was at once intimately in our
ear and at the same time outwardly referring to the space we watched.
The aural space filtered the meaning of the visual world: what we saw
was entirely formed by what we closely heard. The sounds had an impact
xviii  Introduction

Fig. 1  Simon McBurney and the binaural head in The Encounter (Complicite/

McBurney 2015), photograph by Robbie Jack
 Introduction   xix

on what we saw, they did things to the visual action—in a way, they per-
formed.
In setting up for the show, McBurney also gave glimpses of the ways
in which sounds performed in this production, how they augmented,
often changed or even initiated action. For example, a physical action
only becomes the opening of a window when the sound of the traffic
outside is heard. These sounds could at one moment establish the fiction
of the story and, at the next moment, draw attention to their creation
by revealing their own fiction. To demonstrate this, McBurney replayed
some of the ‘original’ contexts of the sound recordings, some ostensi-
bly from his home, such as the frequent interruptions from McBurney’s
(then) five-year-old daughter. These moments punctuate throughout
to remind the audience that this production is, in a number of ways, a
story of fictions within fictions, encounters within encounters, and of
recorded pasts made present. The extent to which sound created these
layers of The Encounter suggests that, in this production at least, sound
had become for Complicite what gesture used to be. McBurney offered
his body in ways that invited the sounds in, but he didn’t illustrate them,
he wasn’t performing a sound track: his purpose was to lend body to the
story, which he did primarily through his voice. McBurney magicked a
world from the sound of his voice through a vocality that was entirely
mediated and modulated to effect a whole cast of characters to a sound
track of live and recorded, looped and composed sound. The Encounter
was a virtuoso performance of immediate and mediatised sound, and
McBurney was both its performer and conductor. This attention to the
ear, from a company so well known for physical theatre and subsequently
lauded for its visual production, was a significant moment in contempo-
rary British theatre.
While I am not suggesting a paradigm shift or that Complicite’s The
Encounter is evidence of some kind of new genre in theatre practice,
what this production did bring home to its audience was that sound in
theatre is going through a process of fundamental change; it is no longer
just a matter of (the often concealed) effect, it can affect the entire
means of its production and reception—it can constitute theatre. And
the practice of sound design has also changed: the designer is no longer
necessarily confined to a specific space, to certain times in the produc-
tion process, or indeed to a received idea of what the sound designer
role should be. They have, as designer Carolyn Downing put it, been
liberated from the confines of the ‘tech box’ and entered the rehearsal
xx  Introduction

room not just because their kit is portable (though of course this helps)
but because their practice takes place in/amongst and sometimes as the
rehearsal process (see Downing 2013). The art of theatre sound and its
potential is already apparent in the work of Gareth Fry, Melanie Wilson,
Scott Gibbons, Matthias Kispert, Ben and Max Ringham, amongst oth-
ers, and their positions as sound designers are as diverse as the practices
and processes they come into a collaborative relationship with; such as
Wilson’s solo performances and ‘sound pieces’ (for example, Landscape
II, Fuel Theatre, 2013) as well as her work with director Katie Mitchell
(for example, The Forbidden Zone, Salzburg Festival, 2014 and Cleansed,
Royal National Theatre, London 2016). One of the interesting conse-
quences of an art of theatre sound is that it is no longer exclusively the
craft of a designated designer. There are a number of directors and thea-
tre makers whose work is wrought through sound in some way; whether
this is a predilection for the sonic or a process entirely driven by sound:
from the sonic inventiveness and idiosyncrasies of Robert Lepage’s thea-
tre, to the incorporation of live music by Thomas Ostermeier or the bold
sonic choices of Vanishing Point, the potential for theatre sound is more
than apparent.3
There is a growing movement of sonic aesthetics in theatre, which
has recently come to a head—and the art of staging theatre sound on/
in-ear is a creation of a specific aural experience. Theatre such as this
is a reminder of the fact that, while we may be able to close our eyes,
we cannot close our ears.4 This difference in the practice of the senses
is often used to assert that the visual and aural worlds and our percep-
tion of them are not the same. However, from the perspective of theatre
and performance makers, the notion of sensory difference is less about
the absence of ear-lids but more about the potential of sound: as sound
designers Burris-Meyer, Mallory and Goodfriend put it, ‘You can shut
your eyes but the sound comes out and gets you’ (1979, p. 5).
There is a surge of interest in theatre sound and its perception, and a
flurry of recent publications have explored the histories of sound in thea-
tre and the phenomenon of audience, thereby extending the critical field
of enquiry, including: Ross Brown’s (2005) ‘The Theatre Soundscape
and the End of Noise’ in Performance Research and (2010) Sound: A
Reader in Theatre Practice; Mladen Ovadija’s (2013) Dramaturgy of
Sound in the Avant-garde and Postdramatic Theatre; Pieter Verstraete’s
(2013) ‘Turkish Post-Migrant “Opera” in Europe: A Socio-Historical
Perspective on Aurality’; Adrian Curtin’s (2014) Avant-Garde Theatre
 Introduction   xxi

Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity; George Home-Cook’s (2015) Theatre

and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves; and, more recently, Curtin
and David Roesner’s (2016) ‘Sounds Good’ Theatre and Performance
Design; Jean-Marc Larrue and Marie-Madeleine Mervant-Roux’s (2016)
Le Son du Théâtre for CNRS Éditions. Also, research into the theory
of theatre sound is recognised in Patrice Pavis’ (2016) The Routledge
Dictionary of Theatre and Performance. Aurality frequently features in
these publications, sometimes in thematic, sometimes in tentatively para-
digmatic ways: for instance, in 2005, Ross Brown identified a ‘new era
of aurality’ in theatre sound practice (p. 105); in 2011, Mladen Ovadija
used the term to capture contemporary sonic dramaturgy; in 2013,
Pieter Verstraete identified the ‘social force’ of aurality, which is ‘tuned
to social history’ (p. 188); and recently David Roesner and I collated and
commissioned a range of academic reflections on genres of theatre prac-
tice that suggested a field of theatre aurality.5 But what is theatre aural-
ity? Is this a category of analysis and/or practice, or just an umbrella
term, a riff or a turn? In order to explore this development in theatre
sound, I think there is an opportunity to bring theories of sound and
perception and the practices of theatre together in ways that articulate
what theatre aurality might be and why this has become such a pertinent,
urgent and often political form of theatre practice.

Why Theatre Aurality?

At first glance, the chapters of this book are about different forms of
sound in and as theatre, yet there are a number of reasons as to why the
term aurality is more appropriate for this study. One reason is that the
word ‘sound’ in relation to theatre remains frustratingly tied to the spe-
cificities of discipline and, as a consequence, its critical reach can become
a little restricted. For example, sound is primarily conceived of as ‘sound
design,’ which Brown points out is ‘not a dramatic or a performance
art [but] is quintessentially a theatre art’ (2010, p. 5). Once designed
and produced, sound can ‘be’ dramatic and/or performed, and it can
become a part of the acoustic environment and audience experience, but
in theatre analysis its creation is still treated as discrete from its mani-
festation. This partition between design and the theatre event can limit
the discourses of theatre sound implying that in order to understand the
design, it is best to be at arm’s length from the experience of it. But is
this possible? Sound often conceals itself in its effect; we are not always
xxii  Introduction

aware when we are amidst sound and this becomes a creative oppor-
tunity in theatre, a particular sonic sleight of hand that is used for spe-
cific affect. The covert properties of sound are not just elements of the
designer’s toolkit; they run through the histories and cultures of theatre
making in ways that mean we are not always aware of the fundamental
sonic nature of theatre. The sonic phenomena of theatre are voice as a
form of sound, the relations between voice and ear, the aural manifes-
tations of sound effects, feeling as a particular sonic hapticity, and the
‘other’ sounds of resonance and noise, and these demonstrate not just
the potential of sound in theatre but the sheer extent of its reach and
affect: its aurality.
Aurality encompasses sound and its reception in comingled ways
that often means the two cannot be separated—nor should they be. It
makes no sense to refer to sound without hearing it, and voices cannot
be talked about without engaging the ears upon which they fall. Sound
is active, it is mobile, it can move us and move through us, and any con-
sideration of sound is an encounter with it. Yet aurality does not draw
all aspects of sounding and hearing into equal and impassive relation.
As a field of enquiry, it is based on the specific productive and radical
possibilities of listening in relation to hearing, of the politics of noises
in relation to signal and of voices heard and those listened to. Aurality
refers, as Frances Dyson explains, to ‘the phenomenal and discursive field
of sound’ (2009, p. 6), not just to the phenomena of sound and per-
ception but also to the structures in which these occur, are bound or
exceed in some way. And this is the point about aurality, it is a mode of
engagement that—because it cannot be captured by the eye—can exceed
the boundaries by which our visible world is marked out for us: voice
can travel incognito in intimate ways or across great distances; radical lis-
tening can take place below the radar; and sound can redraw the spaces
and environments around us. Yet all these stealthy sonic relations have
purpose, particularly in the theatre, where voice, ear, body and space are
finding new relationships through sound because the normative modes
of speech and audience arrangement for theatre are no longer adequate
for the kinds of stories, experiences and ideas that radical theatre makers
wish to create. Audience has been reconfigured through sound and voice
has found new staging in relation to the ear.
At the heart of the theatre aurality enquiry is the practice and phi-
losophy of sound and its reception: its material creation and application
in theatre performances as well as critical investigations into the theories
 Introduction   xxiii

and phenomenologies of sound, and why these matter now, in forms

of sonic-led theatre that seek different relationships between image and
sound, text and voice, signal and noise, voice and ear, hearing and lis-
tening, sound and touch. These relations are not necessarily binaries but
forms of sound and perception that are more connected than they might
first appear. It is often easier to countenance sounding and hearing as
fundamentally different operations because it is notoriously difficult
to identify what sound—and our engagement in it—is. Writing about
sound can tie us in knots, therefore, to understand these reconfigura-
tions of our encounter with the sonic in theatre, it is often necessary to
draw on the languages of philosophy, which are complex, convoluted
and often poetic, abstract and metaphorical. But these languages are not
just theories applied or interpretations that isolate sound and elucidate
its reception, rather they reveal the fact that sound is so bound up in
the abstract that it is difficult to unravel. Just as it is impossible to talk
of sound without consideration of our perception of it, so it is no longer
useful to consider perception in isolation of the socio-cultural and politi-
cal contexts of hearing and listening. It is fruitless to think of sound as an
entity apart from its meaning—or the way in which it agitates, dissipates
or annihilates meaning—as Mark M. Smith points out: ‘Sound operates
as reality and as construction, sometimes simultaneously’ (2004, p. 366).
Twentieth and twenty-first century critical theory and philosophy
have begun to embrace aurality, not as an obvious alternative to visual-
ity, but as a form of engagement in its own right. However, the sounds
these theories analyse tend to be either of the so-called natural world:
for instance, the phenomena of ‘nature,’ such as the familiar trees fall-
ing in forests or the soundscapes of the city; or the resonant listening
of the normative body, such as cochleae or wombs; or if art is the focus,
then music is often the default choice. There is more fidelity in the theo-
ries of sound art and sonic studies that examine the very forms of art
their fields of enquiry suggest, and sounds of the digital and virtual arts
are frequently represented in media and cultural studies. Yet, theatre and
performance as artforms rarely feature in the theories of aurality, and
vice versa. Furthermore, the theories of sound used in relation to theatre
tend towards those that feature the all-too-familiar bells, birds and cock-
tail party effects; the usual binaries of sound source or sound received,
sound objects or events, attention or distraction, eye or ear. There is an
opportunity—if not a crying need—to reinvigorate the languages and
discourses for the analyses of sound in theatre and these may, in turn,
xxiv  Introduction

offer more appropriate examples of theatre practice for critical theory or

philosophy.
Re-examining the aurality of theatre facilitates a broader critical scope
because it draws on theatre’s materiality, hapticity and phenomenology
from the perspective of the ear. Based upon the premise that hearing/
listening and voicing/speaking do not take place in isolation (see Corradi
Fiumara 1995 and Cavarero 2005), the critical field of aurality focuses
on the relationality of theatre practice and engagement, from the sonic
sensibility of directorial practice to theories of listening and audience.
Some of the questions prompted by this field of enquiry include: How
are the acoustic spaces and aural territories of listening created through
theatre sound? What is a voice and how can it perform sound? Can noise
be re-produced and what demands does this make on us? What can
attention to acts of audience—sonorous perception, presence and reso-
nance, aural engagement and noisy assaults—tell us about how contem-
porary theatre functions and affects us? How does the sonorous world
invite experience, sensation and immersion? When is hearing passive and
listening active or vice versa? How can the theories of aurality, sound and
noise elucidate what contemporary theatre practice is?
This field of enquiry begins with an exploration of aurality as a criti-
cal and philosophical concept (Chap. 1) and explores the origins of this
in theatre practice, from early auralities through the histories of sound
in the formation of contemporary theatre practice (Chap. 2). Theatre
aurality is then explored through a series of case studies that make use of
innovative sound technologies (chapters three and six) or original sonic-
led processes (Chaps. 4 and 5), which demand new forms of audience.
These case studies are chosen because they all demonstrate how theatre
sound and our perception of it demand attention to their aurality. They
begin with listening as the primary, and arguably the only means of the
theatre encounter (Chap. 3); they then move towards voice as a per-
formance of sound (Chap. 4); through noise as a politics of sound; and
make a return to a form of listening that is the technological opposite to
headphone theatre, the inverse of the on-ear audience that explores the
open ear and the feeling of sound in performance (Chap. 6).
The case studies start from the perspective of the ear with analysis of
the auditory performance that is created by headphone theatre (Chap. 3).
Here, the subject is the theatre in the dark of Glen Neath and David
Rosenberg, specifically Ring (2013), and the auditory experience of bin-
aural recording and the auralisation of spaces and events that surround
us. It is a form of immersive theatre, which in many ways is deceptively
 Introduction   xxv

guided through theatre sound. However, exploring the auditory phe-

nomenology and physiology of listening to this form of theatre demon-
strates how immersion can be both omnipresent and directional, which is
also manifested by the ways in which the acoustic spaces of the produc-
tion are redrawn through sound as well as generated through the audi-
tory performance of our listening: audience is in many ways an act, and,
in immersive theatre practices, listening can be generative.
The lack of visual reference is obvious in theatre in the dark, yet it is
also a feature of the work that is the focus of the second case study on
the voice as a performance of sound (Chap. 4). Gatz by Elevator Repair
Service is an eight-hour long production of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The
Great Gatsby staged in a basement office in New York. The visual world
of the book springs from its interior as it is read aloud in its entirety, here
the voice is the form of sound that calls all aspects of this production into
play. Drawing on the theories of Mladen Dolar’s object voice, this chap-
ter asks what a voice is, what can it bring forth and do in theatre—how
does it perform, as a thing in and of itself (not as carrier of linguistic
meaning)? And where does the voice go, who is it for? This chapter also
considers its destination, not a Lacanian residue but the ear of another,
and this suggests that the voice is also an aural phenomenon. If the ear
is the destination of theatre aurality, the voice is often its bearer, not just
because of the obvious fact that this is what (by and large) makes the
performer audible, but because the relation between voice and ear is
particularly potent in sonic-led theatre practices—it has ontological and
political potential, which can be harnessed by their re-staging.
In many ways, Chaps. 3 and 4 explore intimate auralities, such as the
proximate sounds of headphone theatre or the familiarity of performed
narration in Gatz. To extend the reach of theatre aurality, Chap. 5 turns
the ear towards those sounds that are not so sotto voce but are chaotic,
disorienting and loud: noise. Through the theses of Michel Serres, noise
is explored as an agitatory entity and how this is manifested in sounds
that exert power—through amplitude, cacophony or disorder—in ways
that are designed to move meaning and shift our understanding. This is
noise as a politics of sound, and it asks in what ways can noise in theatre
be reproduced? In response, the chapter focuses on: noise as an organis-
ing principle, in the theatre of Teatr ZAR; noise as a methodology, in
the work by Chris Goode; and noise as a sonic entity, in the practices
of the contemporary sound designers Tom Gibbons, Scott Gibbons
and Ben and Max Ringham. These different manifestations of noise are
xxvi  Introduction

designed to make their presence felt; from the movements of their mate-
rial presence to the performance of a collapse of structure, noise is sound
designed to work on us—to demand something from us in ways that
cannot be ignored. Its very presence is a politics of sound.
The affective movement of sound is harnessed in the work that is
the subject of Chap. 6. Extant theatre, the UK’s leading company mak-
ing work for and by the visually impaired, has undertaken research into
theatre sound that can move its audience, literally, through an immer-
sive performance experience. They explore how can sound in all its
sonorous, sensual and sensitising potential form the audience experi-
ence? Can sound not only move us but allow us to move? How does
the sonorous world invite experience, sensation and immersion? When is
hearing passive and listening active or vice versa? Drawing on Jean-Luc
Nancy’s seminal thesis on listening and his theories of touch, hapticity
and syncope, this chapter demonstrates how sound in theatre brings its
audience into relation with a sense of their selves, as well as the other
selves that may be sensed. This invites a listening as a form of sonority
and subjectivity—how our engagement in sound makes us through the
performance experience. All this makes for a different understanding of
audience that theatre aurality invites us to perform.
Theatre aurality describes contemporary and emerging practices as a
critical field. This book explores some of these practices as situated within
the wider field of aurality, because these theatre makers are not only
making conscious use of sound, but are also intentionally creating work
within a wider aural frame. This is theatre which is crafted to be uttered,
vocalised, audited, reverberated, resonated, attended, captured and lost,
listened and heard. In order to explore how the theories of aurality,
sound and noise can elucidate what contemporary theatre practice is, the
following two chapters will focus on aurality and the beginnings of thea-
tre aurality and will ask why this form of theatre is emerging now.

Notes
1. The Encounter premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival 2015
and was performed at the Barbican Theatre, London in 2016, which is
where I saw the production. It was a co-production between the Barbican,
Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens; the Schaubühne, Berlin; Théâtre de Vidy,
Lausanne and Warwick Arts Centre, Warwick, UK. The book which this
production was based on, Amazon Beaming by Petru Popescu, tells the
 Introduction   xxvii

story of Loren McIntyre’s discovery of one of the few remaining indig-

enous peoples of the Amazon, which he encounters through different
modes of non-visual and non-linguistic communication, supposedly a form
of telepathy.
2. ASMR stands for the ‘autonomous sensory meridian response’ and refers
to streamed and downloadable performances of audio art and soundscapes
recorded for binaural replay. They often feature repeated, looped, low-fi
and close-up sounds of everyday objects and sotto voce voiceovers that are
designed to relax the listener.
3. For example: in Ex Machina’s The Seven Streams of the River Ota (NT
London, 1994), directed by Robert Lepage, personal conversations from
within a busy café were heard through a medical consultant’s stethoscope:
he held the chestpiece near to those talking, picking up snippets of chat
which was then transmitted to the audience, and as this scene progressed
towards a conversation about HIV infection, the reason for the presence
of the consultant became apparent. In the Schaubühne’s An Enemy of
the People (Barbican London, 2014), Thomas Ostermeier’s Dr. Stockman
held band practice for a cover version of David Bowie’s Changes; and for
Vanishing Point’s Interiors (Brighton Festival, 2012); director Matthew
Lenton chose to absent all sound from within a house staged behind a
glass screen, which had the effect of drawing attention to the performance
of sound and the aurality of theatre (see Kendrick 2015).
4. This well-worn phrase or ‘old theme,’ as Jean-Luc Nancy called it (2007,
p. 14) is thought by Mladen Dolar to have been first articulated by Lacan.
5. Some of the essays in this collection were developed from contributions to
the Theatre Noise: the sound of performance conference at the Royal Central
School of Speech and Drama in 2009. It was the first conference of its
kind to explore noise as productive and produced in historical and contem-
porary theatre practice.

References
Brown, Ross. 2005. The Theatre Soundscape and the End of Noise. Performance
Research 10 (4): 105–119.
Burris-Meyer, Harold, Vincent Mallory, and Lewis S. Goodfriend. 1979. Sound
in the Theatre. New York: Theatre Arts Books.
Downing, Carolyn. 2013. New Technologies in the Rehearsal Room: Sound
Design Process at Theatre Sound Colloquium (28 June 2013) London: RCSSD,
ASD and RNT, https://vimeo.com/75041793. Accessed 14 May 2016.
Kendrick, Lynne. 2015. Aurality, Gestus and the Performance of Noise In Sound
und Performance, ed. W.D. Ernst, N. Niethammer, B. Szymanski-Düll,
A. Mungen. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann Publishers.
xxviii  Introduction

Ovadija, Mladen. 2013. Dramaturgy of Sound in the Avant-garde and

Postdramatic Theatre. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University
Press.
Pavis, Patrice. 2016. The Routledge Dictionary of Performance and Contemporary
Theatre, trans. Andrew Brown. London and New York: Routledge.
Smith, Mark M. (ed.). 2004. Hearing History: A Reader. Athens and London:
University of Georgia Press.
 CHAPTER 1

Aurality

To ask what aurality is often prompts questions about what it isn’t, or

what it is assumed to be against: why distinguish between the aural and
visual, seemingly setting the ear against the eye and advocating for audi-
ence rather than spectatorship? The answer to this first question is that
aurality is not just about an alternative sense: an ear for an eye, or an
argument for hearing rather than seeing. It is not necessarily anti-visual,
just as visuality is rarely just a matter of sight alone. Aurality relates to
many states of hearing and listening, resounding and voicing, sonance
and resonance, moving and feeling but these do not necessarily preclude
the other senses. However, any sensual specificity does seem to neces-
sitate an explanation of how one incorporates the others, partly because
the idea of focusing on one mode of engagement is often assumed to
be at the expense of the others. One of the reasons for this assump-
tion is that it has become generally acknowledged, in sound and per-
ception studies at least, that historically there was no dominance of one
sense over another, even after the era of enlightenment that, it is often
assumed, consolidated the eye as the primary sense. At the same time
there was also, as Jonathan Sterne argues, ‘an Ensoniment’ (2003, p. 2),
whereupon:

sound itself became an object and a domain of thought and practice

[… and] hearing was reconstructed as a physiological process, a kind of
receptivity and capacity based on physics, biology, and mechanics. (ibid.)

© The Author(s) 2017 1

L. Kendrick, Theatre Aurality,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-45233-7_1
2  L. Kendrick

Moreover, the twentieth-century theories of perception and phenom-

enology offered a myriad of ways in which our senses coalesce, com-
mingle and blur in our encounter of and being within the world. These
holistic and gestalt theories seem like a good solution to the problem of
the sensory divide. Coupled with the fact that, as it is often assumed, all
our senses are firing away at once, one might ask is it possible to discern
between them? Tim Ingold sums up the futility of sensorial division thus:

the 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. (2007, p. 10, emphasis in
original)

But herein lies the problem: it has become commonplace to assume that
the world is fully available to all senses. This excludes the notion of dif-
ference, of subjectivity and the fact that we may not all sense in the same
way, nor experience the same world. For instance, the senses are divis-
ible for the visually impaired and the deaf and, moreover, the notion that
everyone perceives the same environment misses the point that artists
are prioritising sensory engagement for specific and often overtly politi-
cal purposes. We can’t ignore the fact that environments, spaces and art
objects are made for specific sensory encounters, particularly in contem-
porary theatre practice. The theatre performances that are the subject of
this book all involve purposeful sensory exploration that asks us to think
about how we engage in them—and it is not without significance that
these explorations are within the field of aurality. Not because they want
to advocate for ear over eye (though some, of course, do); nor because
they wish to invoke old arguments of ocular dominance. The theatre
makers referenced in this book use sound because it allows them to cre-
ate experiences that cannot be made visually, or if they were—they would
be something different. Furthermore, some of these theatre makers focus
on sound because they have something to say about the terms upon
which the visual takes place, how this is organised and produced and
what the ocular has come to represent. The visual remains problematic
and its problems can become apparent in the domain of aurality, exposed
and available for critical engagement. For this reason, it is pertinent to
remind ourselves of the concepts of the dominant eye and of how these
were conceived, because histories of ocularcentrism remain available,
despite modern debunking.
 1 AURALITY  3

Aurality can be considered an antidote for ocularcentrism because it

offers an alternative to the saturated image; it does this in stealthy, covert
practices as well as in overtly resistive and political forms. As such, ques-
tions about the inauguration and naturalisation of vision as the primary
sense are pertinent in order to explore the territories of aurality’s cri-
tique. Ocularcentrism is often assumed to be a veneration of the visual,
because it is through vision that the world around us seems to become
evident and also because sight appears to be the first sense that brings
us into relation to our world. Seeing, as John Berger (1972) pointed
out, not only arrives prior to language, it is a sense that ostensibly func-
tions before we know we are seen. Looking is the earliest encounter with
autonomy; our eye enjoys ubiquity before we are aware of ourselves
entering the gaze, whereas listening is arguably always for something,
right from the outset.1 Despite this intrinsic relation between the ear and
the world beyond ourselves, it was the emergence of vision in ancient
philosophy that forged an inextricable link between sight and object, as
our eyes were established as the chief means by which we cognate the
difference between ourselves and the world—between subject and object.
This primacy of sight has produced the notion that the world is only
fully known when it is visually evident, therefore sight—it was com-
monly thought—became something of a meta-sense. With ocularcen-
trism, other senses were marshalled in service to vision: touch augments
that which we see, smell affirms a pending visual presence, and we are
compelled to look for the source of a sound. However, though ocular-
centrism pertains to the sense of sight, it does not necessarily represent
all those who ‘see,’ rather it upholds particular structures of vision that
place the subject in a problematic relation to the visual object, which is
the world beyond it. The relations between vision as the preferred and
trusted mode of engagement, sight as the primary sense and the visual
world are not straightforward.
The idea of sight as the primary sense was predicated on the concept
of an eye—singular; that which differentiated between the external world
and the internal vision of it, but had little to do with the binocular per-
ception of the subject that actually sees. The ocularcentric monocular
eye was manifested as that which possessed knowledge or predicted it
through the particular advantage of foresight, such as the philosopher’s
inner eye of profound vision or the prophet’s prediction. Or the singu-
lar eye was thought to be external and of considerable power, such as
the omnipresent ‘all-seeing eye’. Ocularcentrism was formed by two very
4  L. Kendrick

different forms of access to vision: either the subject had the privileged
ability to see, or was subject to being looked upon, and this indicates
a hierarchy of vision that has complex beginnings. Martin Jay (1994)
attributes the rise of ocularcentrism to a bifurcation of sight into the
specular and the observatory, a demarcation of seeing that takes place in
the eye of the mind or through the eyes of the body. Similarly, Jonathan
Crary (1992, 2001) differentiates between the emergence of the spec-
tator and the observer, preferring the latter as indicative of a subject
who sees but whose looking is ‘within a prescribed set of possibilities,
one who is embedded in a system of conventions and limitations’ (1992,
p. 6). For both Jay and Crary, ocular engagement takes place within a
structure of vision, of regulated looking and managed spaces of specta-
torship that reveal profound differences and hierarchies between specu-
lation and observation—who sees what, what is seen, how and where
sight takes place—which not only promulgate vision as the primary sense
but also produce the apparatuses of visual engagement; these are often
referred to as scopic regimes.2
However, the idea of ocularcentrism was by no means a straight-
forward celebration of the eye and what it beheld. The preference for
the seen was rooted in deeply held suspicions of the visual world and
of the fallibility of our engagement in it. Jay draws attention to this as
an early fault-line in philosophical thought: for instance, he points out
that Plato’s claim that ‘vision is humanity’s greatest gift also warns us
against the illusions of our imperfect eyes’ (1994, p. 27), which is an
early indication of the now commonplace impoverished view of the ocu-
lar at the heart of ocularcentrism. The glorification of vision seems insep-
arable from the belief that the visual cannot be properly beheld, let alone
recreated. For this reason, Plato’s celebration of sight coincided with his
notorious mistrust of mimesis, most palpable in his aversion to the rep-
resentative capacity of theatre. These seeds of ocularcentrism uphold the
idea that the person who looks, the observing subject, is inferior to the
‘seer’,3 the person (for example, the philosopher or the prophet) who,
according to scopic hierarchies, is bestowed with the authority to look.
This is not just a case of formative control over the visual world by regu-
lation of what is seen—what art forms are permissible or not in Plato’s
Republic, for instance—or a determination of what vision is through ocu-
larcentric language. Rather, as Crary states, the ‘problems of vision then,
as now, were fundamentally questions about the body and the operation
of social power’ (1992, p. 3).
 1 AURALITY  5

Accusations of historical or modern ocularcentrism are not just an

effort to focus on sight as a politics of looking; sight was also a con-
tested site of engagement. In the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries,
physiological research revealed that the body processed the image of
the world through the apparatus of the eye and by means of ocular
assembly, and as a consequence, vision became understood as a form of
perception that was constructed by the observer rather than a straight-
forward reception and consumption of the external world. This ‘subjec-
tive vision’, as Crary terms it (2001, p. 11), posed a form of subjectivity
that was potentially autonomous and could possess the capacity to resist
scopic regimes in all their existing and new technological modernist
forms. The developing knowledge of how sight functioned also dem-
onstrated the ways in which seeing aggregated the visual, revealing a
form of vision that was durational and an observer that was perpetu-
ally engaged in the process of seeing. The proper business of looking—
attention—was merely one mode within an array of potential optical
distraction.4 This focal precarity produced a seer who, in turn, pro-
duced the visual in their own time as well as on their own terms. Thus,
the modernist observer became subject to what Crary has referred to
as ‘regimes’ (1992, p. 3) of visuality; these were the technological and
economic means of managing and maintaining jurisdiction over the
corporeality of vision. These regimes were manifest in the manage-
ment of the observer, not in terms of making them ‘see’, but of owning
the means of the production of seeing, something which altered and
adapted as rapidly as the observer was thought to be distracted. Crary
describes the extent of this as a form of ‘relentless abstraction’ (1992,
p. 2) of the visual in relation to the observer, which is not necessarily
the obvious consequence of technological advances but is a segregation
and autonomization of sight, which is then annexed and brought into
service in the form of spectatorship.

This autonomization of sight, occurring in many different domains, was a

historical condition for the rebuilding of an observer fitted for the tasks of
“spectacular” consumption. Not only did the empirical isolation of vision
allow its quantification and homogenization but it also enabled the new
objects of vision (whether commodities, photographs, or the act of percep-
tion itself) to assume a mystified and abstract identity, sundered from any
relation to the observer’s position within a cognitively unified field. (Crary
1992, p. 19)
6  L. Kendrick

One of the places deemed ripe for experimentation with spectatorship

was, of course, the theatre, which was commandeered for the demon-
strations of a variety of early phantasmagorias and illusory devices. Crary
argues that the emerging technological apparatuses (from magic lantern
displays to the early moving images of the Théâtre-Optique) and spec-
tacular spaces (from the Camera Obscura to Wagner’s Festspielhaus at
Bayreuth) created a form of spectacle that was more an ‘architecture’,
rather than ‘optics,’ of power (2001, pp. 74–75). As a consequence, at
the beginning of the twentieth century, an observer emerged whose ocu-
lar engagement was increasingly staged and frequently isolated, enabling
their attention to and, crucially, the circulation of visual consumption.
Crary makes the important point that, towards the end of the twentieth
century, the computer monitor successfully cohered the sites of specta-
torship and the means of circulation as an ‘effective fusion of surveillance
and spectacle’ (2001, p. 76). All these examples demonstrate the extent
to which the idea of the eye as problematic is embedded in everyday
looking, how our role as observer has become our default. Our position
as observer is concealed under the guise of a managed and structured
spectatorship in which we adopt modes of looking that bear little rela-
tion to our own, the extent of this is expressed in Laura Mulvey’s noto-
rious critique of the male gaze.5 These examples also demonstrate that
any turn towards aurality is not a simple rejection of the eye but of the
histories and hegemonies conceived in the idea of what sight was and
how this quarantined spectatorship and aesthetic experience. Therefore,
to engage in a critique of seeing, of visuality and spectatorship, is to cri-
tique the systems that maintain jurisdiction over the terms of perceptual
engagement.

The Absence of Aurality

The idea of a dominant eye—whether this produced ocularcentric his-
tories or not—has nevertheless had an impact on our understanding of
how the senses function and of what the senses ought to do, particu-
larly in relation to making meaning of the world at large. It is not that
the senses have exclusive qualities, but that certain discourses and phi-
losophies have, it is argued, become aligned with sensual function and
meaning. And those who advocate for the hearing sense—in all its man-
ifestations—do so because of the association of vision (rather than the
visual object) with meaning making. In philosophy, the primacy of the
 1 AURALITY  7

eye is intrinsically linked to notions of truth, but it is also emblematic

of the metaphysical obsession with meaning as being the ultimate cul-
mination of any act of sensual engagement.6 Meaning, it is assumed,
requires the evident, not the felt or the experienced. Yet, as Jean-Luc
Nancy points out in Listening (2007), this is a consequence of historical
metaphysical prejudice in relation to sensual engagement and how this
has directed our ways of making meaning and/or as sense, he asks: ‘Why,
in the case of the ear, is there withdrawal and turning inward, a making
resonant, but, in the case of the eye, there is manifestation and display, a
making evident?’ (2007, p. 3, emphases in original). Nancy draws atten-
tion to the fact that in philosophy the senses have frequently been set
against each other, with the visual and aural ones placed almost in oppo-
sition: the ocular makes sense of the world, whereas auricular engage-
ment senses it in reduced ways. One of the reasons for this is that hearing
is often considered an entirely internal affair, because sound (it is often
assumed) travels through the ear and is processed inwardly, therefore
hearing and listening are thought to have been isolated, solipsistic even.
Part of the problem is that the scopic control of looking, through the
practices of spectatorship in managed forms of observation, has rein-
forced the assumption that sight is the sense by which things, ideas and
meanings become evident: for example, the printed page is seen as the
voice captured in the visual object; or the endurance of vision when new
technologies offer ways of documenting what is heard, such as the visu-
alisation of sound into waves. To make matters worse, visual mediation,
by reinforcing the primacy of that which meets the eye, is in turn seen
as a denigration of the aural, which becomes indicative of sounds of a
pre-technological era—oral traditions such as disappearing languages,
or ancient song—which are captured for the eye and therefore saved by
visual means. Aurality on these terms became shorthand for notions of
primitive, pre-literary cultures, concepts which are much critiqued and
now largely dismissed.
The notion of sight as a dominant sense is fundamental to the idea
that the self is separate from the world. This autonomy has produced a
subject that can have an impartial impact on the world because they are
not in it; this is a direct consequence of the enduring notion that the eye
distances us from anything that is not of us and thus we are removed—
physically and philosophically—from it. Aurality, on the other hand,
brings all those qualities of auricular engagement—of feeling, movement,
immersion and multiplicity—to the forefront of our relation with the
8  L. Kendrick

world. These qualities of aurality are aligned with the idea of being in
the world, and not just because the ear is always open to it. The hear-
ing sense is not just an internal mode of perception and nor is listening
an individual endeavour of isolated contemplation. But nor are they the
opposite. Hearing exceeds definition because, as Frances Dyson (2009)
points out, it ‘is not a discrete sense, to hear is also to be touched, both
physically and emotionally’ (p. 4). The ear brings us into contact with
the world which, in turn, means we can be affected by it, as well as hav-
ing an effect upon it. Therefore, it is not so much the sense, but the
sensing possibilities of the ear that are thwarted by ocular dominance,
particularly when honed by listening, which renders the self open and
available to modes of engagement that invite exchange and dialogue.7
These are the qualities that a number of critics have argued have been
historically absent from metaphysical discourse. A significant critique
is offered by Gemma Corradi Fiumara (1990), who argues that listen-
ing is largely ignored in philosophy because of epistemic prejudice, an
‘unshaken faith in the validity of our own mother tongue—the rational-
ist tradition—[which] prevents us from seeing any different logical tradi-
tion because it is believed that it cannot be ‘logical’’ (p. 25, emphasis
in original). Any prejudice against the ear is ‘not merely a question of
understanding the power shifts from one epistemology to another: the
unavoidable philosophical problem lies in clarifying the preliminary inter-
actions behind the functioning of control mechanisms’ (1990, p. 3)—
and the culprit is logic, particularly its unassailable relation to thought
as manifested directly in speech. According to Corradi Fiumara, this is
a ‘thinking primarily anchored to saying-without-listening’ (1990, p. 3)
but it is futile to unravel the course of its absenting, not just because this
concept is so ingrained, but because listening cannot take place in such a
sealed, causal relationship:

it is significant that listening […] is either ignored by philosophical study

or, at best, touched upon fortuitously […]. We could, in fact, construe
that the absence of a philosophical analysis of listening is not the culpabil-
ity of any particular orientation, since the phenomenon might be consid-
ered as the peak of a desperate and silent need, an interrogative that is too
disquieting for western culture as a whole […] there is hardly any “logi-
cal” space left for the “hidden” but essential tradition of listening. (Corradi
Fiumara 1990, p. 29)
 1 AURALITY  9

The claims of an absence of aurality in philosophical discourse are

rooted in the lack of attention to listening: how can any theory of the
sensory in meaning-making take place without understanding the func-
tion of the hearing sense and its practices in discourse? Indeed, Nancy
raises the question as to whether philosophy is capable of this at all, sug-
gesting that there has been a profound misunderstanding of it: ‘hasn’t
philosophy superimposed upon listening […] or else substituted for lis-
tening, something else that might be more on the order of understand-
ing?’ (2007, p. 1, emphasis in original). He goes as far as to suggest
that received forms of philosophy require a neutralisation of listening,
that the privileged position of the former is a disavowal of the latter: the
very absence of listening has become a necessary condition of philoso-
phy. And ocularcentrism, as a sustained scopic trope of philosophical dis-
course, could be seen as a direct response to the radical possibilities of
listening, those particular aspects of aurality that possess agitatory poten-
tial. Both Corradi Fiumara and Nancy identify listening as potentially
responsive (open and available to exchange and discourse), explorative
(open to and seeking new meaning), and ethical (as the one sense that is
open to and available to otherness).
Dyson suggests that it is not so much the intersubjective possibilities
of aurality that are not represented in philosophy, but the potential of
these to blur the distinctions between feeling and making sense of the
world, and in doing so, to obscure the point at which a self is considered
to be separate from the object of the world, questioning ‘the status of
the object and of the subject, simultaneously’ (2009, p. 4). Hearing, she
asserts, is neither entirely internal nor external but crosses the threshold
between the two, and this is one cause of philosophy’s aural amnesia—
how can the world be understood if we are not entirely sure where it
ceases and ourselves commence? ‘Because of this,’ Dyson goes on to say:

the aural has been muted, idealized, ignored, and silenced by the very
words used to describe it. “Sound”—the term itself—is already abstracted:
there is sound, inasmuch as there is atmosphere; like a dense fog, it dis-
appears when approached, falling beyond discourse as it settles within the
skin. (2009, p. 4)

Any philosophical prejudice against the ear is also seen as a tactical deni-
gration of all that falls upon it, particularly a mistrust of sounds and their
10  L. Kendrick

capacity to circumvent the eye, to exceed the limits of looking and to

shake the terrain of our understanding. This prejudice has resulted in
an absence, which Dyson (2008) has referred to as a ‘sonophobia’ (p.
535) in philosophical thought.8 Such accusations demonstrate the extent
to which the regulation of seeing remains a concern, despite the recent
rebuttals of ocularcentrism as an outmoded critique of a more modern-
ist era that is merely bound up in its own terms. Whether the world can
be envisaged as ocularcentric or not it is difficult to dismiss the residual
inequalities of the senses, particularly in our understanding of meaning-
making and our sensory engagement in the world around us. These lurk
in the traditional distinctions between the visual and the aural, which
permeate contemporary thought about sensory engagement, for instance
in that nagging sense that the world is largely produced for the eye yet
appears authentic, more ‘real’ for the ear.

The Sensory Divide

Perception, as Ingold (2000) has pointed out, always comes back to the
problem of exterior and interior. What is considered to be ‘outside’ and
‘inside’ ourselves and how sensing takes place are the ways in which the
domains of self and the world are demarcated. There is the further prob-
lem of the thing seen and heard, of the identifiable visual object that is
seen and the sonic—subject, object, what should it be called? The indi-
visibility of sound makes for a less identifiable encounter with it; is hear-
ing only that which takes place within the apparatus of the ear, or is it
of the space around us in which our ear moves? Does hearing take place
through our skin, or is it neurological, vibrations converted? Our rela-
tionship to sound is slippery; though we don’t quite know where the
perceptual encounter takes place (within, without or across us), we are
more likely to believe what we hear. Ingold describes the paradox of our
uncanny relationship to sound thus:

Sound, it is said, reaches directly into the soul, whereas in vision all one
can do is reconstruct a picture of what the outside world might be like, on
the basis of light-induced sensations. But by the same token, we are more
readily convinced that we hear sound than that we see light. The objects of
vision, we suppose, are not sources or manifestations of light but the things
that light illuminates for us. The objects of hearing, on the other hand,
are not things but sounds or sources of sound. (2000, p. 244, emphasis in
original)
 1 AURALITY  11

The certainty that it is sound that we hear is at odds with our uncertain-
ties about its ontology. This is one reason why, as Ingold states, theories
of the senses refer to hearing and sight rather than the visual or aural—the
senses are easier to countenance, if nothing else. The common notion that
we hear sound (but don’t see light) reinforces the notion that sound, in
essence, is something else, somewhere else, of nature, is ‘natural’ and its
authenticity is readily available to the listener. Yet the idea of the ‘nature’
of sound is nevertheless a constructed one and, as Sterne has suggested,
the most common construct is that this is an ‘implied opposite’ (2003, p.
10) of technological reproduction. This reinforces the idea of a nature/
culture divide—sound is something natural, ‘static and transhistorical’
(Sterne, 2003, p. 14), which is mediated through cultural sonic experi-
ence—which in turn makes the task of understanding sound an unneces-
sarily elusive one. Instead, there are a set of assumptions about the nature
of sound, predicated on the idea of the sensory divide between hearing
and seeing which, Sterne argues, constitutes a ‘litany’ (2003, p. 15). The
basis for this is the physical and psychological model of the human sub-
ject—that ‘universal’ subject which, Sterne argues, is a consequence of ‘the
universalization of a set of particular religious prejudices’ (2003, p. 14)—
from which a series of familiar differences are metered out. It begins thus:

• Hearing is spherical, vision is directional;

• Hearing immerses its subject, vision offers a perspective;
• Sounds come to us, but vision travels to its object […] (2003, p. 15)

Here Sterne lays bare the seemingly logical idea that sound surrounds
because the physical act of hearing is a three-dimensional act, and that
this spherical experience is an immersive one. He continues:

• Hearing is concerned with interiors, vision is concerned with

surfaces;
• Hearing involves physical contact with the outside world, vision
requires distance from it;
• Hearing places us inside an event, seeing gives us a perspective on
the event […] (ibid.)

The relation between hearing and interiority—and, by association, with

immersion as a state of being within—is also, by dint of being the oppo-
site to vision, non-perspectival. The litany continues:
12  L. Kendrick

• Hearing tends toward subjectivity, vision tends toward objectivity;

• Hearing brings us into the living world, sight moves us toward atro-
phy and death;
• Hearing is about affect, vision is about intellect;
• Hearing is a primarily temporal sense, vision is a primarily spatial
sense;
• Hearing is a sense that immerses us in the world, vision is a sense
that removes us from it. (ibid.)

In the steady progress of hearing towards hapless immersion, we might

be forgiven for assuming that through hearing we become lost in the
world and therefore it is lost to us in any meaningful sense: either we
see it or we don’t. This is the problem that Sterne’s litany demonstrates,
that in pitching the aural and visual against each other, a choice is always
implicit. History, therefore, is assumed to be something that ‘happens
between the senses’ (Sterne, 2003, p. 16, emphasis in original). Sterne’s
point is that this inherited sensory divide is no mere historical and syn-
cretic difference based on ancient concepts of how the ear and eye func-
tioned, which was then consolidated by theological practice. Rather how
we listen—and by extension, what the nature of sound is—is bound by
the ‘unacknowledged weight of a two-thousand-year-old Christian the-
ology of listening’ (Sterne, 2003, p. 14). The consequences of this are
considerable, not the least the conflation of listening with hearing and
rudimentary ideas of surfaces and interiors. Instead, Sterne suggests a
move away from the consequences of interiority and proposes the oppo-
site, ‘because that elusive inside world of sound—the sonorous, the
auditory, the heard, the very density of sonic experience—emerges and
becomes perceptible only through its exteriors’ (2003, p. 13). These are
the social and cultural conditions of sound, in our understanding of it as
well as those that formed its production. What is revealing about Sterne’s
analysis is that it draws attention to the fact that interiority is tantamount
to immersion, within which a passive auditory experience takes place.
The sensory divide is also a partitioning of immersion and perspective,
whereas in theatre, immersion (as chapters three and six of this book
explore) is seen as a more specific, directed and meaningful experience.
Omnipresence is not an absence of direction (whether by intention or
design) nor is experience short of understanding. Yet the lingering con-
notations of sound as natural, loose and free-flowing, and listening as an
 1 AURALITY  13

interior, immersed and entirely experiential sense divert attention from

the contemporary practices and experiences of aurality and its presence
within critical discourse.

The Presence of Aurality

Ocularcentrism, in the form of scopic control or as outright sonopho-
bia, may be symptomatic of sensory hierarchies but it is not hard and fast
evidence of the actual absence of aurality in the practices and developing
discourses of modern times. Not all theorists consider history and phi-
losophy as essentially biased against the ear because it is reductive, if not
misleading, to conclude that a fascination for one sense is necessarily the
failure of another. Furthermore, sensory bias is not tantamount to sen-
sory division. In an extensive history of modern aurality, Veit Erlmann
(2010) makes the point that the study of the ear—otology—was as much
concerned with those qualities that are ordinarily associated with the ocu-
lar, in particular reason and truth, as well the sensations and experiences
of hearing and listening. For Erlmann the ear is so deeply connected to
understanding and experience that its philosophical potential cannot be
cleaved from its physical properties and our embodied experience of it:
he makes the point that the ear is ‘something we think with’ (2010, p.
24, emphasis in original). His theory of aurality draws on the materiality
of perception through the social and cultural constructed ear as a form
of Foucauldian ‘listener function’ (Erlmann 2010, p. 23).9 Via the physi-
cal properties of the ear, and the history of philosophical consideration of
resonance, Erlmann demonstrates how modernity is not so much centred
on the fascination with the eye but is conversely an era in which ‘we listen
only too well’ (2010, p. 15). Similarly, Steven Connor (1997) describes
the emergence at the end of the nineteenth century of a ‘modern audi-
tory I’, which is based on ‘a new kind of human subjectivity, which is
continuously being traversed, dissolved and remade’ (1997, p. 208).
This ‘auditory I’ is formed through the experience of new technologies
that transmitted the intimate, transporting selves that resonated through
spaces changing their shape, scale and intensifying their experience. Early
telephony and the arrival of the wireless rendered sound more of a sen-
sual affair, making its producing bodies more mutable and permeable.
For example, Connor makes the point that the telephone not only carried
the voice from afar but also transported the self in the process:
14  L. Kendrick

The new instability of the modern self, its understanding of itself in terms
of its interception of, and by, experiences, events and phenomena, rather
than its reception or perception of them, is frequently embodied in terms
of sound, and in particular electronically broadcast sound, rather than of
sight. (1997, pp. 208–209)

Connor’s aurally configured modern subject anticipates the postmod-

ern concept of deconstructed, performed and performative identities,
and this indicates that aurality plays a significant part in the route from
modernity to postmodernity.10
The emergence of a modernist aurality meant that the ear and its sen-
sory potential was not necessarily exempt from the systems that captured
and organised looking in the form of scopic regimes. For example, Peter
Szendy (2008) has drawn attention to the ways in which the copyright
of music and composition were also attempts at regulating listening.
The legislation involved in the reproduction of music, through print and
by performance, had the effect of censoring the art of listening, which,
according to him, became reduced to the more mundane functions of
interpretation, adaption and translation. The protection of composition
revenue was one example of an emerging ‘regime of listening’ (2008, p.
8) which, potentially, had similar consequences for the listener as ocular-
centrism did for the spectator. Szendy argues that the sensory capacities
of the ear for making meaning are thwarted and ‘forgotten, erased when
faced with the allegedly self-evident values of authenticity and author-
ship’ (2008, p. 34).11 For Szendy, in the case of music at least, the conse-
quences of this are far reaching and any proper consideration of listening
as an artform is thwarted.
It is difficult to legislate listening, but it is nigh-on impossible to cen-
sor hearing. The ear has a more feral relationship to the outside world
because we cannot see the act of hearing, unlike the visually evident
seeing-eye or the tell-tale signs of taste and touch. Even the nostril can
indicate the act of smell but the ear rarely signals that it’s sensing. This
is one reason why the auricular sense has evaded total commodification.
While the anatomy of the eye could be interpreted in ways that reinforce
the idea of the production of the image and the projection of the outside
world into the mind, the mechanics of the ear were not as easy to align
with sensory regimes. Aspects of the ear’s sensory practice have remained
elusive and, as such, the ear has not been so easily annexed and dislo-
cated from its sensing. The ear has maintained a relation to the listener.
 1 AURALITY  15

Listening is covert and stealthy, not just because it cannot be seen but
because, historically, we had less of a sense of what it was. As Douglas
Kahn (1999) observes, while the gaze has long been in circulation and
therefore looking has been available for scrutiny, the sensory practice of
the ear could not be countenanced to the same extent. He argues that
this is because hearing couldn’t be heard, not least until the advent of
technology:

Humans had always been able to see their own faces, see their own seeing
— ever since the moment of species consciousness when some very distant
relative looked into a pool. But it was not until the late nineteenth century
with the phonograph that people could hear their own voices (or reason-
able facsimiles thereof), if not hear their own hearing. (1999, pp. 8–9)

That being said, sonic technologies were not conjured up in a void: the
received ideas about the function of the ear, the process of hearing and
the notion that listening was a form of auricular focus directly impacted
upon their design, function and distribution. Nevertheless, sound
reproduction is crucial to the formation of the critical field of aurality
in many ways, not least because it makes content available and captures
the means of its production. Reproduction also makes sound available
for circulation, which allows investigation into the terms of this (and this
is explored in chapter two of this book). Sound reproduction also altered
our understanding of sound itself and, as a consequence, its relation to
aurality.

Sound: The Matter of Aurality

Questions as to what sound is, how it functions and in what ways it is
perceived are important to any analysis of aurality. In terms of theatre
aurality, the creation and production of sound is not only its material but
is also a process that gives rise to its critical questions, the most obvi-
ous and important of which is what does it mean to create and repro-
duce sound? Once partitioned by technologies, sound bifurcated into the
idea of the original and the produced. R. Murray Schafer described the
rift between the recorded and its source as a schizophonic split between
sound and ‘its electroacoustical transmission or reproduction’ (1994, p.
90). Before this, the traditional argument goes, there was no problem
with our understanding of sounds because:
16  L. Kendrick

Originally all sounds were originals. They occurred at one time and in one
place only. Sounds were then indissolubly tied to the mechanisms which
produced them. The human voice travelled only as far as one could shout.
Every sound was uncounterfeitable, unique. (Schafer 2004, p. 34)

Reproducibility brought sound into different material relations with

those who make it. No longer just the production of the body—as
speaker, player or musician—or of the environment that surrounds it—
of weather, of others, or of sound’s other—noise, sound could be cap-
tured and reheard. Yet sound’s material availability and the possibilities
of recording and replaying sound prompted a rethink of what sound
is: whether it is at all a ‘thing’ that can be manipulated and produced?
Whether it is an event, with an identifiable beginning and end? What
of persistent sound? Is sonic finitude a matter of hearing alone? Does
sound only exist upon its reception? A considerable amount of questions
have been—and continue to be—raised in relation to the ontologies,
processes and experiences of sound production, which reveal signifi-
cantly unsettled relations between that recorded and the record made.
For instance, Pierre Schaeffer’s (1966) sound object unshackles the
art of that recorded from a notion of source or origin,12 whereas Rick
Altman’s more heterogeneous manifestations of sound are a ‘particular
account of a specific event’ (1992, p. 16) which contain a considerable
‘discursive complexity’ (Ibid.) of all that which impacted on its creation
as well as that which is incurred upon its hearing. Sound, as Ross Brown
(2011) insists, ‘is a perceived phenomenon, nothing but subject infer-
ence’ and because of this he makes the point that ‘any meaning made
and exchanged through sounding and hearing is contingent, always, on
an aural presence’ (p. 4, emphasis in original). Brown’s aurality is not
just descriptive of sound’s reception; according to him, without aurality
‘there is no sound’ (Ibid.).13 Whether it is a thing, an object, an event
or hybrid object-event, or a scape, the myriad of sound material in turn
profoundly altered the relation between production and perception.
Just as technology radically altered our sense of what sound is, it also
changed the ways in which we sense our sense of what sound might be.
The new opportunities for the ear that these afforded, from Erlmann’s
‘listener-function’ to Connor’s ‘auditory I’, altered what was thought to
constitute an aural experience. This is because aurality is by no means
exclusively of the ear. It describes the affective capacities of air, ether,
touch, feeling, resonance that, in turn, extend the meaning of aurality
and remind us of its resonances—of the aural but also of aura.
 1 AURALITY  17

Aura-lity/Aural-ity
The term ‘aurality’ has divergent roots: it refers to ‘the quality, condition
or degree of being aural’ (Collins dictionary online accessed 3.10.16),
yet the ‘aural’ is both ‘of or pertaining to the organ of hearing’ and ‘of
or pertaining to the aura’ (OED 1989, p. 788). Aura is originally of air,
of the world around us ‘a gentle breeze, a zephyr’ (Ibid.), or an emana-
tion from a substance or an exhalation from a being. But it is also more
commonly associated with the presence of a being, from the ‘distinctive
impression of character or aspect’ to the ‘supposed subtle emanation
from and enveloping living persons and things […] the essence of an
individual’ (Ibid.). The latter association is one reason why the term aura
has tricky connotations in any analysis of theatre performances—particu-
larly in relation to the actor. Aura as essence is equated with the idea of
spirituality, and the presence of aura as distinctive and original. Walter
Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
(1936) is well known for consolidating this version of aura with the actor
(amongst many other important observations), and in doing so blurring
the link between aura and aural-ity in favour of notions of the presence
and authenticity.14 Adrian Curtin (referring to Benjamin’s particular res-
ervations about the phonograph and sound reproduction) addresses the
disconnection by making the obvious but important point that aural-
ity (in relation to the sense) is nevertheless ‘a key component of an art
object’s ‘aura’’ (2014, p. 70); yet any relation to the auricular sense—
or indeed of the sensing of air, of its movement and tactility—has since
paled in comparison to the eminent ‘aura’ as essence, in the business of
art (let alone theatre) analysis. Aurality as a quality, condition or degree
of the organ of hearing is, of course, in common usage but it has become
less commonly associated with what is heard, with the sonic phenomena
that give rise to it. In fact, as Sterne has pointed out, the aural (once
distinguished from the auricular) referred specifically to the inner ear
and had ‘a decidedly medical inflection’ (Sterne 2006, p. 11). Aurality
in its everyday circulation is more readily understood to be exclusively
about the auricular, as if the ear was distinct from the body as well as
that which it hears. Furthermore, aura as presence is not necessarily a
divergence from the auricular sense; indeed, Don Ihde (2007) consid-
ers aura as a condition of hearing that is revealed in the encounter with
the sounds of others. Ihde’s auditory aura is found amidst that particular
form of sound, which he considers to be both surroundable and direc-
tional—speech. He describes this as ‘a special kind of “shape” […] an
18  L. Kendrick

auditory “halo” or the auditory aura’ (2007, p. 79, emphasis in origi-

nal,) which exceeds the body of the speaker, fills up the space between
speaker and others and draws those who hear it into a listening relation-
ship with them. For Ihde, the excessive sonority of the voice is essentially
an auditory phenomenon that also resonates the speaker’s presence, an
aura which is fully realised when the listener engages. He explains:

The other, when speaking in sonorous speech, presents himself as “more”

than something fixed, “more” than a outline-body, as a “presence” who is
most strongly present when standing face to face. It is here that the audi-
tory aura is most heightened. (Ihde 2007, p. 79)

In drawing the auditory into a relationship with aura, Ihde also locates
this within the visual presence of the speaker and listener, but the fas-
cination lies in locating the invisible—the speaker may be seen but the
aura cannot, and therefore the only way to experience their full presence
is to engage in listening—to be in an aural relationship. This version of
the aural, then, is not at the expense of the visual; it is something else
entirely, which augments and potentially alters visual phenomena. In this
way aural-ity can become a political move, one which alters experience in
unseen ways.

Theorising Aurality
There are a number of theories that relate to the contemporary ontolo-
gies and phenomenologies of sound that invite contemporary theories of
aurality. Just as the idea of aurality became altered after modernity, so too
was it seen to be a condition of, or mode of engagement with, work that
has political potential. For example, Thomas Docherty (1996) considers
aurality to be a fundamental condition of postmodernism, particularly
of those art forms that resist or transgress the frames and boundaries of
the visual object.15 He places emphasis on the way in which temporal-
ity is manifest in aurality, how it becomes sensate, and one of the ways
in which this occurs is through anachronism—which relates to the ways
in which artworks contain a sense of their departure, passing or becom-
ing past in our perception of them. Aural anachronism, he argues, is
indicative of art out of time or out of sync (such as the compositions
of John Cage, Philip Glass or Steve Reich) and he relates to art that
involves a sense of catching up with itself or, as he puts it, to that which
 1 AURALITY  19

is ‘anachronistic with respect to itself’ (1996, p. 31). Docherty sug-

gests that such anachronism prompts hearing of sounds or things that
aren’t present in the work, and in this way our engagement in it becomes
something of a transgression in itself:

[The aural sense] has the effect of altering the work which it strives to
hear; this aurality is also marked by a tendency to heterogeneity or alter-
ity, for its major transgression is in its tendency to hear what is not there,
to make the work which is the object of its aural perception different from
itself. (Docherty 1996, p. 36)

Docherty’s potentially transgressive aurality is echoed in Dyson’s aural

alterity. She explores how the application of aurality in the analysis of arts
practice (particularly, in Dyson’s case, of digital, virtual and sonic arts)
reveals its material constructs, which in turn can provide ‘an opening to
an alternate metaphysics’ (2009, p. 5). Dyson’s aurality is not an alter-
native in itself but, she argues, paying attention to its material and phe-
nomenal constructs reveals the alterity of arts practice and illuminates
normative (and, I might add, often ocularcentric) default ways of reading
them. For example, it uproots the persistent assumption that practices
are necessarily representative in some way; for instance, that the copy is
the copy of an original thing. Both Docherty and Dyson readdress the
aural in aurality, and in doing so offer more critical versions of listen-
ing than the sensory divide suggests. These theoretical manoeuvres also
effect what Dyson calls a ‘reterritorialization of aurality’s mythos’ (2009,
p. 6), jettisoning its less critical ramifications and reigniting aurality’s
relation to the critical discourses it brings forth.16
The philosophies and theories chosen for the case studies in this book
are representative of a series of significant turns in critical thinking that
underpin aurality. Each places an emphasis on an aspect of sound and
perception that can be found in the orbit of aurality: including Ihde’s
auditory perception, Dolar’s voice, Serres’ noise and Nancy’s listening.
These also deal with the matter of sound in some way, whether this is
interiority (Ihde), the performance of sound that is voice (Dolar), the
annihilating capacity of noise (Serres) or the way in which sound makes
its presence felt through resonance (Nancy) to demonstrate how sound
moves beyond traditional notions of subject and object and Cartesian
versions of ourselves in a distinct relation to the world. The contempo-
rary philosophical move towards aurality, sonority and vocality demands
20  L. Kendrick

different configurations of subjectivity. For instance, according to Veit

Erlmann (2010), resonance is a considerable materiality, which disrupts
the rationale of Descartes’ model of reason:

While reason implies the disjunction of subject and object, resonance

involves their conjunction. Where reason requires separation and auton-
omy, resonance entails adjacency, sympathy, and the collapse of the bound-
ary between perceiver and perceived. (p. 10)

Resonance has emerged as an important part of that thinking which con-

siders subjectivity functions rather differently than the received Cartesian
model, which is divorced from the world. Resonance necessitates and is
necessitated by the world, by encounter, by exchange and in relation to the
other, but crucially it doesn’t require the separation between self and other.
Aurality, for Erlmann, is an important move towards the collapse of subject
and object, that tiresome separation of ourselves from the world that no
longer serves our experience nor represents our influence upon it.
The concept of the self as being both of subject and of object is a
tenet of phenomenology, the radical philosophical movement of the early
twentieth-century which, as Erlmann, amongst others, points out, drew
on aurality—sound, vocality, hearing and perception—in order to articu-
late the experience of phenomena and being.17 This book makes specific
use of phenomenological theory, specifically that of Don Ihde, and it also
draws on theories (such as those of Nancy) that critique the phenom-
enological notion of the intentional subject and bring experience to bear
upon the formation of subjectivity: sound is not an object encountered
but is an experience that forms us in some way. Aurality also identifies an
aural subjectivity, the self which can be constructed by sound—particu-
larly in performance. These subjects are not only defined by identity, but
they are also identifiable by their construction, as non-ocular, resonant,
mutable and (potentially) transgressive figures. And it is the aural sense
that makes this possible. As Connor states:

The self defined in terms of hearing rather than sight is a self imaged not
as a point, but as a membrane; not as a picture, but as a channel through
which voices, noises and musics travel. (1997, p. 207)

A theatre aurality can reinvigorate our understanding of audience by

rethinking and restaging our experience of it. It does this by examining
the terms on which audience takes place by laying bare its base material;
 1 AURALITY  21

through an exposé of listening by means of interrogating voice (not text,

linguistic meaning and so on) and perception (not spectator studies but
aural experience). But it also does this by making us its subject—literally,
as in the case of some participatory, immersive and theatre in the dark
productions—we feature and figure in the work. For this reason I often
refer to ‘us’ and to ‘our’ experience; not because I assume that we, or
our experiences, are one and the same, but because the type of engage-
ment I am describing is not mine alone and, furthermore, because the
idea of the plurality of audience is frequently played with in forms of the-
atre aurality that make material from the fact that, as an audience, we are
‘alone together’.18
As this chapter has demonstrated, contemporary theories of aural-
ity articulate the social, cultural and political field of sound, in response
to what has been perceived as an historical philosophical dearth: from
the modernist subjectivity of Erlmann’s listener-function and Connor’s
auditory I, to the postmodern auralities such as Docherty’s transgressive
form and Dyson’s aural alterity. A theatre aurality refers to the mate-
rial and philosophical ways in which theatre sound—in all its manifes-
tations—produces these. Theatre aurality is about the critical field of
sound and its production and perception, it recognises that these have
developed significantly for political and philosophical reasons. There is a
need for engagement and theoretical analysis of the forms, terms and dis-
courses of sound and all its incarnations in and as theatre. This book sets
out to begin this task.

Notes
1. An instinct for sonic communication is often attributed to the fact that
the hearing sense is active prior to birth; for instance, see Didier Anzieu’s
(1989) concept of the ‘sonorous envelope’.
2. Dominic Johnson (2012) identifies some ways in which significant
changes in scopic culture impacted on theatre production, including
Renaissance perspective and the introduction of manufactured power
in the industrial late nineteenth-century. These developments do not in
themselves constitute scopic regimes, rather these functioned as strate-
gies for the reorganisation of looking and, in doing so, created ‘an artifi-
cial hierarchy of visual styles’ (p. 25). Johnson also makes the point that
scopic regimes annex looking in ways that dislocate subjectivities from
visuality by naturalising ‘the fiction of politically neutral vision’ (Ibid.).
3. For her analysis of Visuality in the Theatre (2011), Maaike Bleeker prefers
the term ‘seer’ (p. 18) rather than ‘spectator’, partly because the latter
22  L. Kendrick

is more commonly associated with passive viewing, whereas the ‘seer’ is

associated with ‘insight, revelations, prophecy, second sight and magic’
(Ibid.), qualities of visual engagement that make the seer available for
new experiences and available for difference.
4. Crary takes issue with the modernist view of attention versus distraction,
that perception is a form of focus fought for from within a myriad of per-
ceptual potentiality.In response, he argues ‘that attention and distraction
cannot be thought outside of a continuum in which the two ceaselessly
flow into one another, as part of a social field in which the same impera-
tives and forces incite one and the other’ (2001, p. 51).
5. Mulvey’s (1975) critique of the male gaze is often mistaken as a the-
ory of gendered looking, whereas her analysis examines the particular
scopophilic regimes and modes of that directly manage how, where and
at what looking takes place in film, how men act and women appear.
Interestingly, Crary dismisses the gaze as a passive form of spectatorship,
whereas for Mulvey the gaze is rendered passive by a voyeuristic structure
that deems the visual object (the female) as possessing a quality of ‘to-be-
looked-at-ness’ (p. 843).
6. As Bruce Johnson (2008) argues, the point of visuality is that it renders
alternative modes of engagement redundant. ‘The scopic has become so
deeply internalised in intellectual discourse, its tropes so naturalised and
generalised, that we don’t attend often enough to the limits of “vision”
in modelling and accounting for human experience’ (2008, p. 43).
7. Daniel Z. Sui (2000) has demonstrated the significance of aurality with
geographical analysis and has placed particular emphasis on the ‘“dia-
logue,” “conversation,” [and] “polyphony”’ (p. 322) that aurality
evokes. Sui’s essay includes an overview of the emergence of aurality as a
direct consequence of the technological modern era.
8. Dyson makes the point that: ‘Despite contemporary critiques of the ocu-
larcentrism that shapes Western metaphysics, the phenomenological, aes-
thetic and epistemological perturbations that sound triggers have received
scant attention—a situation that is interesting in itself’ (2008, p. 535).
9. In his in-depth study of aurality, Erlmann demonstrates how the archi-
tects of modern ocularcentrism are less visually oriented than is often
assumed; for example, he makes the point that Descartes ‘did ponder
[…] the deeper association of sum with sonus’ to the extent that ‘instead
of the alleged exclusion of the ear from the search for truth, Descartes’
philosophy enacts an uneasy truce between cogito and audio’ (2010, p.
31 emphases in original). Therefore, Erlmann argues for the reinterpreta-
tion or ‘decoding’ of so called ocularcentric philosophy from the radical
position of the ear because ‘one might say that the listener is not sim-
ply the recipient of an indefinite number of significations that fill his or
 1 AURALITY  23

her hearing […] Rather, the listener is a function that fixes these mean-
ings with the goal of circumscribing and prescribing the auditory ways in
which individuals acknowledge themselves as subjects’ (2010, p. 24).
10. Mladen Ovadija (2013) uses the term aurality to identify a postmodern
alternative aesthetic because it is not only non-visual but it refers to that
which is not reproducible on visual terms; in this way, his aurality is post-
simulacra: ‘Our culture of work, trade, clear-cut communication, and
state authority relies almost exclusively on visual certainty and the graphic
encoding of words and signs. However, in the works of contemporaries
hungry for the authenticity and identity that are no more in the age of
simulacra, we witness “the postmodern renewal of aurality”’ (p. 51).
11. Interestingly, Szendy suggests that it was the shift of music ‘toward the
paradigm of theater’ (2008, p. 24, emphasis in original), in particular its
staging, that resulted in authorial legislation.
12. Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue (2005) offer a useful sum-
mary of Schaeffer’s objet sonore, including the ‘practical and empirical […]
interaction of the physical signal and the perceptive intentionality’ (p. 6)
of recorded sound.
13. Though Brown positions aural presence ‘at the eventual end of the signal
chain’ (2011, p. 4), which suggests that this is an outcome of the percep-
tual encounter, nevertheless his emphasis on aurality places both sound
and listening as co-present from the outset.
14. Benjamin’s analysis of the actor’s aura, that ‘aura is tied to his presence:
there can be no replica of it’ (1999, p. 223) serves his point that film—
as a mechanical mode of production par excellence—cleaves the audi-
ence’s experience from the art of acting not just because it isn’t present
but because it is produced ‘for a mechanical contrivance’ (1999, p. 222).
It must be said that Benjamin’s aim is to draw attention to the poten-
tial political and ideological threat for art in mechanical form and circu-
lation, as well as to demonstrate how modern art navigates and resists
the demands for reproduction and the auratic experience. However,
Benjamin’s critique, albeit focused on a transcendent multi-sensorial
experience of aura, is nevertheless bound up in the problems of its vis-
ual capture and circulation—and it is this that has certain consequences
for the aural. For instance, it is interesting that Benjamin considers the
later introduction of sound in film as an additional form of reproduction,
which only seems to double the actor’s task, rather than to introduce
vocality to the image.
15. Docherty is one of the few theorists who embraces the aural as politically
anti-ocularcentric material and as a discursive construct of contemporary
culture, stating that: ‘Aurality […] in postmodernism, replaces specularity
as a dominant determining mode of perception’ (1996, p. 36). Aurality
24  L. Kendrick

is not a binary alternative though, rather the aural sense and the restora-
tion of hearing is, as he puts it, a ‘re-versal’ (1996, p. 236) of modernist
spectatorship and its ‘dominant photological imagination’ (1996, p. 171
emphasis in original).
16. Dyson’s analysis frequently draws attention to the default rhetorical mani-
festations of critical discourse, in particular how the tropes of the aural
have become shorthand for the experience of art forms which, in turn,
reveal multiple ‘ideological assumptions’ (2009, p. 5). ‘From the assumed
authenticity of unmediated (virtual) experience, to the pseudoscientific
claims regarding human/machine coevolution, the aural motif recurs in
the reconciling figures of flux and vibration, the plenitude and absolution
of silence, and the alterity of noise. Because of the intractable mytholo-
gies surrounding the aural and the virtual, we find the phenomenality of
sound and hearing, and its sublime, transcendent, cosmic, and mythical
associations being transferred to new media—minus the analysis and cri-
tique they once carried’ (Ibid.).
17. As Dermot Moran (2000) sums up, ‘Phenomenologists claimed that
both the traditional concepts of subject and of object were philosophi-
cal constructions which in fact distorted the true nature of the human
experience of the world. Phenomenology claimed instead to offer a holis-
tic approach to the relation between objectivity and consciousness, stress-
ing the mediating role of the body in perception’ (p. 13). Bringing the
body rather than the mind alone into the heart of the process of phe-
nomenology also brought the aural and the sonorous (hearing, listening,
resonance and voice) to bear upon the phenomenological understanding
of being. The extent to which being and subjectivity were experienced
within the aural sphere was fully realised by Heidegger, whose existential
ontology is often attributed to otological bias which, as Erlmann points
out, is often misunderstood when considered only on the terms of anti-
ocularcentrism. Instead, Heidegger advocated for ‘a discourse of the ear,
one in which the ear itself becomes a “subject,” as it were: an ear that
“speaks and writes”’ (Erlmann 2010, p. 336).
18. William Kenney’s idea was that listening to early broadcasts was an experi-
ence of being ‘alone together’ (in Sterne 2006, p. 163), see also chapter
three of this book.

References
Altman, Rick (ed.). 1992. Sound Theory/Sound Practice. London: Routledge.
Anzieu, Didier. 1989. The Skin Ego. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Augoyard, Jean-François, and Henry Torgue. 2005. Sonic Experience. A Guide to
Everyday Sounds. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
 1 AURALITY  25

Benjamin, Walter. 1999 [1936]. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction. In Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn. London: Pimlico Press.
Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: BBC & Harmondsworth,
Middlesex: Penguin.
Bleeker, Maaike. 2011. Visuality in the Theatre: the Locus of Looking. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Brown, Ross. 2011. Towards Theatre Noise. In Theatre Noise: The Sound of
Performance, ed. Lynne Kendrick and David Roesner. Newcastle: CSP.
Connor, Steven. 1997. The Modern Auditory I. In Rewriting the Self: Histories
from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter. London: Routledge.
Corradi Fiumara, Gemma. 1990. The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of
Listening, trans. Charles Lambert. London: Routledge.
Crary, Jonathan. 1992. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in
the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Crary, Jonathan. 2001. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and
Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Curtin, Adrian. 2014. Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Docherty, Thomas. 1996. After Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Dyson, Frances. 2008. Silent Theory: Aurality, Technology, Philosophy. In
Critical Digital Studies: A Reader, ed. Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Dyson, Frances. 2009. Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the
Arts and Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Erlmann, Veit. 2010. Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality. New
York: Zone Books.
Ihde, Don. 2007. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound. Albany: SUNY.
Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood,
Dwelling and Skill. Routledge: Abingdon, Oxon and New York.
Ingold, T. 2007. Against Soundscape. In Autumn Leaves, Sound and the
Environment in Artistic Practice, ed. A. Carlisle. Paris: Double Entendre.
Jay, Martin. 1994. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century
French Thought. University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA.
Johnson, Dominic. 2012. Theatre and the Visual. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Johnson, Bruce. 2008. “Quick and Dirty”: Sonic Mediations and Affect. In Sonic
Mediations: Body, Sound, Technology, ed. Carolyn Birdsall and Anthony Enns.
Newcastle: CSP.
Kahn, Douglas. 1999. Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Moran, Dermot. 2000. Introduction to Phenomenology. London and New York:
Routledge.
26  L. Kendrick

Mulvey, Laura. 1999 [1975]. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In Film
Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readingsm, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall
Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham
University Press.
Ovadija, Mladen. 2013. Dramaturgy of Sound in the Avant-garde and
Postdramatic Theatre. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University
Press.
Schafer, R.Murray. 1994. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the
Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books.
Schafer, R. Murray. 2004. The Music of the Environment. In Audio Culture:
Readings in Modern Music, eds. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner. New
York: Continuum.
Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound
Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press.
Sui, Daniel Z. 2000. Visuality, Aurality and Shifting Metaphors of Geographical
Thought in the Late Twentieth Century. Annals of the Association of
American Geographers 90 (2): 322–343.
Szendy, Peter. 2008. Listen: A History of our Ears, trans. Charlotte Mandell. New
York: Fordham University Press.
 CHAPTER 2

Theatre Aurality: Beginnings

Histories of Theatre Sound

Though philosophy has sometimes been accused of ignoring that which
falls upon the ear, from latent aural amnesia to overt sonophobia (see
Chap. 1), theatre has had no such problem with the possibilities of lis-
tening. Prior to the advent of manufactured light and visual effects,
theatre was largely an outdoor event of auditory experience. From our
first gatherings as an audience, theatre relied entirely upon the effective
transmission of sound to reach the imagining ear. As obvious as this may
seem, this innate aurality of theatre is at odds with the most commonly
cited etymological root of theatre as a ‘seeing place’. Theātron (which
stems from the Greek theaesthai, which means ‘to see’) does denote a
‘place for viewing’, a particular site (whether natural or built) where
people are gathered to spectate; yet the same root term for spectator,
theōreein, is also directly related to theōriā—the root of theory—which
is a reminder that theatre is also a place of thoughts and ideas, of the-
ses and discourses, which invite modes of engagement and exchange
that are not necessarily visual. Of course, spectating took place in early
theatres and this is particularly evidenced by the mechanical illusions of
the deus ex machina or the scenic effect of the painted backgrounds of
the skene of ancient Greek Theatre.1 Yet theatre sound researchers have
argued that visual effects were a later addition to the Greek and Roman
theatres, which were initially designed to optimise the acoustics of an
entire performance.2 Furthermore, when visual effects were introduced,

© The Author(s) 2017 27

L. Kendrick, Theatre Aurality,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-45233-7_2
28  L. Kendrick

these were crafted for specific moments, such as entrances and inter-
ludes, and therefore these were for specific dramatic effect rather than
of theatre form. Early spectatorship was largely contingent on what
was heard, as Vitruvius repeatedly stated, theatre was for the ‘ear of the
spectator’: audiences gathered to listen to theatre being orated, solilo-
quised and sung by resonant bodies—actors, musicians and choruses—
and even the visual paraphernalia of Greek, early English Medieval and
Renaissance theatre, it is thought, also served the aural experience.3
Histories of theatre, from the formal Ancient Greek amphitheatres to the
performance spaces of Renaissance London, indicate that spectating took
place through theatre sounds, as it was voices that made visible the per-
formance. This is one reason why it is often said that Shakespeare was
originally heard rather than seen, that the text brought the visual stage
into view by being spoken within the acoustic sphere of our early the-
atres that optimised listening and assembled us for this purpose. Even
the onset of illumination, which made possible the scenic and pictorial
nineteenth-century stages and eventually shed light on its three dimen-
sionality, giving us the twentieth-century inhabitable, realist stage, didn’t
divert theatre makers from the potential of sound and the development
of the performance space as sonic—auditory and sonographic.4
From architecture to sound effect and eventually sound design, thea-
tre has a rich history of aurality which, despite its impact on our theatre
spaces and performances, has been somewhat obscured from the dis-
courses of theatre and performance. One of the reasons for this is that,
despite its origins in aurality, during the twentieth century there was
also a certain amount of industry resistance to theatre’s sonic potential.
This could be attributed to the rapid development of the visual stage,
in particular the early adoption of lighting technologies for which, as
Christopher Baugh (2005) points out, there was already a certain aes-
thetic logic, or ‘scenic syntax’ (p. 204) in theatre production. Yet the
reason lies more in the problems that sound technologies presented to
theatre practice, not just practical issues (though there were many of
these) but the medial, material and aesthetic challenges that introduced
entirely new production and performance techniques which, in turn,
seemed to expose the constructs of theatre. These suggest a different
aurality at play through the development of theatre sound: therefore,
this mapping of the beginnings of contemporary theatre aurality starts
with the disruptive nature of sound, in particular the introduction of the
effect.
 2  THEATRE AURALITY: BEGINNINGS  29

Contemporary theatre aurality as it is conceived of in this book, in

particular its material possibilities and critical potential, can in some ways
be traced through the development of sound production, particularly
the evolution of the sound effect. However, any link or particular causal
relation between technological advances and new forms of theatre must
be treated with caution; partly because as Jonathan Sterne (2006) has
so poignantly argued, technological design cannot be separated from the
existing ideas of what sound is and how we engage in it; but also because
there is no singular, traceable route from the introduction of technologi-
cal innovation to the art of theatre sound. There are a number of histo-
ries of how sound making became a theatre art and—more recently—an
art of theatre (some examples of which are the subject of this book),
some of these are entwined, others are quite contradictory, hence it is
more appropriate to speak of plural histories rather than discrete roots of
development. Nevertheless, the introduction of the electronic effect in
theatre practice is worthy of investigation because it reveals how differ-
ent ideas about sound production and its proper use in the theatre were
directly linked to deeply held notions of what theatre should be in terms
of its practices and its ontology.
Before the introduction of electrics to the theatre, the sound effect
was a very practical, mechanical endeavour of unseen, and therefore
often unacknowledged, offstage labour. In the UK, there are histories of
nineteenth and early twentieth century theatre architectures and docu-
mentations of performances that detail an array of inventive solutions
for mechanical sound effects and the performance that these required
to generate sound in the wings, which is now referred to as the art of
Foley.5 Sound making in the theatre was literally a practice of generating
‘noises off’, as the sounds required by the plays, melodramas and music
hall skits were often illustrations of the weather, atmospheres and calam-
ities that took place outside that being watched: torrential downpours
were simulated by rain boxes and wind machines, the pending entrance
of characters heralded by door bells rung in boxes and accidents out of
sight but within earshot produced by a well-timed clatter crash.6 Up
until the mid-twentieth century the practice of making sound effects was
more often than not the job of the stage crew or props managers, grap-
pling with cumbersome devices, some of considerable size, such as the
recently restored thunder run at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre, England.
The move from noises off to on—not just those obvious sounds that
could be made on the stage, but those which became a part of the
30  L. Kendrick

aesthetic—is often attributed to the development of the realist theatre

through modern drama and the infamous soundscapes, atmospheres
and spot effects that new member of theatre personnel—the director—
thought that Chekhov’s and Ibsen’s texts cried out for.7 But the techni-
cal craft of theatre sound was also was made possible through the rapid
and competing processes and formats of amplification, recording and
replay through the inventions of the microphone and telephone (1876),
the phonograph (1877) and the gramophone (1887). David Collison’s
(2008) detailed history of the theatre sound effect mentions the first
occasions in which a phonograph and gramophone were used in London
theatres: 1890 and 1906 respectively, although the amplifier and loud-
speaker were not available until 1927, there were enthusiasts who experi-
mented with the recording and replay of rudimentary effects including,
for instance, Tyrone Guthrie at the Old Vic Theatre, London.
However, though there was a certain amount of early artistic enthu-
siasm for the new technologies of electronic sound production, the fact
remained that theatre buildings and budgets were not built to house
sound creation other than that Foleyed in the wings. This was not just
a problem of early twentieth-century theatre logistics; the sheer poten-
tial of producible sound also presented a number of challenges to its
organisation. Despite the fact that theatre was arguably the first artform
of the sound effect, the possibilities of electronic sound actually caused
a hiatus in theatre sound production. In the UK in particular, there was
a significant lag between the introduction of the recordable and replay-
able sound effect and the emergence of sound design in theatre, and
this is often attributed to lack of investment. However, the delayed art
of sound in theatre, though sparsely documented, is nevertheless con-
tested. The most common complaint was that the equipment that elec-
tronic sound production required was inappropriate for the practicalities
of theatre production. The first dual turntable devices, such as the cue-
able Panatrope,8 which allowed operators to locate specific grooves in
discs and to switch between or alter the order of effects in accordance
with the inevitable variations of live performance, took up a considerable
amount of space and got in the way of what was deemed to be the more
essential business of the back stage. Those stage and artistic directors
who fought to make space for sound production did so with an acknowl-
edged element of risk as, unlike the sound studios of the film and bur-
geoning recording industry, theatres were dusty places that made it hard
to maintain sensitive equipment, which also quickly became dated and
 2  THEATRE AURALITY: BEGINNINGS  31

was expensive to replace. A prevailing sense of incompatibility between

available kit and working conditions was difficult to shake off and sound
creation and operation was, as recently as the turn of the millennium,
still a rather beleaguered endeavour, as John A. Leonard puts it, of creat-
ing ‘the best possible sound with the worst possible equipment’ (2001,
p. 2). Adverse practical conditions may well be to blame but the new
ways of operating effects, which were more often than not pre-recorded
from stock collections, also impeded progress as these required cueing
rather than playing, therefore their operation didn’t necessarily require
a specific member of the crew; as such there was little opportunity for
a sound specialist. Oddly enough, the lack of opportunity for artistic
development is also considered to be exacerbated by sound’s shift from
stage management to artistic theatre production as its operation became
the responsibility of those who were perhaps the least interested in it.9
Furthermore, the development of theatre sound is not easily traced
along the line of technological advances. For example, the introduction
of recordable magnetic tape and reel-to-reel players, which replaced the
disc and turntable and liberated sound effects recording, didn’t offer the
same degree of flexibility during performances because all aspects of the
sound effects (including duration, levels and so forth) had to be captured
on tape. This also changed the order in which final decisions around
sound effects needed to be made, nearly always earlier than directors
were prepared for, and, as such, some sound technicians felt that direc-
tors simply lost interest.10
The slow progress of sonic technologies in the theatre industry is
thought to be the reason why the mechanical effect has endured and
remains a feature of theatre sound production. However, the perfor-
mance of live sound was an important part of the effective introduc-
tion of electronic sound into theatre performances. Napier (1936)
described the limitations of early electronic sound effects discs in
both operational and aesthetic terms. Practically, the discs for gramo-
phones or the Panatrope could only hold effects of short duration so
any lengthy atmospheric sound involved fading between more than one
disc or device. Effects were expensive to record and print and, with a
limited supply of wind or rainfall to hand, the sound operator risked
the comic effect of audience familiarisation. If the theatre had only one
playing device then there was an additional risk that the effect would
draw to an abrupt halt while the operator frantically repositioned the
needle. Therefore, Napier advised that a cross-fade could be created
32  L. Kendrick

and repetitions disguised by the addition of vocal or mechanical effects

from the operators themselves. Moreover, Napier advocated the mix of
live effects with the recorded because sound effects discs deteriorated
and recording processes didn’t guarantee that the effect would sound
as it should.11 The mechanical effect remained a part of theatre sound
production not just because theatres found it difficult to accommodate
or afford new technologies; the sound operator’s performance also ren-
dered the electronic effect more authentic. Even recorded sound effects
were, more often than not, those performed or Foleyed in studios
because the capture of the actual sounds was notoriously tricky. Theatre
sound handbooks continue to recommend tried and trusted means for
recreating ‘real’ sounds with findable objects often combined with the
odd household appliance.12 The rustling of a piece of cellophane or an
empty crisp packet against a microphone is still the most reliable, cheap
and safe way to simulate a crackling fire—one of the traditional acts of
recordable Foley that feature in Complicite’s The Encounter (see also
Complicite/Simon McBurney 2015, p. 30). While the art of produced
sound effects may be attributable to technological developments, these
developments didn’t eradicate the presence of actual sounds—whether
these were effects of actors, as well as of operators, or happenstances,
sounds of audiences, or intrusions from the theatre’s exteriors. This
has produced a mix that is unique to theatre, one which Ross Brown
(2010) has called an ‘aural ecology’ (p. 31), which in turn produces its
own acoustemology of sound.13 The evolution of sound effects making
in theatre has always been a combination of theatricality, technical skill
and design—in part because there is a fidelity to certain traditions of
effects making, but also because these are considered to be more con-
vincing. Certain produced sound effects still lack the clarity in playback
that their live production can have, for example spot effects—the gun-
shot, for instance—are still made live (with blank cartridges) because
the recorded versions sound recorded and can be distracting from the
immediacy and the authenticity of the effect. And this is a conundrum
that has impacted upon theatre sound creation: that an electronic effect
is no substitute for the real sound unless it convinces us that it isn’t
an effect. This is not just a problem for realist theatre production, but
impacts all effects creation and operation as the sound technician navi-
gates the diegetic terrain: should an effect be perceivable as an effect?14
Though the pre-recorded effect can be perfectly synchronised it can
 2  THEATRE AURALITY: BEGINNINGS  33

also inhabit a dissonant space in relation to the stage, an agitatory and

noisy affect, a potential of which some of the sound designers featured
in this book take advantage.
The field of sound design in theatre emerged when sound had the
potential to affect more than the specific effect, particularly with the
arrival of the theatre mixing desk in the 1970s, which brought all
aspects of theatre sound into the design domain. The tools of sound
creation, management and operation signalled a shift in the position
of sound with the industry. David Collison, generally considered to be
the first theatre sound designer, progressed from the role of assistant
stage manager to sound operator at the Arts Theatre, London and col-
laborated with then artistic director, Sir Peter Hall, on producing and
recording different effects and experimenting with their playback in
performance. One of the principles Collison established was the neces-
sary shift of position of the sound operator from the theatre wings to
the auditorium, a very practical step that enabled them to monitor the
effects created. Yet this simple change of location was also a significant
repositioning of sound creation within the hierarchies of theatre pro-
duction, allowing it to sneak into the now established space of theatre
direction. As a consultant, Collison advised on the provision of sound in
new arts centre based theatres, establishing the positioning of the con-
trol room at the rear of the auditorium (at the Royal National Theatre,
London as well as regional theatres across the UK) and as such he also
inaugurated the theatre sound department (the logic being that when
there is space dedicated to the creation of sound, it requires someone to
run it).15
Throughout the twentieth century there were, of course, alternative
forms of theatre and radical performance that embraced sound technolo-
gies: from the onstage presence of Foley artistry in Dada and absurd-
ist theatre; the alterity of the sonic materiality of the avant-garde, to
the noisy possibilities of Artaud’s theatre.16 Yet the histories of sound
in mainstream (both commercial and subsidised) theatre practice were
contentious because sound’s presence exposed the ‘presence’ of thea-
tre: it could transmit, amplify and transform performances, and so the
question arose—what is theatre if it could be thus mediated? These ten-
sions between sonic technologies and theatre exposed anxieties about its
ontology.
34  L. Kendrick

Sound’s Affect
The art of theatre sound design was also built upon the controversial
possibilities of sound reinforcement. From the introduction of micro-
phones, speakers, multi-channel mixers and, eventually, MIDI systems
all aspects of ‘live sound’ could be augmented in some way. It was one
thing to produce sound effects or atmospheric soundscapes through
technical means, quite another to capture, mix and amplify all the sonic
material of a theatre performance. Despite the early adoption of tech-
nologies for audience engagement, for example, the théâtrophone in Paris
and the Electrophone in London, which allowed audiences to dial into
live transmission of theatre performances and listen in at large, it was the
arrival of sound reinforcement and reproduction within mainstream the-
atre practice that was significantly delayed to the extent that it affected
the industry’s place in the socio-cultural lives of its potential audiences.
Jean-Marc Larrue (2011) describes the consequences thus:

While Western theatre rapidly adopted the innovations that electric-

ity could bring to its lighting systems, it waited almost three-quarters of
a century — into the 1950s — before allowing electric sound to enter
its stages, auditoriums or creative process. It took barely ten years for
Edison’s incandescent bulb, invented in 1879, to sweep gaslight from
the great majority of Western theatre’s stages and halls. But seventy-five
years after Bell invented the telephone (1876), after Berliner (1877) and
Edward Hughes (1878) introduced the microphone and Edison the pho-
nograph (1877), reproduced sound remained a rarity in these venues.
During this period, thanks to the new technology, the cabaret, with its
singing and comedy (1936), radio (1920), and talking films (1927) expe-
rienced their phenomenal growth! Mediatised sound therefore spawned
three major media in less than a half-century — the record-phonogram-
phonograph system, radio and talkies, all of which weakened the position
of theatre in the growing entertainment field, which it had dominated
until then. (Larrue 2011, p. 18)

Larrue attributes the late arrival of sound technologies into theatres—

on stages and in processes as well as technological provision—to ‘medi-
atic resistance’ (2011, p. 20), impressing the point that it is the idea
of sound as a medium that presents a threat to theatricality, in par-
ticular the socio-cultural terms of its production, such as the norms
of what theatre was, and how it should be best communicated. Sound
 2  THEATRE AURALITY: BEGINNINGS  35

reinforcement in particular brought with it the possibility of reproduc-

ibility. A ‘public address’ system (and the PA system is still referred to
as such) is, of course, simultaneously a conduit for recording. The point
is not so much that theatre performances were recorded (either trans-
mitted for off-site audiences or illegally copied), but that the presence
of the mediating capacity of sound—whether in transmission or repro-
duction—in turn confirmed theatre as an art form that could not (or
certainly should not) be mediated. It is interesting to note that it was
technological, rather than architectural reinforcement, that consoli-
dated a difference between mediatisation and theatre. And this, in turn,
exposed the surprisingly persistent idea that theatre is still considered to
be exclusive to media: it is resolutely not a medium; it is live. Yet liveness,
as Philip Auslander (2008) has explored in depth, is itself a construct,
not an ontology. Liveness is not a neutral state vulnerable to exploita-
tion through reproduction. Rather, Auslander points out, that it was the
arrival of the reproductive media that in turn confirmed theatre’s status
as uniquely ‘live’. That liveness, rather than being the opposite of the
mediatised, is actually established by its potential for being mediated, not
just by incorporating sonic technologies, but by the fact that it can be
recorded and distributed. Seen in this way, mediatic resistance could be
considered a fear of mediatic potential, but also of its effect upon the
idea of the ‘original’, particularly the anxieties about the status of the live
in relation to its mediated state, something that the sonic technologies,
as considered to be so distinct from the visual effects of theatre, posed
a particular problem. The very presence of sound reinforcement brings
with it the potential for capture and the inevitable dilution of the original
that the notion of the ‘copy’ implies. Yet it is not only reproducibility, in
Walter Benjamin’s sense17 that threatens to erode the theatre ‘original’
but its reproducibility within the form itself, the immediate reproduction
of sound made by reinforcement in the live moment that constitutes the
theatre performance. It is the very presence of amplification that prompts
mediatic resistance because it alters the actor’s ‘presence’ by palpably
extending the voice beyond the body’s physical limits. The mediatic
resistance sustained by mainstream theatre production revealed a prob-
lem of theatre ontology, of ‘theatre’s episteme’ as Larrue puts it (2011,
p. 20), as the form which is created by the presence of the actor, on
steadfast definitions of what the presence of the actor is (auratic, mimetic
and poetic) and how this should be produced.
36  L. Kendrick

The problem of the amplified voice is not just a matter of consterna-

tion about the need for reinforcement (the prevalent notion that this is
something the properly trained actor shouldn’t need), rather that voice
in theatre is already a form of transmission. Prior to visual effect, it was
the job of the voice to transport the drama being played out. In many
ways the voice is the default medium of theatre: it is invariably consid-
ered to be the essence of drama. For instance, the voice is expressive of
theatre, it speaks its ‘truth’ via conventions of direct address or by means
of aesthetic pleasure, or it is considered to be that which communicates
theatre, as the carrier of linguistic meaning, the deliverer of dialogue or
the barer of a character. The voice in theatre has become so commonly
associated with its written material, that which is found in the drama if
studied closely enough or enshrined in a script if it is a record of things
spoken, that its theatrical purpose has become enmeshed with the vari-
ous functions of the text. The interesting consequence is that the thea-
tre voice has become dislocated from its relationship to the sonic. Tim
Ingold (2000) makes the point that our familiarity with the written word
has altered our perception of speech in relation to the sound that carries
it. Rather,

when it comes to speech, we are inclined to treat hearing as a species of

vision — a kind of seeing with the ear, or “earsight” — that reacts to
sound in the same way that eyesight reacts to light. Thus we are convinced
that we apprehend words, not sound. It is almost as though the sounds of
speech were seen rather than heard. (Ingold 2000, p. 248)

The introduction of sound reinforcement exposes the fact that the voice
is of sound not text, and that it is an aural phenomenon. For this rea-
son, the application of any form of reinforcement necessarily invites
questions about its effect upon theatre form because it throws the voice
into the aural sphere, potentially cleaving its relation to the actor. Vocal
amplification is not innocuous: it is always about extending the reach of
voice in ways that can be contentious and genre-changing. For exam-
ple, a mic-ed up actor is still considered to be a marker of musical thea-
tre not just because the mic can often be seen but because it is usually
mixed to provide lyrical clarity. The microphone is not of theatre-proper
where any reinforcement must be visually and sonically imperceptible.
Yet questions about the visible presence and levels of aural appropriate-
ness are tactics of coping with the ontological anxieties of employing one
 2  THEATRE AURALITY: BEGINNINGS  37

media—sound—to communicate another—theatre, one of the conse-

quences of which is that sound brings theatre in relation to broadcast.
The transmission of theatre and performance through broadcasting,
a more recent audience development strategy employed by New York’s
Metropolitan Opera and London’s Royal National Theatre (amongst
others) to extend the reach of their productions across Europe and inter-
nationally, has largely been a success. This is hardly surprising in an age
where audiences are more than familiar with the live as broadcasted. As
Auslander points out, contemporary audiences possess a knowledge of
mediatised liveness, they are informed by a kind of ‘media epistemology’
(2008, p. 36), and the ‘live stream’ of theatre performances is a form
of encounter that audiences embrace. Yet the notion of the broadcasted
voice, particularly in the latest UK and US referendums and elections,
has never courted so much mistrust and dismay. This is one reason why
the practices in the field of theatre aurality often focus on reconfiguring
the relation between voice and audience with forms of theatre emerg-
ing that alter the relationship of voice to ear through mediated sound.
For example, one radical alternative to the broadcasted voice is the inti-
mate vocality of on- and in-ear theatre techniques and headphone shows,
and this close-up or proximate voice features in the contemporary prac-
tices in this book for two key reasons: first, because, as a consequence
of sound technology, the notion of theatre space has radically changed;
and second, the voice has had to find other ways of navigating this sonic
space to circumnavigate broadcast. In an age when oratory is suspect,
the theatrical voice needs to be cast in a different relation to the ear so
that listening can take place on different terms. The proximate voice has
become associated with authenticity; for example, it is a technique of
verbatim theatre—a form of testimony via ‘narrowcast’ (Wake 2013, p.
321) that, because of its immediate relation to the ear, ostensibly quells
any extraneous performance other than that of giving voice to what is
heard. This approach has brought speech as sound into certain theatre
practices and a glimpse of voice uninterrupted by its incarceration into
the visual domain of the written word.
Any technology that augments by remediation or reproduces the craft
of the actor presents an ontological challenge. Yet mediatic resistance
also hints at the potential for sound to reinvent theatre, by introducing
new theatre material, by radically altering the terms of its performance
and introducing a new aural field of engagement. Sound’s potential to
challenge the ontologies of theatre indicates the presence of another
38  L. Kendrick

history of the sonic in relation to the stage: if sound conjured that which
was seen in early theatres then, as a consequence, sound’s function was
to serve the visuality of theatre production. Eric Vautrin (2011) points
out that, until the arrival of mediated sound, it was ‘directly linked to the
performance in its construction and/or its conventions’ (p. 141) whereas
‘as soon as we were able to record and diffuse sound, this enabled the
creation of fictional spaces outside of the stage’s boundaries’ (ibid.).
Vautrin maps the subsequent developments of what he terms an ‘acous-
tic dramaturgy’ (ibid.) which culminates in a theatre that can be almost
entirely driven by mediatised sound. This sonic history is concerned with
a form of theatre sound that is annexed to reinforce the visual spaces of
theatre production, a material hierarchy that is potentially toppled by
technology because sound is unshackled from its ordinary diegetic func-
tion, that is to support the (predominately visual) narrative of the stage.
Therefore, mediatic resistance may not be attributable to sound’s poten-
tial ontological threat, but marks the point at which sound created spaces
elsewhere, beyond the visual frame of theatre and entirely apart from it
by potentially carving out its own performance space and creating its
own diegesis.18
The concept of theatre as media, medial, multi or inter is already
explored in-depth from Auslander’s assertion that the ‘liveness’ of thea-
tre is already a mediated experience to Christopher Balme’s proposition
that theatre is a ‘hypermedium, that was always capable of incorporat-
ing, representing and on occasion even thematizing other media’ (2008,
p. 90). Perhaps it is the latent but potent effects of sound that forced
questions as to how the means of theatre (mediatised or not) produce
the ontology of it (live or not). Are the concepts of live and media so
mutually exclusive? Can sound—in all the ways it affects theatre perfor-
mance—offer other (more politically expedient) versions of what thea-
tre is? For example, theatre maker Chris Goode (see Chap. 5) offers a
sonic version of theatre’s mediated presence. For him, theatre is ‘a
medium with an inherently low signal-to-noise ratio: in fact, this is, to
a great degree, simply another way of describing the complex of con-
ditions that we normally identify as “liveness”’ (Goode 2015, p. 190).
Whether or not sound (in all its manifestations from voice to the sound
effect) is considered a mediatisation of theatre, the problem stems from
the association of sound with media and, in particular,  as a medium, and
one of the consequences of this is that there is a tendency to think more
about what sound serves in theatre rather than what it does. The other
 2  THEATRE AURALITY: BEGINNINGS  39

consequence is that the focus on sound’s utility in theatre has resulted

in a lack of critical discourse about it. Instead of defining sound as a
medium, what happens if it is considered as a theatrical phenomenon,
what of sound as performance? This will draw attention to what sound
does as well as what sound might be, or what constitutes it. Sound as
performance draws on the tenets of performance studies but also invites
performing (not just performativity) back into the equation. How is
sound—music, song, noise, voice—manifested by performance? And is
sound brought into existence not by its objects but by its performance?19
This is one reason why this book focuses on sound’s generative capac-
ity—to make, create and perform—rather than its mediatic function, to
transport that already made.

From Theatre Sound to Theatre Aurality

This book focuses on contemporary theatre that is formed through
sound in some way, including: that which makes specific use of the
sonic—from sound design to vocality—to affect the meaning and expe-
rience of the performance; theatre performances which are created
through a process of sonic and/or noisy practice; to those forms of thea-
tre which are made exclusively from sound and can only be experienced
as an aural performance. These contemporary practices are, of course,
not exclusive to this study and they frequently feature in contemporary
theatre and performance analysis and, as such, there are glimpses of sonic
possibilities and of the integral nature of aural engagement in current
research into contemporary theatre forms. For example, the potential
of sound in contemporary practice is seeded in Hans-Thies Lehmann’s
concept of postdramatic theatre, in which soundscapes, sound effects
and sonic spaces are frequently acknowledged as a core component of
the fragmented, heterogeneous, ‘theatre of states and of scenically
dynamic formations’ (2006, p. 68). In a study largely organised around
the ‘profoundly changed mode of theatrical sign usage’ (2006, p. 17), he
explores various and diverging examples of ‘auditory semiotics’ (2006, p.
91, emphasis in original), which can emerge from any part of the creative
process from directorial musical and rhythmic preferences, to design-led
sonic excess. However, Lehmann does find a commonality and that is a
‘consistent tendency towards a musicalization’ (2006, p. 91), something
that becomes a core means of expressing the ‘otherness’ of the postdra-
matic, and this is a particular approach to the composition and sonority
40  L. Kendrick

of theatre, which is a common directorial strategy for reinterpreting the

dramatic text. Music theatre and gig theatre20 are, of course, key forms
of contemporary practice that make much use of sound in overt ways.
The shift towards musicality (whether we consider this to be specific to
the postdramatic or not) took place at the level of process and method-
ology as well as production and this brought sound—as an aesthetic as
well as a discipline or skill—into the materiality of theatre (see Roesner
2014). One upshot of this is that analysis of music theatre has begun
to embrace aurality, aesthetically, politically and socio-culturally (see
Verstraete 2013).21
Theatre that is made exclusively for an aural experience (whether this
is primarily a vocal, aural or sonic form of theatre) is often referred to as
‘immersive’, and particular forms of this include theatre in the dark and
headphone theatre, some examples of which are featured in this book.
Immersive theatre is characterised by the sensory audience experience it
creates, by its affective capacity often generated through complex and
expansive design, including scenography, installation and technological
scapes involving both vast and minute spaces—and sound is frequently
acknowledged as a core means of generating the immersive effect. As
noted in Chap. 1 of this book, sound is most commonly assumed to be
an (if not the) immersive phenomenon, and so it makes sense that thea-
tre sound features in the analyses of immersive theatre practice. Indeed,
there is some attention to the potential of sound in creating this form of
theatre; for example, sound is explored as an effective means of estab-
lishing spaces and environments through sensation (see, for instance,
Welton 2012) and our aural sense forms a part of the multi-sensorial
audience that immersive practices invite (see, for example, Machon 2009,
2013). The immersive is identified by its association with interiority,
not just being inside certain spaces (such as the installations and perfor-
mances of Dreamthinkspeak or Punchdrunk), but of the experience of
being inside, of within-ness (see, for example, White 2012) of an interi-
ority that isn’t ordinarily apparent, which can only be available through
performance. It is these states of interiority, rather than sensate experi-
ences of effects, that constitute immersive theatre. I believe that atten-
tion to sound and its constructs enables further understanding of how
this interiority is manifested in performance (particularly its capacity to
sound interiors that are not available to the naked eye; see Chap. 3). The
territories of aurality as outlined in this book also figure in some of the
analysis of interactive and participatory theatre, because these forms of
 2  THEATRE AURALITY: BEGINNINGS  41

practice are often established by participation in the sonic aspects of the

performance, particularly that which requires its participants to speak—in
other words to give voice to audience. Participatory performances are,
by design, aleatoric and unfixed in form and (often to a managed extent)
in content, and it is the actions of the audiences that construct the per-
formance as they take place. Here, the languages of musicalisation and
sound become useful as ways of understanding the improvised sonority
of the performance; for instance, the audience as a compositional ele-
ment of it (see White 2013).
A theory of contemporary theatre sound could certainly be traced
through these (and many other) forms of contemporary theatre and per-
formance. However, drawing together (seemingly) different examples
of sound in theatre in pursuit of their aurality can, in turn, shed light
on what is shared by these forms of theatre—and why. These forms of
contemporary theatre and performance are characterised by some—if not
all—of the following: aural intersubjectivity, sonic presence, lack of visual
reference, sonic sensibility, non-visual spatiality, the corporeality and hap-
ticity of audience and that sound performs. There are a number of con-
cepts of sound which invite a theory of theatre aurality. In particular,
the development of the ways in which sound is formed in relation to
something whether this is a surface, a space, an interior, or is specifically
for another. Sound is social. It is also critically relational and, for some
of the theorists and philosophers featured in this book, it holds a vital
aural intersubjectivity, a destination which is always the ear of another
(Cavarero 2005) and the possibility of encounter with others (Nancy
2007). Theories of the experience of sound, in particular of sonic pres-
ence, in turn echo some of the key concepts of theatre engagement such
as: ‘presence’, ‘co-presence’, ‘liveness’ and, in actor-training parlance,
being ‘in the moment’. For example, Voegelin describes the temporal-
ity of sound as that which is not so much ‘always already’ but is ‘always
now’ (2014, p. 2). Sound is present—or it presents the present. As Jean-
Luc Nancy points out, the present quality of sound is significantly differ-
ent from the ‘present moment’, it is:

not the instant of philosophico-scientific time […] it is a present in waves

on a swell, not in a point on a line; it is a time that opens up, that is hol-
lowed out, that is enlarged or ramified, that envelopes or separates, that
becomes or is turned into a loop, that stretches out or contracts. (Nancy
2007, p. 13)
42  L. Kendrick

This ‘present’, he suggests, is one that is carved out by the materiality

of sonority, specifically its condition of space, and this leads Nancy to
conclude that ‘the sonorous presence is the result of space-time’ (ibid.).
Sound’s present, then, is made possible by movement, and this generates
a presence which is an ‘in the presence of’ (ibid., emphasis added). Sound
is also considered to be actual, or at least is an effective means of present-
ing actuality. For example, the word-for-word of verbatim testimonial has
gained currency on the contemporary stage because the voices it uses are
from the actual events being played out. The voice as an authentic sound
of the original event also circumnavigates the problem of inauthenticity
in witnessed or documentary theatre, something which the presence of
visual objects can exacerbate. Sound can be a useful solution to the per-
petual problem of mimesis (so often a matter of visuality) because of its
potential to take place in the here and now. In this way, sound invites
us into an aural present which is often associated with encounter, inte-
riority and immersivity and these are terms that are frequently used to
describe forms of theatre that are about sensual engagement and experi-
ence. Sound makes the present felt as well as makes its presence felt. It is
this materially generative quality of sound that has piqued interest in it as
a creative rather than as a mediatic force in theatre.
The lack of visual reference is most obvious in headphone theatre, thea-
tre in the dark, audio theatre and acousmatised performance. Yet this is
also a feature of theatre which is in some ways visually present, but which
stages specific aspects of its aesthetics through sound (see Chap. 4). As
certain chapters in this book explore, censorship of vision is not neces-
sarily absence of the visual but a destabilisation of the visual object that
is critiqued in particular ways (see Chaps. 3, 6). It places an emphasis on
audience, not by replacing listening for spectating, but by foregrounding
our relation to sound in the meaning-making process. What is revealed
in this process is not what sounds mean in and of themselves but what
might be known by means of them—culturally, politically—and what
their signification structures are. Aurality exposes the bases of our mean-
ing making. This becomes particularly apparent in audio walks and pod-
cast performances, which often rely on the presence of the visual but
frequently recast this by, for example, reimagining its function in relation
to what is heard, or unearthing its other, socio-historical visual presences.
In these forms of performance, the audiences are often aurally privy to
something else that lurks within the visual world; as such, through these
performances, the visual can be subject to change. Paying attention to
 2  THEATRE AURALITY: BEGINNINGS  43

the aurality of theatre demonstrates that lack of visual reference is not

an outright rejection of visuality but often forms a critique of the visual
dominance in theatre discourses. Therefore this book is not anti-visual;
rather, it explores the ways in which aurality allows us to re-examine the
visual, the terms on which it is constructed in theatre—and on whose
terms. For example, staging aural subjectivities can unshackle the body
from its appearance in the scopic sphere, as a visual object. Sound invites
aural engagement in which we are not so easily seen as fixed, or visually
determined, and aurality (as explored in Chap. 1) draws us into more
mutable experiences that are relational, changeable and sometimes consti-
tutive of the theatre experience.
The forms of theatre featured in this book are created by artists,
ensembles and companies who are acutely aware of sound and its poten-
tial: from sound designers, sonic scenographers and aural writers—for
instance, Scott Gibbons with Romeo Castellucci, Matthias Kispert with
Extant and Glen Neath with David Rosenberg—to directors who have
experience of the creation of sound in theatre practice, such as John
Collins’ work as sound designer for The Wooster Group and Chris
Goode’s artistic journey, which has included performance explorations
with his group Signal to Noise. These artists have a particular predilec-
tion for sounds, their generative capacity and their critical potential
in practice because of what they can unearth. This attention to and
approach towards the possibilities of sound Salomé Voegelin has referred
to as a sonic sensibility, which:

reveals the invisible motility below the surface of a visual world and chal-
lenges its certain position, not to show a better place but to reveal what
this world is made of, to question its singular actuality and to hear other
possibilities that are probable too, but which, for reasons of ideology,
power and coincidence do not take equal part in the production of knowl-
edge, reality, value, and truth. (Voegelin 2014, p. 3)

A sonic sensibility also hinges on sonic materiality, the consideration, cul-

tivation and generation of its substance and its material capacity to shape
and create meaning.
Theatre aurality also captures the ways in which sound creates the
spaces of sonic-driven performances. As this book explores (see Chap. 3),
sound has the capacity to establish and dissolve spaces, and produced
sound can accomplish this over considerable distances, bringing far flung
44  L. Kendrick

performance spaces to the proximity of the ear, making intimate the vast
and vice versa. Sound orchestrates spaces for audience in ways that visuality
would struggle to achieve. The creation of a non-visual spatiality is entirely
reliant on the bodies that inhabit those spaces: our bodies, as well as the
objects, surfaces and things that act as receivers, transmitters and resona-
tors of an acoustic event (see Chap. 6). For this reason, theatre aurality also
concerns the corporeality and hapticity of audience because any reception
of sound is some kind of embodiment of it. All of the approaches detailed
in this book incorporate corporeality in some way because sound requires
bodies and noise commandeers them. Any discussion around a critical
audience must countenance the sonic on corporeal terms, how percep-
tion can produce mobile bodies because sound not only moves through
us but can also literally move us. Theatre aurality is about the presence of
the body amidst perception, and the sonority and resonance, permeabil-
ity and motility of the subject amidst all this. The ways in which sound
works with bodies place an onus on us in establishing its meaning. We are
not mere receptors of or conduits for sound, we are its source at the same
time as its receiver, we can be both speaker and amplifier. Our bodies are
also the point at which sound manifests its meaning, and in this way aural-
ity requires performance—sound works on us (and vice versa) through its
form. These effects demonstrate the final characteristic of theatre aural-
ity: that sound performs, whether this is the creation of the spaces, fictions,
atmospheres and dramas made through sound or the disassembly of all
these through noise (see Chap. 5). The point is that sound in theatre has
particular performance (rather than performative) potential, to the extent
that it can take the part that the actor traditionally occupies.
Theatre aurality also describes the ways in which the ephemera of
sound are made and experienced, through resonance, hapticity and the
feeling of sonance as a corps sonore of audience. In this way, theatre aural-
ity also captures the substance of theatre, its materiality as well as the
immaterial ether of performance and our experience of this at its most
intangible moment because, as Connor (2007) has pointed out: theatre,
like sound, is of air.

Notes
1. See, for example, David Seale’s analysis of the Greek visual stage as a cri-
tique of the ‘visual austerity’ (1982, p. 12) which, he argues, was pro-
duced by Aristotle’s categorisation of spectacle as ‘the least significant of
his six determinant “parts” of tragedy’ (ibid.).
 2  THEATRE AURALITY: BEGINNINGS  45

2. Patrick Finelli (2002) is a firm believer that Greek and Roman theatres
were ‘all positioned for maximum sound efficiency’ (p. 13), citing the
theatre at Pergamum, Turkey, which is ‘built on a mountainside like a
trembling reminder of another age, it is the steepest theatre in the world
with seats at a 45-degree pitch […] This theatre has a special advan-
tage for high fidelity sound. Prevailing breezes that blow in from the
sea each afternoon in theatre season […] carried with them the actors’
voices up to the audience seated on the hillside’ (ibid). David Collison
(2008) makes the point that the back wall of Greek theatres was primarily
acoustic; made of wood, these were designed to reflect the actors’ voices
towards the auditorium. Only by the fifth century BC did this become
adorned in order to indicate ‘the place of action; the “skene” [which]
became the fore-runner of our modern idea of “scenery”’ (p. 5).
3. Vitruvius’ (2009 [original date c.27 BC]) architectural advice for the
most effective construction of theatre (once a clean site is found that is
not too exposed to the sun) is primarily based on the effective transmis-
sion of the voice, for it is the ‘ears of the spectators’ (p. 131) rather than
their eyes that must be reached. Vitruvius’ de Architectura confirms that
ancient theatre was primarily aural, with great attention to the acoustic
efficacy, the aesthetic variations of harmonics and the amplifying capacity
of sounding vessels, urns and vases that decorated the auditorium that
had resonant capacities (see 2009, p. 135).
4. For example, see Jem Kelly (2005), who proposes that Piscator’s twen-
tieth-century multimedial experiments ‘signal a paradigm shift from
staging performances that create “visual space”, to a new paradigm of
synaesthetic perceptual conditions commensurate with McLuhan’s theo-
ries of auditory space’ (p. 217).
5. Robert Dean (2013) makes the point that a certain amount of skill was
involved in operating mechanical sound effects machines because they
were not unlike rudimentary instruments and as such these required
playing, particularly as these effects were often just one component of a
whole composition: for instance, ‘the skill involved in operating a wind
machine is an important reminder that simulating the sound of wind
effectively did not require the operator to merely turn a handle. Like the
musicians in the orchestra pit, the wind machine operator in the wings
would need to respond intuitively to the scene as it unfolded, varying the
speed and rhythm of the drum’s rotation and altering the tension of the
material or wires. The operator would also be required to play alongside
and in conjunction with other wind machines and sound effect devices, as
well as the orchestra’ (Dean 2013).
6. Different intensities of rain, from light shower to torrential downpour,
were generated from a variety of different sieves and boxes containing
dried peas or lead shot, rotating leather strips around a wind machine or
46  L. Kendrick

by actually drizzling water into a trough. The clatter crash was made by
suspending various strung objects and wooden slats which were dropped
all at once in the wings.
7. The challenge presented by the sound at the end of The Cherry Orchard,
described as ‘the distant sound of a string breaking, as if in the sky, a
dying melancholic sound’ (Chekhov 2002 [1904] p. 346), is evidenced
by the fact that it features in a number of theatre sound handbooks (see
Napier 1936; Green 1958; Crook 2013).
8. David Collison points out that, though the Panatrope was the brand name
of the first electronic record player (Brunswick 1927), it became the
generic name for dual turntable desks during the 1940s and 50s and until
the 1970s sound cues in the UK were traditionally referred to as ‘pan
cues’ (see 2008, pp. 84, 111).
9. Collison describes how, in the UK in particular, when sound became an
artistic aspect of theatre production it was brought under the auspices of
stage management, and its operation was usually the additional task of
those members of the SM team whose main job was as an actor’s under-
study. Collison’s histories of theatre sound indicate the impact of such
practical and operational decisions: for instance, he refers to the union
rules in the US which specified that only chief electricians—already
charged with the responsibility for lighting—could handle turntables and
microphones. The ramifications of this are hinted at in Collison’s assess-
ment of the burden: ‘When a show moved into a theatre, the lighting
rig was normally completed before anyone thought of unpacking the
audio equipment—leaving little or no time for rehearsal. Making matters
worse, because the chief electrician’s main concern was for the lighting,
the responsibility for operating the sound equipment usually fell to the
most junior, or the most ineffectual, member of the electrical team. Quite
often, one or other of the lighting board operators would perform sound
cues between lighting operations’ (2008, p. 109).
10. Collison (2008, 2013) makes the point that the introduction of tape in
theatres in the 1950s altered the process of sound production, in particu-
lar its proximity to the creative process by changing where decisions about
effects needed to be made—in the sound studio and often well before final
rehearsals and technical runs: ‘But when tape came along, the director
was expected to make a final choice of what sounds he wanted, how they
were to be mixed, how long they should run and in what order they were
required, all in the antiseptic atmosphere of a recording studio. And all this
was to be agreed before the play was properly set in rehearsal. When the
tapes were played in the vastly different acoustic of the theatre, the mix
was inevitably wrong and the timings were out. To add to the frustration,
when the director wished to hear an effect recorded in a different part of
 2  THEATRE AURALITY: BEGINNINGS  47

the tape, he had to wait while the technician spooled backwards and for-
wards trying to locate it. The impatient reaction of many directors under
fraught rehearsal conditions, was simply to shout “Cut it”’ (2008, p. 160).
11. Napier’s guide for creating sound effects includes advice on how to incor-
porate those prerecorded, about which he is rather sceptical: ‘The very
means of recording and reproduction distort the majority of sounds, until
they are no longer true, giving them a metallic quality […] As a general
rule records are completely successful only when the sounds recorded are
metallic, e.g. car and airplane sounds’ (1936, p. 15). For Napier, the elec-
tronic effect was only one component of the sound operator’s technical
apparatus because it had an identifiable sound.
12. See, for instance, Neil Fraser (1988), which includes the wind machine,
thunder sheet, clatter crashes and advises that different off-stage terrain
can be suggested by footsteps in a tray of gravel.
13. Drawing on Steven Feld’s (2003) concept of acoustemology, Brown
describes how theatre sound creates ‘a culturally-defining repertoire’
(2010, p. 36) that is informed by its particular mix of the immediate and
mediated, which in turn produces an integral theatrical intermediality.
14. Collison (1982) makes the very revealing remark that sound along with
‘all the scenic and technical elements of a production must be designed
and executed so as to be integral and related parts of the whole. In other
words, the only justification for the technician’s existence is to serve the
performer’ (p. 10) ‘Good’ sound is often considered to be that which
goes unnoticed (for critiques of this see Curtin and Roesner 2016).
15. See Collison (1982, 2013).
16. See Curtin (2010, 2011, 2014) for in-depth analysis of Foleying, noise-
making and Artaud’s theatre and Ovadija (2013) for a sonic history of
alternative theatre from the avant-garde to the postdramatic.
17. See also Chap. 1 of this book.
18. Vautrin (2011) argues that considering theatre sound as an event becomes
diegetic because ‘it represents itself. It is neither illustration, nor illusion,
nor the expression of an idea, or innerness […] A diegetic sound event
enables sound to no longer be an image of itself, or an idea but rather
it becomes something which could link gesture, matter, concept, space,
movement and memories indistinctly’ (p. 144).
19. Auslander (2015) takes a stand against disciplinarity and proposes that
‘music and its performance [are] inextricably imbricated with one
another’ (p. 534) and that music is not so much that produced by the
skill of playing, of which the performance is its expression, but ‘“is” what
musicians “do”’ (p. 541).
20. In the UK, ‘gig theatre’ is a term used to refer to performances that are
a hybrid of theatre and a music gig, to those which incorporate live or
48  L. Kendrick

recorded sound, and are identifiable by the presence of a single mic. Gig
theatre also refers to the economy of the ‘one-night-only’ theatre event;
the bare minimum of performance that is possible to muster in the cur-
rent times of austerity. Like the gig economy, gig theatre is the result of
precarity in the theatre industry, it is a phrase that articulates the prob-
lems that the gig format present to performers and programmers alike,
but it is also a form of performance embraced by risky and radical theatre
makers who are drawn to the possibilities that the one-off event uniquely
presents.
21. Pieter Verstraete (2013) is emphatic about the aurality of music theatre
and opera, and here’s why: ‘I take as axiomatic the link between music
theatre and aurality—that part of our cultural discourse that both ena-
bles and disciplines the values, norms, meanings and opinions related to
listening, not just in our aesthetic encounters in the auditorium but also
everywhere else in our daily lives. I take it as a given that in their arrange-
ment of sound within the particular construct of representation, opera
and music theatre can display the secret workings of aurality’ (p. 187).

References
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London: Routledge.
Auslander, Philip. 2015. Music as Performance: The Disciplinary Dilemma
Revisited. In Sound und Performance, ed. Ernst, W.D., Niethammer, N.,
Szymanski-Düll, B., and Mungen, A. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.
Balme, Christopher. 2008. Surrogate Stages: Theatre, Performance and the
Challenge of New Media. Performance Research 13 (2): 80–91.
Baugh, Christopher. 2005. Theatre, Performance and Technology: The
Development of Scenography in the Twentieth Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Brown, Ross. 2010. Sound: A Reader in Theatre Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Cavarero, Adriana. 2005. For More Than One Voice: Towards a Philosophy of Vocal
Expression, trans. Paul A. Kottman. Stanford California: Stanford University
Press.
Chekhov, Anton. 2002 [1904]. The Cherry Orchard, trans. Peter Carson.
London: Penguin Classics.
Collison, David. 1982. Stage Sound. London: Cassell Ltd.
Collison, David. 2008. The Sound of Theatre: A History. Eastbourne: Plasa Ltd.
Collison, David. 2013. In Conversation with David Collison. In Theatre Sound
Colloquium (28 June 2013). London: RCSSD, ASD and RNT. https://
vimeo.com/75512118. Accessed 15 Nov 2016.
 2  THEATRE AURALITY: BEGINNINGS  49

Complicite/Simon McBurney. 2015. The Encounter. London: Nick Hern Books.

Connor, Steven. 2007. Sound and the Pathos of the Air. In Lecture at Sonorities
Festival of Contemporary Music (21 April 2007). Belfast: Sonic Arts Research
Centre.
Crook, Tim. 2013. The Sound Handbook. London and New York: Routledge.
Curtin, Adrian. 2010. Cruel Vibrations: Sounding Out Antonin Artaud’s
Production of Les Cenci. Theatre Research International 35 (3): 250–262.
Curtin, Adrian. 2011. Noises On: Sights and Sites of Sound in Apollinaire’s The
Breasts of Tiresias. In Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance, ed. Lynne
Kendrick and David Roesner. Newcastle: CSP.
Curtin, Adrian. 2014. Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Curtin, Adrian, and David Roesner. 2016. Sounds Good. Theatre and
Performance Design 2: 3–4.
Dean, Robert. 2013. Ibsen: The 19th Century Sound Designer. University of
Montreal: Le Son du Théâtre conference.
Feld, Steven. 2003. A Rainforest Acoustemology. In The Auditory Culture
Reader, ed. Michael Bull and Les Back. Oxford: Berg.
Finelli, Patrick. 2002. Sound for the Stage. Cambridge: Entertainment
Technology Press Ltd.
Fraser, Neil. 1988. Lighting and Sound. Oxford: Phaidon.
Green, Michael. 1958. Stage Noises and Effects. London: Herbert Jenkins.
Goode, Chris. 2015. chrisgoodeandcompany.com. Accessed 14 February 2016.
Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood,
Dwelling and Skill. Routledge: Abingdon.
Kelly, Jim. 2005. Auditory Space: Emergent Modes of Apprehension and
Historical Representations in Three Tales. International Journal of
Performance Arts and Digital Media 1 (3): 207–236.
Larrue, Jean-Marc. 2011. Sound Reproduction Techniques in Theatre: A Case of
Mediatic Resistance. In Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance, ed. Lynne
Kendrick and David Roesner. Newcastle: CSP.
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Leonard, John A. 2001. Theatre Sound. London: A & C Black.
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Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Napier, Frank. 1936. Noises Off: A Handbook of Sound Effects. London: Frederick
Muller Ltd.
50  L. Kendrick

Ovadija, Mladen. 2013. Dramaturgy of Sound in the Avant-garde and

Postdramatic Theatre. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University
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Roesner, David. 2014. Musicality in Theatre: Music as Model, Method and
Metaphor in Theatre-Making. Ashgate: Farnham, Surrey.
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Croom Helm Ltd.
Sterne, Jonathan. 2006. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound
Reproduction. Durham: DUKE University Press.
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Historical Perspective on Aurality. In The Legacy of Opera: Reading Music
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Karantonis. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
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(3): 221–235.
White, Gareth. 2013. Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the
Invitation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
 CHAPTER 3

Listening: Headphone Theatre and Auditory

Performance

The listener is a central figure in theatre aurality, as part of an

­audience, and as a lone attender, often indulged in a private experi-
ence that is characterised by intimate technologies (either sport-
ing some sort of headset or glued to a phone, but not necessarily
in conversation). The aim of this type of individual audience varies:
this might be the conduit for a one-to-one experience; or we may
be receiving instructions for participatory action; or we may find
ourselves performing by listening, replaying an audio narrative as a
percipient—part receiver, part player1—or we may be hearing a per-
formance via a contemporary version of the théâtrophone,2 engaged
in listening that is entirely separate from the visual and is exclusively
heard.3 Throughout the UK, the increase in such a variety of ‘head-
phone’ shows and ‘in ear’ experiences demonstrates a surge of interest
in audio theatre and auditory performance.4 A prime example of this
is Rosenberg and Neath’s production, Ring (written by Glen Neath
2013, produced by Fuel), an almost entirely auditory ‘sound journey’
(Fuel 2013), which is produced using what is termed binaural record-
ing. Ring takes place almost entirely in total black-out, not even a
glimmer of an emergency exit light is discernible. Equipped only with
head-sets to guide the way throughout the production, its audience is
hostage to listening.
As an entirely auditory experience, Ring not only captures its audience,
it also positions them, literally, as the subject of the production. As soon as
they are all seated, the audience are addressed as members of an unknown

© The Author(s) 2017 51

L. Kendrick, Theatre Aurality,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-45233-7_3
52  L. Kendrick

group who are gathered for a therapeutic meeting of some sort; however,
it soon becomes clear that they are assembled for a different, more urgent
purpose and that is to identify, accuse and potentially punish the elusive
Frances/Francis, who is guilty of a range of misdemeanours from manip-
ulation to murder—and who turns out to be us. As such, we are both
subject to and the subject of this form of headphone theatre. Director
David Rosenberg describes this positioning as ‘an audience shaped hole,’
a ‘gap in the performance where the audience fits in’ (McLaren 2013),
a bespoke place for the listener which negates any other. For this reason,
Ring is described by its producers as ‘an antidote to choice’ (Fuel 2013).
Nevertheless, despite the absence of agency that this statement implies,
Ring is utterly immersive, to the point that one critic claimed it redefined
the term considering this production ‘completely submerging’ (Love
2013).5 By relinquishing control, its audience is promised, in return, a
more direct and acute immersive experience. However, the notion of an
antidote to choice is also a purposeful misdirection of the participation in
the production which, as this chapter aims to demonstrate, is nevertheless
active, particularly in terms of auditory perception.

Technologies
The auditory experience of Ring is created by binaural sound produc-
tion. This records sound from the perspective of auricular reception in
order to mimic live hearing by incorporating the difference between the
ears. To achieve this, contemporary binaural processes involve a dummy
head to position microphones, in order to capture the range and field
of signals around it. It is not just the different receptive positioning that
mimics this; the auricular differential is reproduced by capturing the dif-
ference in the perception of sound, including the hierarchies of signal, in
particular precedence (which is dealt with later in this chapter, see p. 63)
and the low-fi soundscapes of resonance and noise. Standing in for the
audience, the dummy head carves out the ‘audience shaped hole’ that
Rosenberg wishes to create. The idea being, of course, that when repro-
duced, the sound surrounds us as if it is present, happening in the here
and now. Indeed, binaural recording has a history in the recreation
of the presence of sound; its capacity for surroundability and potential
for complex location of sounds, makes this technology ripe for realism.
This is known as a process of ‘auralisation’ (Farina 1993, p. 2), a sort of
sonic mimesis, if you like. Yet there are subtle but significant differences
 3  LISTENING: HEADPHONE THEATRE AND AUDITORY PERFORMANCE  53

Fig. 3.1  Simon Kane as Michael in Neath and Rosenberg’s Ring (produced by

Fuel Theatre, 2013), photograph by Suzanne Dietz

between the actual recorded event and our re-hearing of it that thwart
the recreation of a realist sonic space. Our means of perception—the
most obvious of which is the movement of the head to locate sound—
no longer affect the signal, our perceptual positioning is fixed. Therefore,
while the auralisation of binaural techniques may recreate a very realis-
tic, three-dimensional hearing experience, our listening—in particular the
focusing on specific sounds—is somewhat thwarted by it. This form of
immersive experience is deceptively guided.
The auditory effect of Ring is also directed by a series of misdirec-
tions, which distract the audience from the binaural experience that
awaits, the first of which takes place at the outset of the production
and, seemingly, prior to it commencing. In preparing us for the show,
our guide and master of ceremonies, Michael (see Fig. 3.1), involves the
audience in a headphone test. The setup is that the production will be
recorded and, more significantly, that we are about to be privy to a live
54  L. Kendrick

feed. He taps the (supposedly) single-rigged microphone (with his cane,

which becomes a sonic marker of his presence throughout the piece)
and apologises for its primitive quality as it transmits a monophonic sig-
nal back to us. This sonic sleight-of-hand is also a ‘setup’ for the audi-
tory experience; the production preamble takes place in the monaural
domain, therefore our everyday perception is somewhat reduced to a
rudimentary auditory encounter, whereas the production itself exists
in the three-dimensional aural sphere that quite suddenly engulfs us.
Therefore, the monaural and visual denote the real, whereas the bin-
aural darkness heralds the fictional aspect of the production—it signals
the performance. This auditory shift between what we might think is
real and what is performance is crucial to our immersive experience, but
this is as much the result of the dramaturgies of technology as well as its
augmentation of perception. One example is how the binaural recording
has the effect of creating something of an audience paradox: the hear-
ing experience is individual yet is undertaken collectively. The listener
is simultaneously isolated and accompanied in experience, concurrently
‘alone together’ (Kenney in Sterne 2006, p. 163).6 For Rosenberg, this
is a key dramaturgical effect of this piece of headphone theatre, a means
by which individual members of the audience finds their place within
both the world and the narrative of Ring: ‘You are in the odd position
of being very much alone—isolated in the blackness—but also linked
to the other similarly lonely people in the room through the sound in
your headphones. The performance then creeps closer and closer to you;
pointing its filthy fingers at you’ (McLaren 2013). This describes a dou-
bling of audience, while the binaural field invokes the presence of oth-
ers; for instance, our relationship with Michael and our differing relations
with other group members, so too this is within the presence of actual
others—the audience. In Ring this results in a comingling of the two,
this particular ‘alone together’ experience is a bleed between fictional
and actual presences, which makes for a very complex audience experi-
ence. Our immersion is similarly somewhere between the collective hear-
ing of a narrative and individual listening.

Auditory Performance
Considering the potential of headphone theatre to shift between actual-
ity and fiction, between monaural and binaural perception, between iso-
lation and collectivism, is the audience’s position as fixed as the phrase 
 3  LISTENING: HEADPHONE THEATRE AND AUDITORY PERFORMANCE  55

an ‘antidote to choice’ suggests (Fuel 2013)? How directed is this

immersive experience? Is our perceptual experience as positioned as the
technologies are? Or do the technologies promote perception that chal-
lenges this fixedness? In order to explore how Ring produces different
modes of auditory performance—the performance of our listening—
and how this, in turn, produces immersion, this chapter draws on some
theories of perception that I consider to be well within the domain of
aurality: auditory phenomenology and aspects of auditory physiology. An
auditory phenomenology becomes particularly relevant for understand-
ing auditory performance, not just because the theory patches well onto
the technology but because of the absence of the visual in Ring, which
throws the auditory experience to the fore. Auditory phenomenology
also demonstrates how aural immersion is far from the passive state it is
commonly assumed to be. Rather it is active and, furthermore, it is acti-
vated by acts of the audience, which engage us in attending, listening
and embodying sounds, immersing us by perceptive action not unwitting
submersion.7 Yet Ring is also made active by its aural technology and its
recording technique, in particular its production of an immersive experi-
ence; its effect is not just within our perception of a recorded event, but
in how the techniques require us to re-perform it. For these reasons, this
chapter will investigate how the technology and auditory physiology also
generate an immersive experience.

Phenomenology of Sound
and the Auditory Experience

While the field of phenomenology frequently refers to sound, few theo-

rists have sought an exclusive phenomenology of our perception of it,
except for Don Ihde, whose emphasis on a phenomenological auditory
dimension is an attempt to recover ‘the richness of primary experience’
(2007, p. 13) as well as to challenge the dominant ocularcentrism which,
he argues, has nullified this. To illustrate the auditory dimension, Ihde
draws out two regions, one visual for the entirely available field of sight,
the other auditory, which encompasses all sound presences. A primary
reason for this division is that anything seen or heard is never done so
in isolation because ‘the thing never occurs simply alone but within a
field, a limited and bounded context’ (2007, p. 73). Both are charac-
terised by the limits of visual or auditory experience, and in the case of
sight this is that which exists beyond its sensual perimeter—a horizon of
56  L. Kendrick

invisibility, for sound—a horizon of silence. Flanked by Husserl’s tenet

of intentionality (an experience at the centre of any field of perception)
and Heidegger’s version (in which the horizon marks the extent of the
coming into being of a perceptual event), Ihde’s perceptual fields are a
phenomenological capturing of all available sense data that might con-
textualise, inform, disturb, become or be the object of intentional focus,
visual or auditory.8 As such, Ihde is pursuing a tenet of phenomenology,
that all senses are essentially spatial, as Merleau-Ponty explains: ‘A sensa-
tion would be no sensation at all if it were not the sensation of some-
thing, and “things”, in the most general sense of the word, for example
specific qualities, stand out from the amorphous mass of impressions
only if the latter is put into perspective and coordinated by space’ (2002,
p. 252). However, Merleau-Ponty placed an emphasis on the senses as
‘all open on the same space’ (ibid.), but in terms of perception, Ihde
finds distinction between aural and visual spheres. The distinctive nature
of the auditory dimension is revealed in the layering of the two regions
(see Fig. 3.2). In the overlapping auditory and visual fields, objects are

Fig. 3.2  Don Ihde’s Auditory Visual Overlap (2007, p. 53) which demon-
strates how ‘the area of mute objects (x) seems to be closed to the auditory expe-
rience as these objects lie in silence, so within auditory experience the invisible
sounds (–z–) are present to the ear but absent to the eye. There are also some
presences that are “synthesised” (–y–) or present to both “senses” or “regions”’
(ibid.)
 3  LISTENING: HEADPHONE THEATRE AND AUDITORY PERFORMANCE  57

not merely seen and heard but are synthesized in a moment of move-
ment between sensory fields. On either side are the familiar mute objects
or invisible sounds, those which are ‘horizonal (or absent)’ (Ihde 2007,
p. 53) for one region are present in the other. Yet there is a difference
between these segregated presences, in how the sensed phenomena
come into presence, and this is that the properties of movement are pre-
dominantly auditory—the visual world is by and large fixed in relation.
We may move to intentionally focus upon the visual field, but the audi-
tory moves us. This movement is not simply a shift of attention to an
object, rather it describes our perceptual immersion in a sensing event
that moves through us, becomes embodied by us.9 Ihde’s purpose is
not to denigrate visual perception (nor to deny that visual objects do
indeed move, and that visual pleasures move us—of course they do), but
is to demonstrate how the field of auditory engagement can be the pri-
mary means by which the visual world is experienced, or is that which
calls visual objects into being. Ihde’s most common example is the bird-
watcher who first hears the object of her intention, and what is heard
then draws the bird object into her field of visual perception. The fre-
quency with which sounds initiate and conduct perceptual experience,
a regular occurrence somewhat muted by our predilection for the vis-
ual, is such, as Judy Lochhead asserts, that Ihde’s theory is a necessary
reminder that we underestimate how ‘sound plays an important role in
defining the world that we see’ (Lochhead 2006, p. 67). Thus, the audi-
tory dimension offers an important dissolution of the binarisation and
subsequent hierarchy of the senses, but it also avoids the theories of co-
mingling them in order to examine more closely the perception potential
of sound.
My interest in Ihde’s phenomenological approach is that this indicates
how the domains of sight and sound might function together, when,
in the case of Ring, one is sensorially censored.10 This is, of course, the
particular consequence of the pitch-blackness of this form of headphone
theatre, as it is a formative example of the contemporary performance
movement known as ‘theatre in the dark’. Though this complete black-
out is obviously an absence of the visual, it must be said that the darkness
in Ring is not about staging the loss of sight, far from it. Nor is it about
quelling the desire to see, if anything it foregrounds this, as darkness
may be an absence of what is visually present in the immediate future,
that which may spring out at us from pitch-black space. Darkness is a
loaded presence. It contains the potential for the visual. We are not sure
58  L. Kendrick

what gazes back at us in the dark. As such we might become anticipatory

‘seers’, straining to see what may appear, and therefore more conscious
of our effort to look. Thus there is also an argument that darkness is not
an attempt to partition seeing from the other senses; for example, Martin
Welton considers that within darkness, looking and listening become co-
extensive (see 2017). Seemingly dissipated by lack of light, the two pri-
mary senses might be considered searching for each other in the dark
in order to cohere the deconstructed perceptual experience. This sen-
sual search within darkness is premised on a more holistic version of the
senses as Welton, drawing on Ingold, states ‘the seen and heard are not
merely in parallel in theatrical experience, in the sense that the effect of
one works pleasingly with the other, but they are unavoidably aspects of
one another’s experience’ (2012, p. 77). Indeed, contemporary thinking
around theatre in the dark draws together the senses in a more perform-
ative sensorium that allows us to consider perception as more embod-
ied and haptic.11 However, in Ring it is difficult to argue for an equal
relation between the senses, as the censorship of sight is nevertheless a
purposeful decision to foreground a sonic version of the world seen, an
aural dramaturgy of the absent visual. In this respect, Ihde’s phenomeno-
logical approach can reveal how Ring is a recreation of visuality in the
domain of the auditory, that which is seeded in the performance’s visual
prologue and becomes fully manifested in the body of the work—in its
aurality.
The audience are well prepared for the ensuing darkness, under the
guise of the standard routine of pre-show housekeeping (such as turn-
ing off our mobile phones), we are treated to a preview of this absolute
blackout, and equipped with safe words or gestures should it become
overwhelming. All this is because, as Michael insists from the outset,
that ‘the most important thing … is … the darkness’ (Neath 2013, p. 3).
For Rosenberg, the darkness has the effect of increasing and intensifying
an auditory focus which, in his opinion, produces a sort of heightened
awareness,12 but it also has a very pragmatic dramatic function in that
‘everything that then happens is still happening in the room, or what
appears to be the room, the same room. But something has changed
and it is very difficult to put your finger on what has changed’ (McLaren
2013). Thus, the space of the performance is revealed by the arrival of
the darkness; the visual absence actually stages the proceedings, but
leaves us entirely guessing as to what these might be. The darkness is also
the means by which we are first implicated in the production. Michael’s
 3  LISTENING: HEADPHONE THEATRE AND AUDITORY PERFORMANCE  59

warning that ‘in response to the uncomfortable events that took place
during our last meeting. Can everyone keep their clothes on?’ (Neath
2013, p. 4) is the point at which we enter the narrative. That Ring com-
mences visually is important, not just for health and safety reasons but
because our initial visual recognitions feed the auditory experience.
The most important of which is the configuration of the auditorium,
which is arranged somewhere between that of the obedient, generally
mute theatre audience and an assembly for a participatory meeting. But
equally significant is the identification of actor Simon Kane as Michael
and, though we don’t know this from the outset, other members of the
audience as potentially the rest of the cast. Michael can be envisaged and
his image recalled. This is evident as he becomes the threat to the pro-
ceedings of the meeting, leaving under pressure and returning in anger
to pursue the subject of the story (us), and this residue of information
from the visual field becomes increasingly important. But the remain-
ing characters are less clear, the glimpses of audience members facing us
may appear, but as our focus was initially drawn to Michael, the stability
of such ancillary, field-based visual information can be less than that of
our pursuer. Furthermore, as the production progresses into headphone
theatre, we must rely entirely on the auditory sense to draw any visual
information, responding to sonic clues to imagine that seen, and as such,
the characters form a kind of greyscale of diminishing visual data, some
indexed to that seen, others entirely conjured up in the auditory dimen-
sion. In terms of Ihde’s visual and auditory regions, it is as if the for-
mer moves into the latter, as the visual seems to take on the qualities of
the auditory. Ihde’s most persuasive argument for this is his model of
auditory imagination, in which he argues the point that the visual can no
longer be shut off from our experience—by closing our eyes—but sur-
rounds us, as sound does. He explains:

I seem to be able to place the visually imagined object in any position

in relation to the surrounding imagined space […] then the space of the
visual imagery parallels in at least one aspect the space of the auditory
field and not its visual counterpart. In this sense the imaginative activity
“exceeds” structurally its perceptual base. (Ihde 2007, p. 209, emphasis in
original)

Understood in this way, the visual isn’t replaced or annihilated by the

auditory but is reconstructed by it. The visual has a quality of movement
60  L. Kendrick

and becomes less stable. The mute object is no longer mute; it takes on
the guise of the invisible sound and borrows the attributes of the audi-
tory. In flux, and subject to change, the visual has an auditory quality
of coming into being.13 It is as if the censorship of the visual field draws
it into the realm of aurality. However, the auditory experience of Ring
cannot be entirely attributed to visual deprivation and aural recalibration.
Perception is not parasitical to sense data, shifting allegiances from one
region to another; rather in this case it is directed. This relinquishment
of the visual field throws another aspect of the auditory experience into
sharp focus, that the auditory realm has ‘bidimensionality’, according to
Ihde (2007, p. 77): it is both directional and omnipresent.

Ihde’s Auditory Enigma

Ihde’s assertion of the co-presence of direction and surroundability relies
on a dismissal of the traditional physics of sound formation and reception,
particularly because this is a visual modelling of sound and one which, he
feels, is restricted to the ‘forward orientation’ (2007, p. 75) of the field
of sight. He eschews the linear model, which limits our understanding of
sound as waves that are received at the focal point of the ear, and pur-
sues the different ways in which the phenomena of sounds sound. One
of the means of sounding is the surface, not just of the sounding object
but of the objects, resistances and environs that the sound encounters
which, when all occur, means that we are listening more to a shape than
a wave of sound. This ‘field-shape’ (Ihde 2007, p. 75), Ihde argues, is
what distinguishes auditory focus from the visual, as this shape exceeds
our visual perceptual position, it surrounds and encompasses: ‘As a field-
shape I may hear all around me, or, as a field-shape, sound surrounds
me in my embodied positionality’ (ibid., emphases in original). Situated
within sound, its omnipresence becomes apparent, its directionality is that
sound can be perceptually located. Put more simply, omnipresence could
be understood as that sensed—in this case heard—and directionality as
that intentionally focused upon—or listened to. A sound can be both sur-
rounding and simultaneously the object of our intentional focus. In Ring,
an example of this takes place immediately after the onset of the darkness
and the second sonic misdirection occurs as we are commanded to move
our chairs from the previous configuration into a circle. Immediately we
hear the sounds of shifting chairs and mutterings about the task which, as
this is our first encounter with the binaural recording, suddenly surround
 3  LISTENING: HEADPHONE THEATRE AND AUDITORY PERFORMANCE  61

us and are sonically omnipresent. This ‘activity’ is virtually indistinguish-

able from the ‘real’ space that we are gathered in; whether this is a real or
recorded demand, we do not necessarily know whether or not to under-
take the action, or if, because we are so recently enveloped in the dark-
ness, it’s possible to do so. A sudden anxiety of perilous participation is
upon us—only to be assuaged by a close whisper into our left ears, ‘It’s
okay Frances, you can stay where you are’ (Neath 2013). This sound is
purposefully directional; not only does it come from a particular direc-
tion it is directed at us, not just as a ‘voice’ which ascribes us our identity,
but by where it becomes  located, by its proximity to us within the shape
of the auditory field. Indeed, it is this directional sound which gives spec-
ificity to the field-shape; without this, the surrounding sonic material is
mere soundscape. Thus, it is the auditory directionality, not just the narra-
tive function of the voice that positions us as a member of the group.
This co-presence of directional and omnipresent sound—Ihde’s
‘enigma’ (2007, p. 77) of the auditory dimension—is a key part of the
auditory experience of Ring, and it forms the dramaturgical structure
by which we move from witnessing the production ‘as’ Francis to com-
ing into focus as ‘being’ Frances. This happens when omnipresent sound
becomes directional, through the direction of our attention to it. An
example of this occurs later in the production whereby a final ‘imagined’
sequence takes place, one which is staged as an escape from our implica-
tion in the serious crime: a quarrel between Michael and another group
participant, played closely around us, breaks out into a fight—we hear
the smashing of chairs and the breaking of the circle—and this is sud-
denly intercepted by soporific sounds reminiscent of a relaxation tape,
which ushers in the following scene:

As the sound [of the fight] fades away we realise we have been transported
onto a beach. We spend a long [time] while listening to the relaxing sounds of
the seaside: waves; seagulls etc., then:
MICHAEL―(calling from a distance, as he approaches) Frances! Frances!
Is that you? Frances. Frances. Imagine yourself on the beach Frances.
(Neath 2013)

We are asked to imagine something that is already sonically present,

which alters our auditory perception of it and shifts our position within
the performance. What was omnipresent becomes directional; the beach
becomes one we have imagined, it is the ‘product’ of our directional
62  L. Kendrick

focus (albeit one imposed upon us—made intentional—by Michael) and

we move into the scene described as the producer of it. Our latent, hori-
zonal presence as ‘Frances’ moves towards a ‘being’ of Frances within
the scene because this directionality changes our position in relation to
the omnipresent sound; we are amidst the auditory field, we are in the
scene. Both these examples demonstrate how it is the aurality of the pro-
duction, in particular the directed  auditory engagement, which positions
us within it and constitutes the experience. Ihde’s auditory phenomenol-
ogy demonstrates how the auditory experience is as much the material of
headphone theatre as we might ordinarily consider the text to be.

Auditory Physiology and Spatial Recreation

Auditory physiology, in particular how hearing systems impact percep-
tion, can also demonstrate how the sonic space of headphone theatre
generates our immersive experience. As this chapter has explored thus far,
the fictional places of Ring—the ‘imagined’ scenarios of the crime scene
or the beach and the ‘actual’ place of the group meeting—are created by
sonic effects. The binaural recording casts us within these places, but in
doing so also recasts the spaces around us. At the production of Ring
I ‘saw’, I sat adjacent to a basement wall, fully aware of its damp pres-
ence from the outset. Yet once the darkness began and the meeting com-
menced this wall vanished, not because I couldn’t see it but because, by
means of sound, the space extended beyond the fourth wall to my left.
There are effects preserved within the recording that, when replayed,
have an impact on our perception by structuring the space of auditory
performance. One of these is reverberation, described by Jean-François
Augoyard and Henry Torgue as ‘a propagation effect’ (2005, p. 111),
which like Ihde’s auditory dimension, is ‘omnipresent’ (2005, p. 114).
Reverberation is most commonly understood as reflective of an origi-
nal signal, as the residues of sound once its source has ceased. However,
reverberation is also key to the ways in which we distinguish between
sounds, as well as the qualities of resonance that constitute them. The
Precedence Effect, or Haas Effect, describes the process by which divi-
sions of directional sound—or waves (if Ihde will forgive my recourse to
this notorious visual model of sounds)—are either cohered as one entity
or become perceptually discernible. Multiple waves (at a maximum dis-
tance of fifty milliseconds apart) are perceivable as a single sound, either
by a dominance of the first wave or the filtering of the others. Any
 3  LISTENING: HEADPHONE THEATRE AND AUDITORY PERFORMANCE  63

identical wave above this becomes distinguishable as reverberation, for

instance, as an echo. Thus precedence has an impact on how we hear
spaces because, by hierarchising waves, it also prioritises certain surfaces.
This is one way in which our perception plays a part in which signals are
heard and, as such, precedence produces a particular auditory demarca-
tion of space. The Precedence Effect is most commonly used for acoustic
spatialisation; for instance, points of amplification in an auditorium can
be modulated to maintain a coherent sense of space, one source arriving
before another will dominate and radically alter the auditory shape, often
flattening out the three-dimensional auditorium. However, the listener
is not a neutral receiver of wave and reverberance, precedence is not just
a binaural consequence, perception also modulates these potential hier-
archies of sound. For example, more recent studies in auditory physi-
ology have identified the function of ‘echo suppression’ (Bizley 2013)
whereby the listener also ascribes precedence to a primary wave, arguably
ignoring its reverberation and, therefore, also its constitution as another
sound (even though this may appear as such in acoustic modelling). This
means that we may have different perceived notions of the position of
sounds than their physical manifestation in space. Therefore, the location
of sounds is more problematic than first appears. As auditory researcher
Andrew King has found, ‘we are good at localising sound in space, but
we are essentially bad at judging the distance of a sound source’ (2013);
put more bluntly by George Home-Cook ‘our ears often get it wrong’
(2011, p. 104). Indeed, King’s research into precedence, perception and
spatialisation, has led to the assertion that it is not the determinacy of the
ear but the relation between sounds by which we perceive space; ‘that
the processing of auditory space is geared toward the representation of
relative positional differences between stimuli, rather than their absolute
positions in space’ (Dahmen et al. 2010). Sounds, therefore, become the
co-ordinates by which we understand space. It is the information they
bring forth to an audience that we attend to; their ‘opaque’ quality as
James Hamilton described it (2015). This demonstrates another way
in which the environment of Ring is determined within visual absence.
Sounds do not alter a space because they were recorded somewhere else
and, reheard, sound ‘as if over there’ is recreated ‘here’. Sounds recre-
ate spaces because of their specific interrelation, in which actual spatial
sources give way to re-heard localisations. Considering all this, it’s pos-
sible to see how auditory perception performs; this isn’t recreation but
creation.
64  L. Kendrick

Audience as Act
Auditory performance takes place within the constant flux between self
and space, and in the case of Ring, this entails our movement between
the actual and fictional worlds made possible by headphone theatre. As
this chapter has shown thus far, auditory phenomenology and physi-
ology demonstrate how sounds generate this flow, in particular how
sounds move us and our environment: the sites, sights and subjectiv-
ity of the performance experience. But what of our movement towards
sound? How does sound call us into the aurality of performance? How
do we tend towards immersion? Another recent field of aural theory—
more commonly termed aural, rather than auditory phenomenology14—
focuses on modes of attention in relation to perception, how we navigate
the interplay between sounds and within soundscapes and how sonic
hierarchies—whether prioritised by precedence, the directional, or the
relational, or by other means—draw us into attending or dis-attending.
Thinking about notions of attention requires consideration of its other:
distraction. More often than not, the idea of attention is predicated on
that plethora of binaries from which the audience ‘proper’ needs to be
drawn: hearing/listening, objectivity/subjectivity, signal/noise and
so on. But attention as an act of an audience—that culturally encoded,
well-behaved (or not), bored or jouissanced listening—actually requires
the task of creating attention within a field of auditory presence that is
already attended to. How does one listen if one is already involved in lis-
tening? How does immersion work within that which (arguably) already
immerses? Within sound there is often more demand for our attention
than we can pay attention to. As a consequence, listening is not necessar-
ily so neatly aligned to that intended. Listening is not that well behaved.
We do not necessarily attend to that which is intended to be the subject
of our focus. This is not just a fending off of distractive elements within
the field; rather, audience is also a movement between attention and its
context, which requires a particular effort and an interplay between audi-
tion and focus, something which sound producers are acutely aware of.
Theatre audience is not a mere fraught navigation of sonic phenomena,
but is a conscious and purposeful negotiation of listening that requires
constant reconfiguration and adaptation. It suggests movement, not just
of sounds, but on behalf of the listener.
Considering the motility of listening, audience could be consid-
ered an act, one that requires an effort, or stretching, a concept that
 3  LISTENING: HEADPHONE THEATRE AND AUDITORY PERFORMANCE  65

Home-Cook has emphasised because the ‘word “attention” derives from

the Latin compound adtendere, meaning, “to stretch”’ (2011, p. 99).
Yet this effort is, of course, unseen, most obviously because listening is
not always manifested visually (except for our expressions of it), and this
is particularly so in theatre in the dark whereby any visual clue of listener
effort is not available to the naked eye. Thus a more clandestine form of
listening is indicated, which suggests a stealthy audience, an eavesdrop-
ping or even, as Steven Connor suggests, an unbounded opportunity for
undetectable aural ‘stalking’ (2014). Indeed, the idea of stalking seems
to capture the difficulties of attention, as the listener is always in a pro-
cess of moving towards focus, but never quite attains it, hence the act
of listening is caught somewhere in between absolute focus and inatten-
tion. This unattainability sheds light on our strange covert presence as
the audience for Ring; we may be positioned as Frances/Francis but we
also know we are not this character. We are an imposter; an aural equiva-
lence exacerbated by the fact that we know there are amongst us many
‘Franceses’. Therefore, in the act of audience we have a simultaneous
presence. Phenomenologically we are both the object of Frances—the
intentional focus of the production—but also not the object, because
we are also the audience of this production. We appear twice, once as
the focus of the production and once more as the mute object, that
peripheral presence so on the horizon it is almost, but not quite, absent.
Following phenomenological theory, giving audience from the horizon,
we might also be aware of the process of the coming into presence as the
object of Frances/Francis, a phenomenological realisation of being.
To give audience to something is an act and, for this reason, aural
phenomenology attempts to demonstrate a certain amount of agency in
audition. But how does this agency square up with the ‘audience shaped
hole’ of Ring, the determined position of us in the production? Our role
as Frances/Francis is foisted upon us, whether we are designated as this
character or are positioned from her aural perspective or ‘view’ ourselves
listening-in as her from the aural periphery. Nevertheless, we have no
choice but to hear the performance from this perspective. Consequently
our identity, in relation to this narrative at least, is constructed, and our
actions are not ours but entirely the consequence of others. As such,
Ring is a performance of subjectivity as a profound lack of agency. The
metaphor is not lost on us. In an age where identities are subject to
malicious recreation and virtual persecution, Ring speaks of identity in
peril. This is a more ominous example of the ‘alterity of aurality’ that
66  L. Kendrick

Frances Dyson identifies as a ‘technologically defined subjectivity—one

equipped with new modes of perception, knowledge and self-knowl-
edge’ (2009, p. 58)—but not necessarily one we desire to be. Therefore,
the immersion that this auditory theatre creates is not an all-encompass-
ing experience designed to separate us from the world by enveloping
us in another one, rather it is submergence in the separation of us from
us, an attempt to displace self, an ‘antidote to choice’ as to who we are.
Thus, this immersion is political because it illustrates the ways in which
our selves become performed, and it demands that we witness ourselves
redrawn into a scenario over which we have no jurisdiction. A political
immersive experience is not just the feeling of being othered from one’s
self in this way, but brings to the fore such questions as who are we to be
so easily lost, and how do we consider ourselves identifiable as ‘a self’ in
the first place?

Immersion and Aurality
Sound is commonly associated with immersion, yet immersion often
assumes a passive auditory experience. To briefly recap: without the
means to sever ourselves from the aural world—remembering our range
of bodily haplessness from lack of ear-lids to the ever-present auditory
imagination—sound always surrounds us. As it engulfs, so must we sur-
render to it. For this reason we tend to think of immersion as a posi-
tioning of interiority, whereas auditory performance demonstrates how
our perceptive engagement is as much a making of an interior, whether
within us or a space which we are within. Though the producers state
that Ring is ‘an antidote to choice’, our audience position might not
be as predetermined as it first appears. Our place in the production is
created by acts of listening and auditory performance, not just by the
act of rehearing, but by our recreation of the auditory space and our
immersion in it. Therefore, while there may be no choice in terms of our
narrative positioning, perhaps there is an auditory agency in our experi-
ence of it? As this chapter has shown, our positioning in Ring can be
understood as constructed by a range of phenomenological percep-
tual positionings, including: the double dimension of surroundability
and direction; sound’s ability to move and to move us, such as the shift
between the monaural and bin-aural and their alliances with the ‘actual’
and ‘fictional’ worlds; and the broader auditory qualities of the visual.
In addition to this, our auditory physiological system demonstrates how
 3  LISTENING: HEADPHONE THEATRE AND AUDITORY PERFORMANCE  67

an auditory phenomenology might be bodily generated, for instance the

relocation—and therefore recreation—of space as being between sounds.
This range of ways in which the immersive experience is created suggests
that a sonic immersion, one based almost entirely on sound, and its pas-
sive connotations does not capture the active auditory experience, which
involves not just sound and its reception, but complex auditory systems
and phenomenologies of perception. Sound may no longer be associated
with passive immersion, nor indeed is sound considered to be the only
sense that immerses. Yet in headphone theatre, sound is the material of
immersion and listening is the primary means by which we experience
it. Immersive theatre is often an aural experience, yet it is directed and
directional as well as utterly absorbing. In this way, theatre aurality dem-
onstrates how sonic immersion is not the loose, uncritical experience in
which subjectivity is lost: we may well get lost in it, but this is achieved
with specific intent.

Notes
1. ‘Percipient’ is a term coined by Misha Myers to describe the hybrid per-
former-participant role in auditory performance experiences, particularly
audio walks; see Myers (2011).
2. See Adrian Curtin (2013) and Melissa Van Drie (2016) for more on the
théâtrophone, which was first demonstrated at the Theatre Français in
Paris in 1881 and fully incorporated as a company and early telephonic
service provider in 1890. Interestingly, David Collison (2008) describes
the early Parisian experiments as having ‘no practical use’ (p. 72) and
instead refers to the London-based Electrophone service that transmitted
church services, as well as opera and theatre productions.
3. A survey gathered in 2013 via the SCUDD (Standing Conference of
University Drama Departments, UK) mailbase identified some twenty-
three ‘headphone’ shows of note ranging from those produced by Fuel,
Shunt, Rotozaza and Blast Theory, amongst others.
4. ‘Audio Theatre’ is the term used to refer to theatre productions expe-
rienced primarily via audio means, most commonly headsets, mobile
phones or other ear-pieces. Balme (2006) identified a genre of audio the-
atre, which (at the turn of the century) didn’t take place in theatres but
in other cultural spaces or outdoors and usually involved the listener in
motion; for instance, in the aural or audio walk. Balme is keen to make
the point that this form of audio or ‘Walkman’ experience was intensely
theatrical in that it effected a ‘transformation of perception’ (Balme
2006, p. 123 emphasis in original) despite it being site-generic. In the
68  L. Kendrick

intervening years, audio-theatre has snuck back into the theatre, engulf-
ing the playing space and the auditorium; what Balme refers to as the
‘fictional’ space of that represented and the ‘collective’ co-present space
of performance and audience spaces (2006, p. 118). Lavender (2016)
makes the point that ‘audio theatre’ is now also associated with ‘wider
shifts towards immersion, site-responsiveness and spatial dislocation’ (p.
57). Headphone theatre is also used to specify its material as well as its
means, as a specific form made predominantly (and some might say exclu-
sively) of sound. Auditory performance refers to the audience experience
of audio or headphone theatre. The term auditory performance is pref-
erable to auditory theatre for a number of reasons. First, it is necessary
to distinguish practice from more traditional acts of auditory engagement
within the theatre and, second, this term allows for analysis of auditory
acts as performance and third, it invites investigation into the materials,
processes and forms of these practices: as the term perform suggests, this
auditory experience is only gleaned through form. Auditory performance
points to a critical enquiry by means of audience experience.
5. Love’s blog found that ‘It redefines the horribly overused term “immer-
sive”, completely submerging us in a disturbing experience from which
we cannot escape (unless, that is, it simply becomes too much and we
raise our hand with a cry of “help!”, which one overwhelmed audience
member did on the night I attended)’ (Love 2013).
6. Jonathan Sterne makes the point that William Kenney’s notion of the
principle of being ‘alone together’ was in the spirit of collective rather
than the solitary experience of early phonograph recordings; the impact
of ‘alone together’ was in the potential of the shared experience to create
an ‘imagined community’ (Sterne 2006, p. 165). As Sterne points out,
‘private acoustic space was, thus, a centrally important theme in early rep-
resentations of sound-reproduction technologies’ (2006, p. 163).
7. A number of recent studies have argued for the active, kinetic, participa-
tory and political acts of listening in relation to contemporary perfor-
mance including sonic arts, virtual and digital sonographies and theatre;
see Dyson (2009),Voegelin (2010), Welton (2012).
8. Ihde’s phenomenology of sound, considered a ‘pragmatic’ theory, or
‘post-phenomenology’ by some, (see Dakers or Mitcham in Selinger
2006) draws more on Husserl and Heidegger than Merleau-Ponty.
Key to Ihde’s theory of the auditory dimension is a co-presence of
Husserl’s ‘to the things themselves’ (Husserl in Ihde 2007, p. 19) and
Heidegger’s ‘letting be’ of the phenomena ‘to show themselves from
themselves’ (Ihde 2007, p. 19), though Ihde recognises the important
distinctions and development between the two as ‘the phenomenology of
essence, structure and presence in Husserl leads to the phenomenology
 3  LISTENING: HEADPHONE THEATRE AND AUDITORY PERFORMANCE  69

of existence, history and the hermeneutical in Heidegger’ (Ihde 2007, p.

20). Ihde later wrestled with Heidegger’s phenomenology, particularly
his ambiguity towards technology, preferring the Husserlian approach.
9. Merleau-Ponty (2002) uses the model of listening to music to describe
this process of aural movement as opposed to the traditional model of
auricular reception; ‘… there is an objective sound which reverberates
outside me in the instrument, an atmospheric sound which is between the
object and my body, a sound which vibrates in me “as if I had become
the flute or the clock”; and finally a last stage in which the acoustic ele-
ment disappears and becomes the highly precise experience of a change
permeating my whole body’ (p. 264 emphasis in original).
10. By this I mean that the visual field could be argued to remain ‘present’,
particularly in the auditory realm, but it is no longer necessarily enabled
by sight. The visual field arguably still functions; for example, according
to Ihde, this can be understood as an act of the auditory imagination,
a view commonly held amongst sound artists and producers of auditory
theatre. For instance, Melanie Wilson considers listening is a ‘fecundity of
images’ (Wilson 2013). For the purposes of this chapter, the point is that
the visual field can be produced by auditory, rather than visual, location.
11. I refer here to Josephine Machon’s idea of the haptic, which places an
emphasis on the tactile perceptual experience of the whole body, not just
of the fingers, and explores this kinaesthetically through the body’s loco-
motion in space. See Machon (2013), (2014) and (2017). The haptic as
an affect of sound is explored in chapter six of this book.
12. The idea that the depression of one sense increases perception in another
is a moot point. Ihde frequently refers to notions of an advanced auditory
or tactile engagement by blind people. However, disabled people may
disagree; for instance, Jenny Sealey (Artistic Director, Graeae Theatre
Company and Paralympics Ceremony co-director) considers the notion
that deaf people see better and vice versa ‘is a bit of a myth’ (Sealey in
Kendrick 2010).
13. My point is that the residual visuality of Ring has a peripheral presence
that is resonant of the horizonal phenomena that Heidegger regarded as
coming-into-being. Ihde describes it thus: ‘Being, which is that which
comes-into-presence, that which is (already) gathered, is the given. But
at the horizon one may note the giving, the e-venting, the point at which
“there is given” into what is present’ (Ihde 2007, p. 109, emphases in
original). This arrival of being seems to herald itself at the circumference,
where ‘presence is situated within its horizons’ (ibid.).
14. There is a key difference between Ihde’s auditory phenomenology, which
is primarily focused on the hearing sense, and Brown’s aural phenom-
enology, which is as much about the thing sensed as well as how it is
70  L. Kendrick

heard. This is developed by Home-Cook (2015), whose version of aural

phenomenology places emphasis on attention, a form of audience that
takes place between ‘sound as intended by design and the actualities of
sound as attended’ (p. 10, emphases in original).

References
Augoyard, Jean-François, and Henry Torgue. 2005. Sonic Experience. A Guide to
Everyday Sounds. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Balme, Christopher. 2006. Audio Theatre: The Mediatization of Theatrical
Space. In Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, ed. Freda Chapple and
Chiel Kattenbelt. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Bizley, Jennifer. 2013. ‘From Anechoic Chambers to Cocktail Parties: The
Challenge of Localizing Sounds in Complex Acoustic Environments’,
Keynote with Andrew King Theatre Sound Colloquium (28 June 2013).
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15 Nov 2016.
Collison, David. 2008. The Sound of Theatre: A History. Eastbourne: Plasa Ltd.
Connor, Steven. 2014. ‘Violent Listening’ Talk, The Listening Workshops (14 May
2014). London: Bedford Square, RHUL.
Curtin, Adrian. 2013. Recalling the Theatre Phone. In Theatre, Performance and
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Dahmen, J.C., P. Keating, F.R. Nodal, A.L. Schulz, and A.J. King. 2010.
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Dyson, Frances. 2009. Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the
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Farina, Angelo. 1993. An Example of Adding Spatial Impression to Recorded
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Projection/Expulsion: Strategies of Beholding symposium (14 March
2015). London: CCW Graduate School, University of the Arts London.
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places?in=ccw-graduate-school/sets/projection-expulsion. Accessed 14 Feb
2017.
Home-Cook, George. 2011. Aural Acts: Theatre and the Phenomenology of
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Home-Cook, George. 2015. Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves.
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Ihde, Don. 2007. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound. Albany: State
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 CHAPTER 4

Voice: A Performance of Sound

If sound creates the acoustic spaces of theatre in the dark, and l­istening
is generative of the headphone theatre experience, then the voice
is (more often than not) the only manifestation of the drama in these
forms of theatre. In the dark, how else can the audience know who is
there but by their voice? Even if the performer can be seen, it is what
they say in headphone theatre—such as Simon McBurney’s vocality in
The Encounter—that forms their performance. But what is a voice? Can
it be separated from the performer and, if so, where does it go, can it
return? If voice is the only presence of the performer, how does it per-
form; what does it do? This chapter focuses on the fundamental relation
between voice and performance in Elevator Repair Service’s (ERS) pro-
duction of Gatz (LIFT London 2012, director John Collins) in which
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is read aloud word for word in
its entirety.1 Yet the glamorous world of this great American novel isn’t
immediately visible in this staged version of the book because the pro-
duction takes place in a drab basement office of an undisclosed area of
New York. The glitzy locations of The Great Gatsby emerge from its
dark corners, by inventive use of its battered furniture, the substantial
upgrading of the office stationary in playful ways and to the tune of the
relentless hum of the city beyond its walls. Gatz (which is the central
character’s original name prior to his reinvention) is a Gatsby of the early
twenty-first century, a credit crunch version which plays out the story of
wealth, desire and deception through the everyday world of the base-
ment. The fast-cars, sumptuous riches and soft-focus romance appear

© The Author(s) 2017 73

L. Kendrick, Theatre Aurality,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-45233-7_4
74  L. Kendrick

differently when staged in a working environment, by office clerks and

technicians over the duration of a working day.2 The reading of The
Great Gatsby seems to commence by accident; an office worker’s com-
puter fails to start and it is removed for maintenance, leaving him unex-
pectedly at leisure at his desk. He absentmindedly fiddles with the nooks
and crannies of his work station, animates the remaining objects with
dwindling enthusiasm until he discovers a copy of the book abandoned
in his Rolodex. With nothing else to do, he starts to read The Great
Gatsby out loud and so the world of Gatz opens. The book forms the
basis of the whole production. No other words are added. It is a simple
yet surprisingly complex theatrical device, a literary dramaturgy that has
the effect of turning reader into performer. The production is entirely
driven by a variety of vocal manifestations of the text, which range from
describing to playing character, from referring to, to being the subject(s)
of the text. Thus, the book’s narrator, Nick Carraway, played by Scott
Shepherd, becomes not just as the author/deliverer of the narrative but
a determiner of it. In terms of performance, what is interesting is that
this literary dramaturgy used the voice as the primary device through
which the audience encountered the production. This production was
constructed with a sonic sensibility3 that positioned voice as much more
than the deliverer of meaning or an aesthetic evocation of text; it was
also a performance of sound.
The work of ERS’s founder and artistic director, John Collins,
is rooted in sound. As a senior technician for The Wooster Group, he
explored the possibility of sound as another player in the ensemble,
which entailed an approach to sound as a form of performance. This
approach inaugurated something of a sea-change in the job description
of theatre sound’s personnel, particularly the sound operator, who might
initiate action—for example, activating a sound that demands its corre-
sponding action on stage; for instance, a door slamming shut—or who
might augment action by producing non-corresponding or ‘re-purposed
sounds’ (Collins 2011, p. 24) that alter the action, for instance, a thun-
derclap for a breaking glass. Either effect requires the sound operator to
perform, although the sounds may be recorded, they are played live and
it is often up to the operator as to when. This performance of sound is
not just an improvised effect upon the action, but one that also draws
the operator into it, initiating interaction between performer and opera-
tor, anything from brusque exchanges between the stage and the sound
booth to the presence of the operator on stage. The latter has become a
 4  VOICE: A PERFORMANCE OF SOUND  75

sign of Collins’ theatre; it is a palpable intervention of sound on the pre-

dominantly visual stage. This approach to sound signals a shift towards
theatre aurality, as the presence of the operator involves a dramaturgy
of sound performance that has significant potential to impact upon the
aesthetic. In Gatz, sound identified the two worlds of the production in
many ways; it frequently signalled the office environment and it led the
appearance of the second world, the manifestations of The Great Gatsby,
which sprang from the first. Sound signalled the shift between the quo-
tidian set and the decadence of the book, and although lights might
have suggested other places by throwing parts of the set into shadow or
focusing on finite spaces within it, illusion was not part of the aesthetic
of Gatz; rather it was sound that staged the world of this version of The
Great Gatsby. For instance, soundtracks were used to stage a party as well
as a building-site; sound effects composed a night-sky and sound also
effected a car-crash; it produced a piano from a sofa and it marked the
impact of an open hand on a breaking nose. In each case, sound didn’t
necessarily change what the audience saw, but it invited us (and in the
case of Gatz often charmed us) into watching what we heard: sound, as
Collins is fond of saying, ‘in the theatre is the best liar’ (2011, p. 32).
In Gatz the performance of sound, its presence and its withdrawal,
is the primary means by which the audience knows when and where
the production’s readers/performers are, because the office remains
throughout, albeit frequently disturbed by the book’s decadence (a
highly inebriated gathering staged from the world of the book in turn
produces the detritus of an office party: papers scattered, vomit on the
sofa, chairs and desks upset from their usual order.) The two worlds are
also distinguished by a number of witty and seemingly impromptu solu-
tions to the task of performing one within the other, which the sound
operator is poised to provide. For instance, in The Great Gatsby the
purchase of a dog from a variety of puppies of ‘indeterminate breed’
(Fitzgerald 2000 [1926], p. 30) from an elderly vendor outside a NY
train station, is performed in the world of the office by the sound techni-
cian who leaps to the scene’s aid by grabbing a calendar from the office
wall—fortunately canine themed—and scrolls through each month fea-
turing a different breed. As the character from the book selects her cho-
sen pooch, the technician produces a toy dog from his bag. Thus the
decadent impulse purchase from the book is played out in the office
by more mundane means, using cheap, everyday objects. This example
demonstrates the complexity of the interrelation between the two worlds
76  L. Kendrick

that, because of the lack of visual reference to the book, frequently

requires an inhabitation of both at the same time. Sara-Jane Bailes
describes it thus:

the feat succeeds because the audience is never asked to leave the world
of the office or the trivia of its daily activities behind. (The removal and
fixing of Nick’s computer runs throughout the entire performance, for
example, enabling characters to weave in and out of both stories.) Neither
is The Great Gatsby simply acted out within this setting. Instead, Gatz
thrives on duality and the looseness shaken out by working with appar-
ently ill-suited worlds and with two sets of formal constraint (theatre and
literature). Actions and exchanges can be interpreted as belonging to both
worlds through often-fleeting textual, aural, and visual synchronicities;
or sometimes one world will recede while the other asserts itself. (2007,
pp. 508–509)

The ‘interweaving’ that Bailes suggests describes the bleed of perfor-

mances from one place to another, which is also the means by which
the audience might find similarity as well as difference, the recognis-
able presence of one world as well as the absence of another. Each world
is populated by those not quite fully present in either, infected by one
whilst being in another, echoing one whilst reverberating in another. The
two worlds seem to coexist in order to demonstrate the impossibility of
fully being in either one. In these ways, Gatz is the staging of a crisis
of being, the basis of which is not so much the text, but that aspect of
sound which ordinarily pertains to meaning; the voice.4 It is by means
of the voice that characters are conjured into being and action is called
into play. It is by means of the voice that all takes place. The sheer extent
of voice in the production, which is eight hours in duration, begins to
reveal an excess of voice in relation to the narrative heard. Shepherd’s
and others’ voices become less aligned to the vocal task in hand—the lit-
eral reading of the book. Our prolonged exposure to the utterance of the
book seems to expose the voice as something other than servicing the
text read. There is another presence of the voice on which the perfor-
mance hinges; it is another performance of sound in the literary drama-
turgy, another ‘thing’ in the production. It throws a myriad of characters
from the book into play, calls an abundance of scenes into action and
leaves an array of inventive staging in its wake. This voice seems to exert
a power over the performance as it creates and discards. This other man-
ifestation of voice, as more than a bearer of meaning or as a medium
 4  VOICE: A PERFORMANCE OF SOUND  77

of aesthetic pleasure, can be found in Mladen Dolar’s (2006) theory of

the object voice. Just as the voice in Gatz can simultaneously establish
and dispense with character, Dolar’s object voice is something that both
conjures up and dissipates the self. Though complex, it is useful to draw
on this theory as it offers an aural alternative to the usual focus on the
performer who speaks (and who is visually present). Dolar’s theory ques-
tions the relation between voice and meaning and, in doing so, exposes
voice as a performance of sound.

The Voice as Object

The concept of an object voice is the cornerstone of Dolar’s philosophy.
It is rooted in Lacanian psychoanalysis, which positions the voice as an
entity up for enquiry because it is the medium through which we ana-
lytically enquire. Voice is central to psychoanalysis. It is both the means
by which the patient presents their problems and is the medium for the
analyst’s response. As the ‘talking cure’, psychoanalysis is constituted
by voice in all its manifestations, from the direct communication to the
indirect signals of intonation and involuntary vocal sounds. There is an
exchange of voice from client to analyst, as such, the voice has become
the locus of psychoanalysis, much more than mere transaction, it is a
third player in the process, an identifiable additional entity—an object.
For this reason, voice joined the litany of objects that typify psychoana-
lytical concepts of the self as subject, and objects as different from the
subject—as other. In simple terms, anything can become an object in
relation to the subject, a person, a parent, or a body-part; it is that which
is distinct from the subject—the self—yet it figures in the formation of
the subject—for instance, as their object of desire.
Dolar’s object voice is a re-reading of voice-as-object as it featured
in Lacanian psychoanalysis,5 which was an example of what he termed
the objet a or objet petit a, where the a also stands for autre.6 This ‘lit-
tle object’ or ‘object of the little other’ is best not understood in visual
terms, as an identifiable ‘thing’. It is, as Slavoj Žižek helpfully states, a
‘“transfinite object”’ (1996, p. 91) an incomplete object that relates to
other objects yet cannot itself be countenanced,7 or as Dolar put it, it is
‘the part of the subject that has no mirror reflection, the nonspecular’
(1996a, p. 138). Though our self might be the source of it, the objet
petit a crucially becomes outside of ourselves, and this is what makes
it an object. Lacan considered the voice and the gaze as such forms
78  L. Kendrick

because these are not solely in the domain of the uttering/seeing subject
but pertain to that exterior to it. As Alice Lagaay (developing Žižek’s
theory) says, ‘gaze and voice are objects, that is, they do not belong on
the side of the looking/seeing subject but on the side of what the sub-
ject sees or hears’ (2008, p. 59, emphasis in original). Gaze and voice,
rather than looking or speaking, are propelled by the object—they are
indexed to it. Though the self is the subject that gazes or vocalises, and
the object is considered to be the generator of the gaze or that to which
the voice calls, there is another object present in the relation between the
two. Therefore, Lacan’s concept of object is not just a simple case of per-
ception upon it, but describes the presence of objects that are the means
by which the subject refers to the other—the a to which the subject is
drawn to gaze upon. Lacan’s little object or object of the little other is
a kind of additional object, one which draws the subject towards object.
It is, as Žižek has suggested, ‘what is in the object more than the object
itself’ (1996, p. 3), of which the gaze is a good example—as this is not
the object desired but is the ‘medium’ or ‘catalyst that sets off’ (ibid.)
the very object of desire. Thus, the object petit a inhabits an uncanny (or
familiarly unfamiliar) realm between subject and object, one which dis-
tinguishes the former from the latter but in doing so has consequences.
Lagaay describes this as a process in which:

gaze and voice have a quasi-transcendental status in Lacan’s theory insofar

as they refer to the fundamental relation from outside (the other) to inside
(the self) which in constituting the subject at the same time defines it as
lack. (Lagaay 2008, p. 59)

The lack is that inevitable difference between object and subject, an

intrinsic and complex relation that forms the basis of psychoanalysis. To
put it more simply, Lacan’s objects have less to do with actual external
objects but rather they point towards what is not within the self, they
‘signify an absence’ (Lagaay 2008, p. 59). Suffice to say, this lack is con-
tingent on the notion of desire as always unattainable and the object petit
a, as a manifestation of desire—the gaze upon an object of beauty, for
instance, will always reveal its unattainability—the object of beauty can-
not be attained by becoming the subject, but can only be gazed upon.
Lacan’s model of an object voice has residual properties, which form the
basis of Dolar’s version. Dolar frequently refers to Lacan’s diagram of
desire and the voice that seemed to remain. He was struck by the fact
 4  VOICE: A PERFORMANCE OF SOUND  79

that Lacan’s voice seemed to stand ‘as the outcome of the structural
operation’ (Dolar 1996b, p. 9). This diagram modelled a voice that
appeared to be the opposite—or even a reversal—of that voice which
(it is commonly assumed) only exists as material that services, or points
towards, meaning. However, there is a key difference between Lacan’s
and Dolar’s purpose in theorising an object voice and its relation to the
subject, to the self. Whereas Lacan’s voice object was rooted in the con-
cept of ever unattainable desire, which props up much of psychoanalysis,
Dolar’s object voice is a tool of philosophy, it is, as the book copy suc-
cinctly puts it, ‘the lever of thought’ (2006).

The Object Voice

Similar to Lacan, Dolar makes the case for an object voice by distin-
guishing this from the more commonly assumed functions of the voice
as either a carrier of meaning, such as the bearer of an utterance or as a
linguistic signifier, or as the means of an aesthetic experience, one that
distracts from signification and is a conduit for the ‘bearer of a mean-
ing beyond any ordinary meanings’ (2006, p. 4). To these ubiquitous
versions Dolar adds a third: the object voice, which may be a necessary
condition for the other two, but crucially it is neither. It has a somewhat
paradoxical relation to the others. While the voice might be a conduit for
meaning or the material of aesthetics (speech and singing, for instance,
cannot occur without it), it is also something else entirely. And this is
the kernel (as he would put it) of Dolar’s project, to identify the form of
voice—the object voice—that, according to him, doesn’t dissipate in art
or disappear in signification, that doesn’t ‘go up in smoke in the convey-
ance of meaning, and does not solidify in an object of fetish reverence
[the object of aesthetic desire]’ (2006, p. 4). This futile understanding of
the voice is not just symptomatic of structuralist linguistics (the dogged
pursuit of relational signification that, according to Dolar, has murdered
the voice in its formation) but of metaphysics per se, which has yet to
consider voice as more than that either in service of, or opposition to
meaning. His project is to capture that which remains; what was once
thought residual to signification or the aesthetic might be something
else entirely. Dolar’s championing of the voice is an attempt to capture
its force beyond received notions of meaning and feeling, beyond the
semantics of language and the fetishisation of aesthetics, and how this
brings the self—the subject—into a radically different relationship with
80  L. Kendrick

all that we might consider ourselves subject to. For this reason, Dolar’s
theory of the voice is primarily a political, as well as philosophical project.
First and foremost, for Dolar the voice is a ‘sound object’ (2008), one
which is not visually identifiable but is diffuse, omnipotent, unidenti-
fiable and excessive. To liberate our understanding of this potential of
the voice, Dolar demonstrates the different ways in which it is intrin-
sic to linguistics, physics, ethics and politics. For example, in ethics (as
well as psychoanalysis), voice is an integral component that distinguishes
between the subject and the other; this delineation is developed in the
realm of politics, whereby voice arrives in the intersection of phone—
most easily understood as a speech sound, and logos—in its simplest ver-
sion as meaning manifested in spoken language.8 Dolar subsequently
explores how voice can never be fully attributed to one source, entity or
thing. For example, in the physics of vocality, he shows how the voice
appears in the realm between body and language, because ‘what lan-
guage and the body have in common is the voice, but the voice is part neither
of language nor of the body’ (Dolar 2006, p. 73, emphasis in original).
Dolar expands on this important but paradoxical nature of the voice in
a series of Lacanian Venn diagrams which, by his own admission, Dolar
finds are not entirely fit for purpose; he shows how each overlapping
territory may share aspects of voice but they do not, as the diagrams
suggest, create the voice in their doubling. The voice has a more funda-
mental role in the division. Dolar explains:

The voice is always placed at the intersection. But this way of putting it is
kind of misleading, misleading insofar as it presupposes that we have two
areas that are already constituted and stand opposed to each other, facing
each other. And we’re looking for a link, a link that would bridge their
incommensurability, their utter divergence. But here lies the major paradox
[…] The voice is precisely the operator of the split, it inhabits the split and
by its operation actually produces the two areas which it is supposed to
bring together in their overlapping. (Dolar 2008)

The object voice emerges at this point of creation of division and the
inhabitation of this division. A way of understanding this is how the
voice takes a journey between the areas or domains of body and lan-
guage. Dolar describes this as a topology of the voice, as a kind of inde-
terminate journey, one that might commence with the body but in its
leaving—or falling out (as Dolar would put it)—it radically alters its rela-
tion to the body from which it commenced.
 4  VOICE: A PERFORMANCE OF SOUND  81

In a curious bodily topology, [the voice] is like a bodily missile which sepa-
rates itself from the body and spreads around, but on the other hand it
points to a bodily interior, an intimate partition of the body which cannot
be disclosed — as if the voice were the very principle of division into inte-
rior and exterior. (Dolar 2006, pp. 70–71)

Dolar’s point is that in its journey to absence, the voice opens up the
body to an unexplainable presence. Indeed, presence and absence—a
familiar binary in theatre and performance analysis—are the transfinite
remains of the object voice. To best understand this concept, it is useful
to focus on Dolar’s examples; for instance, his analysis of the shofar.

Object Voice and Performance

The shofar is an ancient Jewish instrument, which has a particular func-
tion in representing the voice as both a presence and an absence. This
woodwind horn has an almighty sonorous force; once played, it produces
‘long continuous sounds which are reputed to fill the soul with an irre-
sistible profound emotion’ (Dolar 2006, p. 53). In representative terms,
it stands for the presence of ‘God’ but in terms of listening it presents,
as Reik states, ‘the anxiety and the ultimate death struggle of the divine
father’ (in Dolar 2006, p. 53) thus it also stands for leaving, for the point
of demise. The shofar thus has a dual function, it both ‘testifies to his
presence—his voice—but also to his absence’ (Dolar 1996b, p. 26). But
this is not merely a doubling of the two; this voice cannot return to its
body because it is not there. As such, Dolar surmises that the shofar is
‘a stand-in for an impossible presence’ (1996b, p. 26, emphasis in origi-
nal). This is a voice without content or body. Furthermore, this voice
is not a carrier of signification but is a sound object, which provides the
actions necessary for its formation, it is a performance. This model of
the object voice is ripe for analysis of performance in the theatre—par-
ticularly the job of the performer’s voice, in all its doubling of body and
language, self and other, and how this creates another present absence
just as the shofar does. All this has very interesting consequences for the
performed voice as something similarly more than deliverer of dramatic
meaning or a theatrical aesthetic. The performed voice has a more intrin-
sic function in the definition of performance. This voice is not just an
output, a vocal manifestation of text or an expression of mise en scene.
Indeed, Dolar concedes that the aesthetic voice—specifically the singing
82  L. Kendrick

voice—‘takes the distraction of the voice seriously’ (2006, p. 30). How

might this equate with the performer’s voice? How is the performer’s
vocality linked to the object voice?
It is not my intention to assert that Gatz is a purposeful production of
the object voice, rather this chapter explores what this epic vocalisation
can tell us about the other possibilities of voice and uncover its intrin-
sic function in this production beyond the conveyance of meaning. This
chapter will explore the possibilities of voice as a performance of sound,
as an object, as in that which is distinct from subject and thus discon-
nected from notions of source, or essentialist meaning.9 To this end,
I’m interested in three aspects of Dolar’s theory of voice, points that he
(sometimes fleetingly) makes on the way towards describing the condi-
tions for the object voice; these are the gap/distraction that the aesthetic
voice (or in this case the performed voice) embraces; acousmatisation,
the disembodied voice and the impossibility of de-acousmatisation (the
return of the voice to the body from whence it came); and the topol-
ogy of voice, what happens when it leaves the body and the absence that
remains. These three aspects, very connected but also distinct in Dolar’s
thesis, in turn reveal something about the ‘call’ of the object voice and
how the performed voice stages being.

Reading the Great Gatsby

The aesthetic voice has a very different function in relation to meaning
than  the linguistic voice and is considered by Dolar as an obfuscation
of the object voice he seeks to identify. The aesthetic voice is a fetish, of
which singing is the ultimate example. It is a voice ‘endowed with pro-
fundity: by not meaning anything, it appears to mean more than mere
words’ (Dolar 2006, p. 31), and, as a consequence it is, in Dolar’s esti-
mation, something of a poor communicator. Furthermore, he consid-
ers this aesthetic form as indulgent, not in the least because it creates its
own codes that are more elusive than the linguistic. Singing maintains
the status of expression as over and above meaning, not by relinquishing
the latter, but by functioning as a diversion from quotidian language—
a distraction from linguistic meaning that exposes its materiality. This
distraction is marked by the foregrounding of the material qualities of
voice: accent, intention and timbre and of vocal individuality of reso-
nance, pitch, cadence and melody, which form the ‘realm of the voice
beyond language’ (Dolar 2006, p. 29). Yet the distraction is not the
 4  VOICE: A PERFORMANCE OF SOUND  83

foregrounded presence of these material qualities, rather Dolar makes the

point that these actually seal the linguistic voice by threading signifiers
together which, in turn, make the aesthetic voice, conversely, an agent
of signification. What is distractive is that which the material voice points
towards, a potential cleaving and abandonment of meaning, which sing-
ing often embraces. This potential, Dolar concedes, does appear in the
opening up of an un-fillable gap between materiality and meaning in the
sung voice which, as noted in this chapter, is the domain of the object
voice.
Unlike the singing voice, the performed voice is not an endeavour
devoted entirely to aesthetic pleasure. The performer’s voice, though it is
traditionally thought to support a range of dramatic services, such as the
delivery of the writer’s text or the expression of a character’s innate self,
sits somewhere between Dolar’s initial definitions: it is neither entirely
the deliverer of meaning nor the vehicle of aesthetic pleasure. To per-
form text, Steven Connor points out, is to have a ‘generative force’
(2012, p. 25) with the voice, as ‘language comes to consist of what is
done to it’ (ibid.). Furthermore, this act of performing by means of the
voice ‘is the necessary disturber of language’s peace that will not leave
it one piece’ (ibid.). This generative function and subsequent disruptive
impact is a reminder that the voice acts within, not just upon, meaning.
The performed voice uses vocality to create meaning. Singing may be the
form that ‘takes the distraction of the voice seriously’ (Dolar 2006, p.
30), but the performed voice utilises this distraction—and in Gatz this is
the basis for the ‘translation’, as Bailes describes it (2010, p. 151) rather
than the adaptation, of the text into a theatre production.
Scott Shepherd’s performance of Nick Carraway consists of an exten-
sive vocal range, from that of an unknowing reader of the story to the
fully fledged performance of it. The former mode is played as if it is his
first encounter with the text or, in the world of Gatz, as the anonymous
office worker discovering the book for the first time, which he happens
upon and subsequently reads aloud as if never previous read—stum-
bling over its words and struggling with pronunciation, playing with
the shapes that the ‘Dukes of Buccleuch’ (Fitzgerald 2000, p. 8) make
in his mouth. This initial performance of a reader is characterised by a
flat, monotone voice that aims to serve no more than the first iteration
of the text, an impassive rendition in which meaning is meant to be
barely apparent. Even the subject of the text, ‘the man who gives his
name to this book’ (ibid.), needs to be double-checked by Shepherd,
84  L. Kendrick

who swiftly closes his copy of The Great Gatsby to see if this is indeed
the case on the front cover. The next stage in Shepherd’s vocal range
is the performance of ‘knowing’ the text, he sounds like a narrator
and this suggests he is in communication with his audience. However,
although he speaks to us, he doesn’t directly address us. This change is
indicated by vocality that has qualities of that which Michel Chion has
called the ‘I-voice’ (1999, p. 54), an atypical mode of narration, which
he describes as thus:

A certain neutrality of timbre and accent, associated with a certain ingrati-

ating discretion, [which] is normally expected of an I-voice […] the voice
must work toward being a written text that speaks with the impersonality of
the printed page’. (Chion 1999, p. 54, emphasis in original)

Thus, in terms of reading The Great Gatsby, Shepherd initially employs a

voice that might be recognised as indicative of a narrator: separate from
the story but connected to the listener. In this way, the text ‘speaks’ to
us by means of narration. Yet, in Gatz, this performed form of voice is
less recognisable, as it appears to be no more than the reading of the
text in an environment—the drab basement office—which at present
bears no relation to it, and vice versa. The vocal aesthetic qualities are
quelled until certain activities on stage require vocalisation, which in turn
allows arbitrary bits of the text to sound as if they relate to the world of
the office. For example, at the beginning of the production, Shepherd
is reading about Nick Carraway’s experience of unemployment after his
return from the Great War, ‘—so I decided to go East and learn the
bond business’ (Fitzgerald 2000, p. 9) whilst simultaneously answering
a ringing telephone so that the words ‘bond business’ (ibid.) also form
the ‘hello’. But the greeting isn’t just formed by the action, Shepherd
also shifts intonation to suggest it, and so the materiality of the voice
moves meaning away from the story read into the disconnected world
in which it is being read. As the text continues to be uttered thus, so
certain words and phrases are drawn out in relation into the visual world
that is staged before us, with the odd joke found in this vocalisation of
Fitzgerald’s text as a theatre production: ‘there was so much to read’
(Fitzgerald 2000) declares Shepherd, on page ten of his task.
Dolar’s distractions of the aesthetic voice are the ability to ‘let the voice
take the upper hand, let the voice to be the bearer of what cannot be
expressed by words’ (2006, p. 30). The vocal displacement of words from
 4  VOICE: A PERFORMANCE OF SOUND  85

their meaning in relation to Fitzgerald’s text to the world of the stage is

the first hint of this potential distraction, which continues apace, shifting
the text from arbitrary reference to the office-world, to more strategic
positionings of the world of The Great Gatsby. As Shepherd-as-office-
worker gains momentum in his reading, he begins to articulate aspects of
the text, particularly when other characters appear. For instance, the first
appearance of Daisy (the object of Gatsby’s desire) and her husband, Tom
Buchanan, is articulated by Shepherd’s description of Buchanan’s ‘gruff
husky tenor’ (Fitzgerald 2000, p. 12), which he utters accordingly, ani-
mating the text by adopting the tone of voice he describes. At this point,
the text seems to morph into ‘lines’ to be acted out, anticipating and
signalling the impending arrival of Buchanan. Shepherd’s vocalisation is
more than impersonation—it seems to function as an invitation into the
production for the performer-playing-Tom-Buchanan. Gary Wilmes, the
performer who is office-worker-yet-to-play-Buchanan, is already present
in the space as another member of the ‘bond business’ personnel, half-
heartedly sifting through the post (a marker of his presence through-
out the production).10 His first iteration of Buchanan is a vocal break in
Shepherd’s reading of the text—and he is the first performer to speak
other than Shepherd—‘Civilization’s going to pieces’ (Fitzgerald 2000,
p. 18) barks Wilmes, making Shepherd’s next line ‘broke out Tom vio-
lently’ (ibid.), an affirmation of Buchanan’s presence. That this rupture
from one voice to another is preceded by Shepherd’s line, ‘I meant noth-
ing in particular by [an innocent remark] but it was taken up in an unex-
pected way’ (Fitzgerald 2000, p. 18), points to the ‘upper hand’ (Dolar
2006, p. 30) of vocality—not so much by this being taken up by another,
but because it is performed (not read) by Tom Buchanan. This upper-
handed moment appears to catch Shepherd, as well as Nick, by surprise—
the follow-up line, ‘I answered, rather surprised by his tone’ (Fitzgerald
2000, p. 18)—referring to both its textual meaning and functioning
as the performer’s response to the change of voice. As such, the vocal-
ity of this moment gives more than textual meaning pertaining to The
Great Gatsby and Shepherd’s reading of it. According to Dolar’s thesis,
this could be dismissed as a transportation of meaning, that these shifts
in Shepherd’s vocality are mere changes in intonation that can transform
meaning but present no challenge to it, they remain  linguistic phenom-
ena. But my point is not about what voices in Gatz mean, but what they
do. The first exchange between Shepherd and Wilmes not only shifts
meaning from text to potential character, it also serves the performance
86  L. Kendrick

of it, not yet of the characters but of the breakthrough of these into the
office, the bleed of the text beyond the page towards the body of per-
formers who will eventually fully embody the characters. This liminal
point between office worker and character is carved out by the performed
voice, which distracts from the text and leaves meaning by appearing to
mean more than the narrative it serves—it is this intersection, the gap
carved out between the reading of and the production of The Great
Gatsby that, in turn, ushers in the performance. It’s as if the characters
wouldn’t appear without it. Through the emergence of a voice no longer
wholly devoted to textual meaning, nor entirely of aesthetic materiality,
the production of Gatz is called into play.
From this point on, the range of Shepherd’s voice continues pretty
much unabated; as subsequent characters are called into presence by
the text, so too Shepherd’s narration moves towards the performance
of Nick Carraway.11 This is manifested by a shift in Shepherd’s vocal-
ity to that which signals the presence of Nick. His lines are no longer
read out loud as if they were written beforehand, but are vocalised as
if said for the first time. He begins to perform as the subject he is read-
ing, who is also the narrator, the subject writing. As such, the distractive
element of voice as that which ‘cannot be expressed by words’ (Dolar
2006, p. 30) comes to the fore—until, on page thirty-two of the book,
Nick emerges, signalled by Shepherd’s eye leaving the page for the first
time as he addresses the audience directly. Throughout the rest of the
production his performance oscillates between book reader, Nick as the
narrator of the book and Nick Carraway as a central character of the
production, but he never fully returns to the impassive role of reader.
Consequently, these various manifestations of the character are always as
a witness to events and, at points, a strategic in-active player in the story.
Shepherd’s best effort to return to reader heralds the story’s tragedy—
his reading of the standoff between Buchanan and Gatsby, both rivals
for Daisy Buchanan’s affections, takes place in the dark, is murmured
sotto voce; as the producer of the narrative, he has no choice but to vocal-
ise it, and his vocality is marked by the fact that he does not wish to
put this scene into words. It is the distractive element of what the voice
has to do, not so much what it means, that drives the production at this
point. At the other extreme, Shepherd’s final incarnation as his desig-
nated character takes place after the story’s events have unfolded; only
after Gatsby’s death can Nick Carraway close the book and soliloquise
the remaining pages to us. Shepherd’s sliding scale between narrator,
 4  VOICE: A PERFORMANCE OF SOUND  87

Nick and Carraway is only possible through his variations in vocality, and
these variations in turn produce the production, not so much by what
they mean but by the fact that they have to be spoken. It is voice that
creates Gatz. Shepherd’s performance is in many ways generated by its
aesthetic distractive relation to textual meaning, encapsulated by the
extraordinary task of uttering ‘reading over what I have written so far’
(Fitzgerald 2000, p. 56).
Shepherd’s performance presents a vast array of not quite complete
versions of Nick Carraway. Not one moment on the continuum from
reader to Carraway appears as a definitive version. But this isn’t just a
case of a ratio of performer to character; rather, Shepherd’s performance
offers different possibilities of Nick Carraway, which align with the char-
acter’s incomplete and, at points, inept function in the story. Fitzgerald’s
book is based on its narrator’s incapacity to act upon the story, which he
has the responsibility to tell. Translated into theatre, the performance of
voice reveals the function of it in establishing the narrator’s seemingly
passive yet narratively dominant identity; this is a voice that unveils a par-
ticularly conscious, almost narcissistic being, which Dolar identifies as
a manifestation of the object voice. This aspect of object voice is prob-
lematic, as it is simultaneously charged with manifesting self yet, in the
effort, it fails to do so. Put more simply, as the voice departs the body,
it leaves the self in establishing it. With the aesthetic voice, this failure
is particularly apparent, because the distractive qualities of this form of
voice introduce ‘a rupture at the core of self-presence’ (Dolar 2006,
p. 42). This ‘rupture’ results from the difficulty of the return of the voice
to the body from which it commenced, the curious ‘topology’ (2006,
p. 70) that Dolar’s theory navigates and the subsequent impossibil-
ity of de-acousmatisation, of the realignment of voice to the body from
whence it came.

Watching Gatz
The acousmatic, as Chion states, is based on ‘a word of Greek origin dis-
covered by Jérôme Peignot and theorised by Pierre Schaeffer [as refer-
ring to] “sounds one hears without seeing their originating cause”’
(1994, p. 71). Schaeffer inaugurated the term in relation to an auto-
telic perception of sound, advocating the attention to sound in itself, by
reduced listening to the object of sound (circumventing sound’s pro-
duction, cause or meaning beyond that which it means in and of itself).
88  L. Kendrick

Historically, acousmatisation refers more to the object of voice as dis-

tinct from its source, the body. The acousmatic voice as a disembodied
entity has a rich dramaturgical history. Relinquishing its origin is another
means by which the voice has become somewhat liberated from quotid-
ian expression. Without being anchored to the body, ostensibly the voice
gains power, thus the acousmatic voice frequently features as an all-pow-
erful omnipresence, particularly in film. It is intrinsic to the dramaturgy
of the murderer in Psycho (Hitchcock 1960) and it functions as a theatri-
cal device in the case of the ‘man behind the curtain’ in The Wizard of
Oz (Fleming 1939); in either case, voices that can only be who or what
they are by remaining as sound by falling only on the ear. The important
point is that acousmatisation prompts its undoing; the presentation of
the voice without body (other than the voice that is permitted to be dis-
embodied, such as the narrator or ‘I-voice’) prompts audiences to seek
and locate its source and, indeed, there is often a dramaturgical impera-
tive to do so (such as finding out who mother is in Psycho or identifying
who gives voice to The Wizard of Oz). This undoing—or deacousmatisa-
tion—is the resolution of voice to body, whether it is the discovery of its
source, or the revelation of a body from whence it could have originated,
or the attribution of an entirely different body to it. What is interesting
is how this requires a visually evident body, for how else can the voice be
matched with the speaker? Therefore, to deacousmatise is to rationalise
sound within visual terrain, and both Chion and Dolar discuss how this
process is, in different ways, indexed to the gaze.
The acousmatic voice is more problematic in the theatre, particu-
larly as this is the art form that is often assumed to be the domain of
the synchronised voice (see Chion 1999). In theatre, bodies and voices
begin or eventually come together—even voices ‘off’ are voices attrib-
utable to someone somewhere, which, according to Chion, is not the
same territory that the omnipresent acousmatised filmic voice occupies.
The acousmatic voice in film often begins at large, with its source unseen
till the moment of deacousmatisation. However, in Gatz acousmatisa-
tion is more of a perceptually complicated affair as it commences both
with the voice at large (as read by Shepherd) but it coincides with the
visual presence of the bodies that the voice will come into a relationship
with—in other words, it will deacousmatise. As this chapter has demon-
strated thus far, there is often the presence of the performer’s body in
the act of vocalising that which is not-yet-present, the character that will
eventually appear. Characters are seeded by strategic distractions of the
 4  VOICE: A PERFORMANCE OF SOUND  89

aesthetic voice, and bodies eventually correspond with what has been
vocalised. This appears to be the reversal of acousmatisation; although
the voice begins adrift, (either because it is uttered by others or, in the
case of Shepherd’s performance, because it isn’t produced in direct rela-
tion to character) and becomes embodied, aligned with the speaking
body and cohering with the character seen, it is not a straightforward
return of the voice to its source. This is because the performer’s mate-
rial presence in Gatz frequently complicates such moments of visual
and aural synchronisation. The first example of this is Susie Sokol, who
plays Jordan Baker, Nick’s reluctant confidante and occasional object of
his half-hearted affection. At her first appearance, Sokol is cast visually
within the office-world, wearing everyday sports-gear. Armed with the
post, she moves into the visual space without qualm, yet she is the first
character who attends fully to Shepherd’s reading of The Great Gatsby
as she performs hearing the text. Immediately she is drawn towards the
beginnings of the book’s performance; casting an eye on the text over
Shepherd’s shoulder she fleetingly joins in, miming the first descrip-
tion of Buchanan, performing a set of gestures in accompaniment to
the narrator’s vocalisation. The audience has yet to know who Sokol
might ‘be’ in the production, but we are aware of what she is game to
play. She settles onto the office couch and another woman enters, col-
lects her post and, perching on the back of the sofa, joins Sokol in a
mute exchange, during which Nick refers to the Buchanan’s ‘enormous
couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an
anchored balloon’ (Fitzgerald 2000, p. 13). At this moment, the audi-
ence is aware that either one of them could be the object of Gatsby’s
(or Nick Carraway’s) desire. The two women exit for Shepherd’s ensu-
ing description of his character’s first encounter with them. Only when
he describes Baker’s first word, which draws Sokol-as-office-worker back
into the office to eject Shepherd from the couch (which he has tempo-
rarily settled into), is she indicated as the character she is cast to play.
Visually Sokol remains the office worker; however, she begins to perform
actions that implicate her with the world of The Great Gatsby, studying a
sports magazine and promptly rising to rehearse her swing, signalling the
professional golfer that will subsequently be referred to as Baker. Finally,
it is an innocuous oral gesture that confirms her presence as that of the
character, as she performs a yawn that Shepherd describes. However, this
moment of synchronicity is immediately compromised by his next line,
which refers to Buchanan as a ‘hulking physical specimen’ (Fitzgerald
90  L. Kendrick

2000, p. 17). This statement is met by the entrance of Kate Scelsa (who
plays the office manager as well as various characters throughout) who
appears to take umbrage at the allusion and promptly issues Shepherd-
as-office-worker a filing task as a punishment for the insult. What is inter-
esting is that, as well as signalling the arrival of the text, these actions
also sustain the presence of the office-world, not just the actions of work
(or of procrastination from work) but the quotidian gestures, physi-
cal rhythms and proxemics that the environment requires them to per-
form. Thus, the visual presence of the body within this world endures
throughout the book’s arrival into it. Furthermore, Sokol’s presence as
Baker is not linear; once she is positioned as the subject referred to—by
direct address from Shepherd and Wilmes—she doesn’t always take up
that which she is described as doing. When she finally speaks it is to cen-
sure Nick, as she whispers—‘Don’t talk. I want to hear what happens’
(Fitzgerald 2000, p. 20)—a line that textually pertains to eavesdropping
and theatrically refers to unseen voices elsewhere, to voices already trav-
elled and not anchored to bodies. This text spoken as a line also forces a
hiatus in the reading of the book. Shepherd’s voice has been temporarily
halted not just by her speaking but because her voicing of Baker is also
a foregrounding of her office worker’s presence and draws attention to
her performance of both roles. Thus, her presence as the office worker
character begins to function as a body to which the character’s voice can
belong, but this is not a straightforward deacousmatisation. Rather it is
the mapping of Sokol’s body, to which the voice can travel while her vis-
ual presence remains elsewhere. Although she may vocally take-up the
character’s text, this, in turn, exposes her non-bodily presence as Baker.
Though Sokol’s performance develops as Baker and, like Shepherd, she
performs a score of manifestations of her designated character, neverthe-
less her performed voice remains at odds with her visual presence. Thus,
a degree of theatrical acousmatisation arguably remains.
If Chion’s acousmatised voice is a presence both within and beyond
the cinematic frame, which requires a body within to anchor its ‘without-
ness’, then Dolar’s acousmatised voice is a presence between, within and
beyond the corporeal frame that exposes bodies. According to Dolar,
the presence of the body producing the voice, the topology of this voice
and its subsequent departure from the body produces another form of
acousmatisation, which is not so much formed by its cleaving from the
visual but is defined by its impossible return. This is because of Dolar’s
emphasis on interiority beyond the threshold of the mouth, the aperture
at which Chion’s deacousmatisation takes place. For Dolar, ‘the source
 4  VOICE: A PERFORMANCE OF SOUND  91

of the voice can never be seen, it stems from an undisclosed and structur-
ally concealed interior, it cannot possibly match what we see’ (2006, p.
70). On Dolar’s terms, we are all acousmatised; there is no possibility of
deacousmatisation—its resolution, and certainly no chance of disacous-
matisation—its undoing. Perhaps the theatrical voice is not as synchro-
nised as Chion suggests. What is interesting is that theatre productions
based on the performance potential of voice reveal the gap between the
voice and the body because they are about the impossibility of speaking
on behalf of one’s self. In Gatz, Sokol’s partial lending of a body demon-
strates that the source of the voice is not only not always locatable, it also
problematises identity.

Performing Gatsby
Dolar’s topology of the voice describes the journey of vocality from its
physical production within the body—the interior of the speaking self—
through the bodily aperture, the mouth, to its manifestation—vocalisa-
tion—to the self’s exterior. This creates another fissure, a gap between
interiority and exteriority, in which the object voice appears and acts as
the operator of this division. In Gatz, this division is most apparent in
the distinction between the physical presence of office-world characters
and the fictional presence of characters from The Great Gatsby that the
voice speaks towards. As explored in this chapter, this gap is upheld by
an incomplete deacousmatisation, but it is also a consequence of the per-
formed voice that, like that of the shofar, is entirely created by its vocal
manifestation and dispersal. Unlike the singing voice, which favours the
aesthetic end result, incorporating the interior as the engine of its aes-
thetic manifestation, the performed voice utilises the division and incor-
porates what is lost—the relinquished body interior mismatched with
the vocal outcome—into its aesthetic. The primary example of this is Jim
Fletcher’s performance of Gatsby, whose vocality functions in a very dif-
ferent way to Shepherd’s. First, Gatsby is consigned to only those parts
of the text which ‘speak’—the lines of dialogue as they are written in
Fitzgerald’s book—he has no recourse to the referential texts that Nick
as narrator enjoys. As such, Fletcher’s Gatsby is more aligned with the
body of his office character (which Collins describes as a ‘malevolent
boss’)12 as the appearance of the Gatsby character is entirely reliant on
the moments at which the book allows him to speak. As he is a man of
few words he has a more provisional presence; he is a subject constantly
in the making. This is fitting with his fleeting presences in the story: he
92  L. Kendrick

is a character who throws parties at which he isn’t seen; is known but

never met by many; whose identity is fantasised by others and whose
death raises questions about his being. Gatsby doesn’t textually appear
until page forty-nine of the book, one hour and thirty-eight minutes into
the production, though his presence is there from the outset. In Gatz,
his entry to the story takes place firmly within the office-world (in the
book, he is discovered by Nick at one of his infamous parties). As Nick
describes the appearance of the eponymous host, Fletcher looks impas-
sively at him, reading the lines as cued. When it becomes clear in the
production that Nick doesn’t recognise his host, this forces the line ‘I’m
Gatsby’ (Fitzgerald 2000, p. 49) from Fletcher, yet it’s as if neither per-
former recognises this until it is uttered. It is only at that moment that
a sense of Gatsby as a presence occurs. Furthermore, this presence can-
not be maintained beyond the utterance, as Nick continues to describe
his host’s responses, yet these are not embodied by the performer, they
are not performed. Thus, the statement ‘I’m Gatsby’ (ibid.) has an active
performative quality. Like the shofar, it is an act of making present the
character, which simultaneously reveals its absence. The topology of the
voice, its leaving of the body, journey towards meaning and performa-
tive moment and no return, is evident in Fletcher’s statement of presence,
which doesn’t remain but rather points to the non-presence of Gatsby
in the guise of the office boss and in the body of the performer. This
moment captures how being is staged in Gatz; suspended between the
low-rent ‘real’ office-world and flawed fantasy of the book, the charac-
ters—particularly Gatsby—are in a constant state of creation and anni-
hilation, one that they barely understand themselves. This state of flux
explains why Fletcher appears to be in moments of confusion about his
presence as Gatsby; a character who is fully fledged only on his own utter-
ance, yet is partial, peripheral and potentially lost when vocalised by Nick.
At moments of ‘I’m Gatsby’(ibid.), the voice thrusts a particular pres-
ence, which the text is an affirmation of, but this presence by means of
the voice exposes that which struggles towards this moment. There is the
sense that the character spends his non-vocalised time trying to capture
these moments of being. This struggle echoes Dolar’s point that ‘the sub-
ject is always stuck between voice and understanding […] there is “the
object voice” in the beginning, followed by the signifier which is a way of
making sense of it, of coming to terms with the voice’ (2006, p. 138).
This emergence and departure of the voice, in particular the trou-
bling absence that remains, forms the performance of Gatz in a different
way to deacousmatisation. Whereas moments of the voice’s incomplete
 4  VOICE: A PERFORMANCE OF SOUND  93

return—for instance, Sokol’s playful embodiment of various voices—pre-

sents characters in a state of partial formation and flux, the problem of
the initial production of voice presents selves troubled in their formation.
This is also apparent in Nick’s narrative domain, particularly when his
vocal task demands both his presence as a character and his function to
make-present as the narrator of the production. He too has a respon-
sibility to perform Gatsby. This produces many comic moments; for
instance, Nick’s attempt to leave Gatsby and Daisy to their illicit affair
becomes impossible as it is only by means of his vocalisation that this will
take place. His line—‘I tried to go then, but they wouldn’t hear of it’
(Fitzgerald 2000, p. 91)—is very much heard by Gatsby who holds Nick
in his clutches as closely as he does Daisy, with Shepherd struggling to
find space under Fletcher’s armpit to produce his next line, ‘perhaps my
presence made them feel more satisfactorily alone’ (ibid.), which is both
ironic and funny—they could not be alone without him (see Fig. 4.1).
Shepherd’s performance requires him to play his absence as well as

Fig. 4.1  Scott Shepherd as Nick Carraway, Jim Fletcher as Gatsby and Lucy
Taylor as Daisy Buchanan in Gatz by Elevator Repair Service (dir. John Collins),
photograph by Tristram Kenton
94  L. Kendrick

Nick’s presence, brandishing his increasingly dog-eared copy of the text

which, as a performance script, has become a score of his shifts between
acts of vocally making-present and the performance of textual absence.
He is, by Nick’s admission, ‘within and without’ (Fitzgerald 2000,
p. 37) the production and at the extreme he is faced with the impossible
task of uttering his character’s vocal absence:

For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted
like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a
wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had remembered
was uncommunicable forever. (Fitzgerald 2000, p. 107)

This story of a thwarted move to speak in The Great Gatsby, forced into
vocalisation in Gatz, captures the problem of self-presence of its central
characters. The desire to speak that can only talk of silence describes the
self’s experience of the ‘bodily missile’ (2006, p. 70) of Dolar’s object
voice: the impulse to speak; the vocal journey towards utterance that
produces a fleeting, performative presence; and its subsequent separation
from the body, its revelation of absence and the production of an unex-
plainable presence. Connor argues that the disembodying journey of the
voice doesn’t necessarily leave an absence without presence.

If it is true of human beings that language enables us to be where we are

not, and prevents us from ever being anywhere but beside ourselves, then
it is the voice that stretches us out between here and elsewhere. One can-
not be fully “here” unless one is silent. (Connor 2004, p. 4)

In other words, to refrain from vocalisation is to remain in one’s self; to

not cast one’s self into the gap created by the object voice, that which
also forms a partition between the self and the world. But the silent state
that Connor refers to is not the same as silence. In the body without
voice, in the domain without the sonic object that is vocalisation, there is
another form of voice: the sonorousless.

The Sonorousless Voice

Nick Carraway’s statement of that which ‘made no sound’ (Fitzgerald
2000, p. 107) describes the voice before it has arrived into sonority.13
The important point is that he cannot say what may have formed sound.
 4  VOICE: A PERFORMANCE OF SOUND  95

This suggests that the character is not withholding linguistic meaning,

because he is not aware of what the voice might mean when he senses
its arrival. He is describing a voice that has no content. As such, this
moment also seems to describe the arrival of a voice within that is not
formed as thought, but as a call upon him to speak. This call, it is sug-
gested, may not have a quality of belonging entirely to him but to have
arrived from elsewhere. This remote quality and function of the sono-
rousless voice is a feature of being, specifically that version of being
which Heidegger describes as Dasein, which is the being that becomes
a being not because of its ability to know by reflection, but because of
its ability to experience by being a being. Dasein describes that aspect of
self that has a sense of being’s Being. What is interesting is the extent
to which Heidegger’s definition of Dasein relates to voice, specifically
the sonorousless or inner voice, which he refers to as a ‘call’ to being.
Heidegger captures the way in which this diverges from a sense of the
speaking self (the they-self) and maps a topology of the inner voice
that, by happening upon us, seems to have no clear start, no delineated
route and, as such, no definitive ‘speaker’. It is a voice that emerges, as
Heidegger describes thus:

The call is precisely something that we ourselves have neither planned, nor
prepared for, nor wilfully brought about. “It” calls against our expecta-
tions and even against our will. On the other hand, the call without doubt
does not come from someone else who is with me in the world. The
call comes from me, and yet from over me. (2010, p. 265, emphases in
original)

This description of the call captures the way in which the multiple mani-
festations of voice open up the gap in which the object voice appears and
the self has a sense of partial and troubled formation. Dolar also focuses
on this estranging aspect of vocality, describing it as a pure ‘alterity of
the voice’ to ‘get out of the closure of one’s self-presence’ (2006, p. 95),
one that closes off any self-reflective mode—this is no opportunity for
internal monologue—it is that which, in its explicable essence, exposes
being.
It would be impossible to claim the sonorousless voice is vocalised in
Gatz. The very nature of this inner voice belies any acoustic manifesta-
tion: it cannot take any bodily form through embodiment or mouth, as
soon as it does, it ceases to be that very voice which we weren’t sure
96  L. Kendrick

was a part of us in the first place. Yet, as Lagaay points out, though the
inner voice may be sonorousless, it is audible to the self. Whether a
call of conscience, of self, or of other selves, the presence of this voice
within is often referred to as various forms of exchange that are neces-
sarily heard by the self. This in turn imbues the ‘call’ with potential, a
‘dramatic quality of a voice as address or appeal’ as Lagaay states (2011,
p. 63, emphases in original), which demands to be listened to. Perhaps
it is the audibility of the sonorousless voice that can be played out in
Gatz? This inner voice may quell sonority but the listener can give voice
to what they hear. Shepherd’s performance of Nick Carraway’s move to
speak what cannot be voiced is not so much about what cannot be said
but about how attending to—and articulating attending to—this call
foregrounds his presence as more than what can ever be spoken.
What is also important about the audibility of the voice that remains
silent is that, despite its sonorouslessness, it has an aural presence. And
this is the most intimate connection between vocality and aurality: the
deepest recesses of the voice are within the realm of aurality, perhaps
entirely.

The Subject Voice

If Shepherd’s performance can put voice to that which has no sound
by articulating what his character can hear, then there is more agency
on the performer’s part than Dolar’s theory of the object voice coun-
tenances. Unlike the voice of the shofar, the performer’s voice is not
only generative by performative means, by the act of vocalising, but
is also made generative by the vocaliser. The performed voice has voli-
tion. It has a speaker, not just in terms of text uttered, but as a speaker
on behalf of one’s self. This volition is somewhat at odds with the the-
ory of the object voice; perhaps the performed voice reveals a flaw in
the argument for it? Put simply, the staging of voice in Gatz is entirely
reliant on a speaker speaking. Because of this, arguably the performed
voice entertains connections between the entities that the object voice
cleaves, in particular between phone and logos, between voice and mean-
ing and between voice and self. Why can’t the subject speak for itself?
Or for another? These questions are raised by Adriana Cavarero (2005),
who argues against the disconnection between the voice and the self
and focuses on the voice as unique to the ‘one who emits it’ (p. 9).
Like Dolar, Cavarero too considers that the voice is ‘sound not speech’
 4  VOICE: A PERFORMANCE OF SOUND  97

(2005, p. 12); however, unlike Dolar, this does not mean voice is entirely
distinct from it as, according to her thesis, ‘speech constitutes its essential
destination’ (2005, p. 12). Furthermore, this destination is by no means
an abandonment of the vocaliser—or, as Cavarero’s theory permits us to
say—the speaker. She makes an argument for a subject voice but not a
subject that, like Heidegger’s for instance, ‘has no voice and speaks only
to itself through the mute voice of consciousness’ (Cavarero 2005, p.
173); in a deft political move, she demonstrates how a subject voice pro-
duces a presence which is always for the ear of another, and this is the
basis for an effective plurality:

Meaning — or, better, the relationality and the uniqueness of each voice
that constitutes the nucleus of this meaning — passes from the acoustic
sphere to speech. Precisely because speech is sonorous, to speak of one
another is to communicate oneself to others in the plurality of voices. In
other words, the act of speaking is relational: what it communicates first
and foremost, beyond the specific content that words communicate, is
the acoustic, empirical, material relationality of singular voices. (Cavarero
2005, p. 13)

This intrinsic connection between the acoustic and the linguistic reveals
how voice can be considered a performance of sound. It is not an orches-
tration of sonority—for instance, the organisation into phonemes that
‘mean’ something—nor does it lend sonority to meaning, carving logos
out of its material.14 Rather the fact that speech is sonorous is a reminder
that voice is sound and it is what we do with it—through form or per-
form—that can constitute it. This places particular emphasis on acts of
vocalisation, of ‘saying’ or of ‘giving voice’ and what is given. For exam-
ple, Brandon LaBelle (2014) provides a critique of Dolar’s theory that
places an emphasis on the body as not relinquished by the voice but as
coming into formation by it. For LaBelle, the voice is ‘a sound so full
of body’ (2014, p. 5) that it has the capacity to the move the body with
it and the act of voice, or ‘voicing’ is a corporeal act, ‘I speak in order
to locate myself near you’ (2005, p. 3). LaBelle’s theory of voice is one
‘which never leaves me behind’ (2005, p. 5, emphasis in original) and it
is the ‘vocal link’ (ibid.) to corporeality which is the ‘ground for agency’
(ibid.). The voice finds the subject by means of sound, and the subject
finds formation by means of its performance.
98  L. Kendrick

The Performed Voice

As this chapter has explored, the theory of the object voice reveals some
ways in which the voice in performance has a distinct function, quite
different from that of the deliverer of linguistic meaning. Considering
the performed voice as possessing the potential of the object voice, it
becomes clear how its production is key to the staging of identities: in
the distances and gaps that it creates, by the topology of its movement
from within and beyond the body, to the performance of voices in rela-
tion to bodies, and, finally, with the promise (but perhaps the impossi-
bility?) of deacousmatisation. As a staged phenomenon, the performed
voice is one which generates meaning not so much by the content it may
bring forth but by what it does, and this is a significant shift from mean-
ing as produced by what is said. In terms of performativity, these are not
speech acts but voice acts. Yet, the object voice’s alternative—the sub-
ject voice—in turn challenges the assumptions of distance, detachment
and crisis that the object of voice presents us with. Voice may not be an
abandonment of the body but may transport bodies in ways that exceed
corporeality. In this way a subject voice is a performance of sound that
is transformative because of the consideration of what/who voice is for;
according to Cavarero and LaBelle, it is always for another. This sheds
new light on the purpose of voice on its journey away from its speaker
and out into the ether. The topology of the voice may have a destination
after all: the ear. Considered in this way, Gatz is as much made by recep-
tion of the voice as it is made in its production. Scott Shepherd could
be said to perform Gatsby not only by reading, narrating and calling the
appearances of him, but also by lending an ear to Jim Fletcher’s voice. It
is by listening to Fletcher that Gatsby comes about; not only Shepherd
but we, by being audience, provide the space for the voice to do its job.
The voice as a performance of sound not only offers a model of voice
as an entity in and of itself but also brings voice and ear to bear upon
each other once more. Voice and ear, vocalising and listening are the
interstices of theatre aurality, their difference opens up the spaces of the
critical field of aurality. In the case of Gatz, these are questions of how
identities are performed, on what terms these can be articulated, and
how their being is brought forth. Furthermore, considering voice as a
performance of sound in theatre allows consideration of what voice does
when it is not in service to normative modes of meaning, by which I
mean the authorial voice of the text in terms of ‘script’ or ‘character’. In
 4  VOICE: A PERFORMANCE OF SOUND  99

other words, what does the voice do in theatre when we are not work-
ing with ‘realism’? How do we speak when the voice does not serve to
cohere the speaking body? When theatre presents its audience with the
performance of characters and identities in their making, what role can
the voice have in this process? Such questions about speaking in theatre
can be answered by asking: what is a voice and what can it do?
The sonic sensibility of Gatz is more than an aesthetic solution to the
translation of a book into a piece of theatre. It is an approach to thea-
tre that stages being, not through linguistic meaning, but by means of
its material and the performance of it. This is the territory of theatre
aurality.

Notes
1. ERS began work on Gatz in 1999, it premiered in Europe in 2006, in the
US in 2009 and in London 2012.
2. The Great Gatsby is some forty-nine thousand words in length, Gatz is
eight hours long (including intervals).
3. I’m referring here to Voegelin’s (2010 and 2014) use of this phrase.
4. In de Anima Aristotle considers the voice to be a sound with meaning; see
Dolar (2006) or Connor (2007).
5. Lacan’s voice as object was also an attempt to capture the intrinsic nature
of voice in psychoanalysis per se and to collapse some of the binaries of
traditional vocal functionality between the analysand and the analyst.
As Dolar surmised, ‘[Lacan] was the one who paid due attention to the
voice, which up to then seemed not to have been quite heard, or reduced
to whispers […] He promoted it to the status of the proper object of psy-
choanalysis, one of the paramount embodiments of what he called objet
petit a[…]’ (2006, p. 127).
6. The notion of a ‘little object’ is in relation to the definition of object in
psychoanalysis as that ‘external to the ego chosen as […] desirable’
(OED, p. 641) and is intrinsic to the psychoanalytical function of object-
relation, which is ‘a relationship felt, or the emotional energy directed,
by the self towards a chosen object’ (ibid.). The gaze and the voice as
objects were Lacan’s significant additions to Freud’s bodily itinerary of
partial objects (breast, phallus, urethra and faeces), see Žižek (1996) or
Lagaay (2008).
7. Not unlike the infinite—or ‘bad infinity’ (as Žižek describes Lacan’s take
on the necessarily negative connotations of the ever unattainable)—the
idea of a ‘transfinite’ object (Lacan’s preferred term for the non-finite)
is one that is not relentlessly excessive but is connected to the ‘empirical
100  L. Kendrick

objects’ to which it refers from infinite extremes. As Žižek puts it ‘our two
objets petit a, voice and gaze, are “transfinite”: in both cases, we are deal-
ing with an empty object that frames the “bad infinity” of the field of the
visible and/or audible by giving body to what constitutively eludes this
field’ (1996, pp. 91–92). In this sense the transfinite object is not unlike
a meta object, which relates to other objects in terms of what they cannot
contain, and Žižek goes on to describe manifestations of the transfinite as
‘the object gaze [which] is a blind spot within the field of the visible [and]
the object voice, par excellence, of course, is silence’ (p. 92).
8. Logos is, of course, a much disputed term. Nevertheless, here I allude to
that which, as Adriana Cavarero points out, ‘is at stake in the term logos’
(2005, p. 9) which is the ultimate destination of voice—speech, which in
turn means that voice is always in service to that which speech is a vehicle
for—meaning. Similarly, Cavarero’s aim, to rethink speech as related to
voice and not vice versa (which she considers to be the folly of metaphys-
ics per se), is based on severing the assumed link between phone and logos.
Like Dolar’s project, this is a political endeavour on Cavarero’s part, to
move from ‘ontology to politics’ (2005, p. 16); however, unlike Dolar,
this is rooted in a ‘subject voice’, which will be considered towards the
end of this chapter.
9. This form of sound object is not dissimilar to Pierre Schaeffer’s isolation
of sound from its context, though Schaeffer’s notion was phenomeno-
logical (see Kane 2007 or Levack-Drever 2010), whereas Dolar’s theory
draws on psychoanalytical notions of object.
10. Tom’s character was based on the owner of the garage where ERS were
rehearsing Gatz, who would frequently interrupt rehearsal, oblivious to
it, to check the daily post, which was stored on a small table near the
door. Collins and company found him to be very ‘Tom-like’ (Collins,
personal communication with author, 18 August 2014. These, and other
quotes from this exchange, are cited with kind permission from John
Collins). It’s an example of how ERS embrace actual events that per-
meate their process to the extent that they become incorporated in the
performance. This frequently occurs with what might ordinarily be con-
sidered as intrusive sound, which Collins not only embraces but captures
by sampling, recording and through amplification (see Collins 2011).
11. I use ‘Nick’ to refer to the narratorial character of The Great Gatsby who
inhabits and drives the story and is referred to as such throughout the
majority of the book/production, and ‘Nick Carraway’ to refer to the
manifestation of the character, particularly towards the end of Gatz when
he becomes the subject of it.
12. The company ‘created analogous lives for the office characters’ including
the mysterious boss who, like his destined character, has his fingers in a
 4  VOICE: A PERFORMANCE OF SOUND  101

number of pies at this office, not all of which are ‘above board’ (Collins
personal communication with the author 18 August 2014).
13. The sonorousless voice describes that which is yet to be sonorous. For this
reason, this voice is best described as sonorousless because though it is
yet to contain sound it holds the potential to do so, it is not the same
thing as an antithesis or absence of sound, such as silence.
14. Unlike theories of voice that focus on its material and quality of sonor-
ity such as Barthes’ ‘grain of the voice’ (1977, p. 179), Cavarero makes
an argument for re-thinking of ‘speech from the perspective of the voice’
(Cavarero 2005, p. 14).

References
Auslander, Philip. 2015. Music as Performance: The Disciplinary Dilemma
Revisited. In Sound und Performance, ed. Ernst, W. D., Niethammer, N.,
Szymanski-Düll, B. and Mungen, A. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.
Bailes, Sara Jane. 2007. Gatz (review). Theatre Journal 59 (3): 508–509.
Bailes, Sara Jane. 2010. Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure. London
and New York: Routledge.
Barthes, Roland. 1977. The Grain of the Voice. In Image Music Text, trans.
Stephen Heath. London: Fontana.
Cavarero, Adriana. 2005. For More Than One Voice: Towards a Philosophy of Vocal
Expression, trans. Paul A. Kottman. Stanford California: Stanford University
Press.
Chion, Michel. 1994. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Chion, Michel. 1999. The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Collins, John. 2011. Performing Sound/Sounding Space. In Theatre Noise: The
Sound of Performance, ed. Lynne Kendrick and David Roesner. Newcastle:
CSP.
Connor, Steven. 2012. Chiasmus. Studies in Musical Theatre 6 (1): 9–27.
Connor, Steven. 2004. The Strains of the Voice. In Phonorama: Eine
Kulturgeschichte der Stimme als Medium, ed. Brigitte Felderer. Berlin: Matthes
and Seitz.
Connor, Steven. 2007. Sound and the Pathos of the Air, lecture at Sonorities
Festival of Contemporary Music (21 April 2007). Belfast: Sonic Arts Research
Centre.
Dolar, Mladen. 2006. A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dolar, Mladen. 1996a. At First Sight. In Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed.
Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek. Durham: Duke University Press.
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Dolar, Mladen. 1996b. The Object Voice. In Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed.
Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek. Durham: Duke University Press.
Dolar, Mladen. 2008. What’s in a Voice? trans. Kathrin Batko, http://philos-
overeign.blogspot.co.uk/#!/2014/02/mladen-dolar-whats-in-voice-tran-
skript.html. Accessed 14 Feb 2014.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. 2000 [1926]. The Great Gatsby. London: Penguin.
Heidegger, Martin. 2010. Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany:
SUNY press.
Kane, Brian. 2007. L’Objet Sonore Maintenant: Pierre Schaeffer, Sound Objects
and the Phenomenological Reduction. Organised Sound 12 (1): 15–24.
LaBelle, Brandon. 2014. Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the
Oral Imaginary. London: Bloomsbury.
Lagaay, Alice. 2008. Between Sound and Silence: Voice in the History of
Psychoanalysis. Episteme 1 (1): 53–61.
Lagaay, Alice. 2011. Towards a (negative) Philosophy of Voice. In Theatre
Noise: The Sound of Performance, ed. Lynne Kendrick, and David Roesner.
Newcastle: CSP.
Levack Drever, John. 2010. Sound Effect – Object – Event. In Sound: A Reader
in Theatre Practice, ed. Ross Brown. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Voegelin, Salomé. 2010. Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of
Sound Art. London and New York: Continuum.
Voegelin, Salomé. 2014. Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound.
London: Bloomsbury.
Žižek, Slavoj. 1996. “I Hear You with my Eyes”, or The Invisible Master. In
Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed. Slavoj Žižek, and Renata Salecl. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2003. Jacques Lacan: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory.
London and New York: Routledge.
 CHAPTER 5

Noise: A Politics of Sound

The previous chapters have shown how sound transforms auditory territories
and acoustic spaces through the intimacies of listening (Chap. 3), and how
it transports beings and bodies through the performance of voice (Chap. 4),
but what of those sounds which are designed to move meaning and shift
our understanding? What of those sounds that exert power, demonstrat-
ing its constructs or consequences? Or those ways of working with sound
that are designed to circumnavigate power and structure? When we think
of the sounds of politics in theatre we might be familiar with the sounds
of speech—of dialogue and discourse, or we may recognise the volume of
it—of chorus, of protest, of outcry. Loudness is a common marker of polit-
ical theatre, but it is not the only sound of it. Noise in theatre practice is
much more than a case of volume; it emerges in diverse and difficult ways
in compositions, rehearsal processes and sound designs. This chapter focuses
on noise as a politics of sound to explore those theatre performances that
are made to re-sound, undo or even shatter sound’s organisation. Jacques
Attali (2009) has identified the ways in which the segregation and com-
modification of sounds took place in direct correlation with the march of
capitalism.1 His thesis suggests that to disorganise sound through noise
can form a direct opposition to the production and circulation of received
meaning in all its manifestations; for example, linguistic speech, melody, har-
mony and signal. In the case of the practice referred to in this chapter, the
received meaning or organised sound is identified as that which is silencing,
heteronormative, nullifying and anaesthetising. Theatre artists who aim to

© The Author(s) 2017 103

L. Kendrick, Theatre Aurality,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-45233-7_5
104  L. Kendrick

sound out the marginalised, silenced, feminist, trans and queer politics or to
stage the ‘apocalyptic potential’ (Sack 2015, p. 147) of the anti-representa-
tive are reconfiguring theatre sound on other terms, or on the terms of its
other—noise. Therefore, this chapter asks: what are the politics of sound in
theatre?

What Is Noise?
If listening is one way in which sound can be transformed into meaning,
then noise reminds our ears of what lies beyond this, but not just in the
form of barely perceivable or overwhelming sounds. Noise is that which
exceeds our understanding. It announces the unexpected and the unex-
plainable; change is often heralded by some kind of sonic cacophony, and
even the onset of silence, as John Cage noted, rings in our ears.2 Yet
noise is not necessarily ‘new’ in and of itself; rather it heralds ‘newness’
to the unsuspecting ear. For example, the tsunami may be the shocking
event, but the sea makes much noise before it happens upon us. The
sheer scale of this noise sounds of more than the event; it is omnipresent,
fuelled by what has been, what is taking place and what is about to come.
Thus this noise is not just of an event but is an opening up of the ear to
all that which the event might bring forth. Noise has a quality of being
always-already in the world yet, despite this, noise is something which we
have been rarely ready for. Our histories are often shaped by our poten-
tial to be under siege from sound, in defence we have created acoustic
architectures for desired sounds, and cultural forms for organised sounds
and, as such, noise has marked the edges of acceptable sound and has
carved out the aural sphere of any given era.3 For this reason, noise has
quite a different discursive function, which unveils a political potential far
more complex than the familiar debate as to whether or not it is a form
of sound. As Hillel Schwartz put it in his voluminous history Making
Noise, from Babel to Big Bang and Beyond, ‘noise in the West has been
signally transformed from an exclusively aural experience to a root meta-
phor about our world, our lives, and the meaning of our lives abroad in
the world’ (2011, p. 21).
Contemporary noise is much more than an auricular assault. Though
it can indeed pierce an eardrum, noise has the potential to shatter much
more than the hearing apparatus of the body. The advent of modernity
and the onset of our technological age sparked a resurgence of noise; it
re-emerged as a manufactured entity that interfered in transmission and
 5  NOISE: A POLITICS OF SOUND  105

interrupted reception. Noise became produced and productive, whether

we liked it or not, and as a consequence, it has become a highly com-
plex basis for the partitioning of sounds and the delineation of mean-
ing. Any form of meaning making—carving out signal, the cultivation of
non-dissonant sound, the clarification of data and isolation of the bit—
has become an encounter with noise in some way. To actively engage in
the production of sound is also an invitation to noise, and an immer-
sion in considerable semantic complexity. Noise is notoriously difficult to
articulate. Indeed, while we may all know noise when we sense it, we
don’t necessarily know what it is. The languages available to describe it
are far more obfuscatory than the vagaries of those of sound. Its etymol-
ogy holds a few clues to its historical relation to perception and recep-
tion: Veit Erlmann explores how the origins of noise emerge in the Latin
nausea, meaning ‘seasickness’, which recalls its connection to the oceans
and the relation of it to the German term rauschen which ‘usually signi-
fies the sound made by such things as rivers, brooks, and leaves’ (2010,
p. 166). The term evolved as it parted company with different manifesta-
tions of it. For instance, as Erlmann points out, rauschen (which means
‘rush’) pertains to the sounds of rustling whereas Rauschen refers to
‘white noise’ (2010, p. 166). A similar semantic bifurcation took place
in French, as the term noise originally referred to uproar, yet once it
entered into English usage it lost its connotations of resistance; ‘English
borrowed the sound from us; we keep only the fury’ (1995, p. 12)
bemoans Michel Serres (who we’ll hear more from later in this chapter).
In French, the common term for noise is now bruit, a more complex mix
‘of two vulgar Latin verbs: bragere (to bray) and rugire (to roar)’ (Chion
2011, p. 241), which aligns noise made with noise in and of itself.4 The
linguistic partitioning of noise, its cleaving from source and productiv-
ity, in part explains its consignment to a binary negative—for instance, as
the foundational idea of the signal-to-noise ratio—or its binary positive,
as a radical aesthetic such as that proclaimed in Luigi Russolo’s Futurist
manifesto L’arte dei Rumori. At either extreme, noise has had a pro-
ductive function, but it has remained defined only by its opposite. The
signal-to-noise ratio is a case in point. This is an attempt to distinguish
noise which could, ostensibly, provide a definition of it. Nevertheless, it
remains elusive: if noise is not signal, then why is not possible to say what
it is?
This problem of definition is both set up and beset by a series of bina-
ries, paradoxes and conundrums: firstly, noise is considered as either a
106  L. Kendrick

sonic entity or an auditory phenomenon, as either material or a matter

of perception; in rudimentary terms, as either the object or subjective
experience of it. This, in turn, commands a paradoxical response; noise
is generally thought to be something that is filtered out or ‘ignored’
(Schafer 2004, p. 30) while remaining something to which we must be
‘alert’ (Barthes 1985, p. 245), in order to decipher the reason for its
presence. Yet noise has a perilous relation to what might be ‘present’;
Sirens once lured us towards danger, whereas the modern siren warns us
away from it; despite their volume, we mustn’t be spellbound by either
(Schwartz 2015). Secondly, noise is considered to be either residing in or
residual to sound, detritus or sonic property. On the one hand it is fall-
out, that toxic aspect of noise related to chaos (Bijsterveld 2012), that
which exceeds meaning—or on the other it is the basis of it, an instru-
ment of war and signal of atrocity (Goodman 2010). Thirdly, noise is
either vibration or rigidity, plural or fixed. For instance, it can be trans-
gressive and radical with the potential to overhaul received ideas and
forms (Attali 2009) or, if unchecked, it can relinquish its political poten-
tial and morph into homogeneity (Serres 2008).
The different ideas of what sound’s other might be have sparked a
recent flourish in thinking about the ontologies of noise. For instance,
in the fields of music, digital, virtual and sound arts, noise is con-
ceived of in ways that seek to embrace the relations between binaries.
Douglas Kahn’s noise is a significant medium of alterity, which might
reveal ‘ontological riches in the raw’ (1999, p. 21); Greg Hainge finds
noise a ‘quasi-material object’ (2013, p. 30) whose relational function
also constitutes its form; and noise is also found in material minutiae,
as Joseph Nechvatal describes a cell-like Deleuzian ‘vacuole’ version that
‘re-route[s] and break[s] up pathways of control’ (2011, p. 15) and, in
this process, generates entirely new meaning. With all this in mind one
might ask to what extent is it still relevant and useful to conceive of noise
only as ex negativo? Indeed, ontological theories of noise have a political
objective, as these disrupt the order, if not collapse the stronghold5 of
the signal-to-noise ratio. What happens if, as Salomé Voegelin declared,
we conceive of all ‘sounds as noise’ (2007)? Of what material might sig-
nal be made from?
Any attempt to define noise ontologically is forced by a definitive ver-
sion of sound as meaning. The mechanical and technological pursuit
of this was the means by which we produced and continue to gener-
ate noise. Jonathan Sterne (2006) has demonstrated at length how the
 5  NOISE: A POLITICS OF SOUND  107

technologies of sound reproduction and communication are in many

ways artefacts of our understanding of what sound is and how listening
functions. As Lisa Gitelman (2006) points out, media is neither entirely
representative of us nor is it autonomous, but is a consequence of the
social and economic definitions of sound that in turn ‘abetted new social
and economic structures’ (p. 13). This has political implications as noise
is no accident. The means by which we engage in sound production pre-
cisely impacts on noise. What becomes most apparent from the various
and diverse histories of sound production is our culpability in the desig-
nation of organised sound versus noise. We are the arbiters of noise, of
what this means and what it can do, and what a definition might be. And
nowhere is this more apparent than in theatre practice.

Three Forms of Noise

In order to ascertain what noise might be and how it becomes mate-
rial for theatre practice, the theories of Michel Serres offer a great deal.
Of his varied and diverse writings, his focus on sensation—in particular
his theory of the senses—draws on noise, or multiple manifestations of
noises as emergent in several aspects of being and perception, transmis-
sion and reception. Indeed, his comingled model of sensing in The Five
Senses: a philosophy of mingled bodies appears to be predicated on the pres-
ence of noise. As Steven Connor, in the introduction to this volume says:
‘for Serres, the senses are not islands, or channels, that keep themselves
to themselves. They do not operate on different frequencies, in differ-
ent parts of the waveband, but are subject to interference—they are even
interference itself’ (2008, p. 7). This bleed between senses as a conse-
quence—or as a construct—of interference, strongly suggests an element
of noise as the basis of the senses and of our understanding of sensory
engagement, evoking that version of noise that Serres himself draws out,
an ever present material from which we attempt to glean all sound. Thus
noise begins as an organising principle for Serres’ radically reorganised
sensorium.
In his effort to describe the three different ‘kinds of audible’ avail-
able to the hearing sense, Serres identifies three different manifestations
of noise. First, noise begins with us. It is primarily of the body, it is the
product of our internal workings; of involuntary airs and digestive irreg-
ularities, of vascular rhythms and cell divisions. This notion is not new;
the constant noise of the body found a happy audience with Cage in his
108  L. Kendrick

anechoic chamber and bolstered his idea that there is no such thing as
silence. But for Serres, this bodily noise is not just of vivacity, it is also
of atrophy and illness and, for him, this noise only becomes fully audi-
ble when experiencing the latter. The second manifestation of noise is
of everything seemingly beyond the body. It ‘is spread over the world:
thunder, wind, surf, birds, avalanches, the terrifying rumbling that pre-
cedes earthquakes, cosmic events’ (Serres 2008, p. 107). Yet in addition
to these exterior noises there is another layer, which is Serres’ ever pre-
sent, unstinting and endless ‘background noise’, which is the ‘ground of
our perception, absolutely uninterrupted […] the basic element of the
software of all our logic [… and] the background of information, the
material of that form’ (1995, p. 7). This concept of noise is fundamental
to language, to aesthetics, to politics, to logos. As ‘[w]ithout this back-
ground production containing the background noise, nothing else will
hold together; nothing in the world, [...] not in the senses, not the arts,
not parts of the body’ (Serres 2008, p. 127). This noise is the very basis
of meaning, no meaning can be discernible without it, as all meaning—
or music as Serres frequently refers to it (by this he means all art forms
and modes of communication)—is derived in relation to noise, it needs it
to come into existence.
Serres’ third manifestation of noise differs greatly from the constant
rattle of the body and the ever-present background hum of the world.
This other manifestation of noise is not of us but is produced by us.
It is the sonic cacophony of the developed world, the extent of which
prompts one of Serres’ longest lists of examples (he is a writer who pre-
fers incidences to references). This idea of a manufactured noise is, of
course, commonplace, but Serres has a different take on it; this man-
made cacophony is not just of an industrial age, an electrical residue or
symptom of urbanity. Serres’ other noise constitutes new modes of col-
lective being, it ‘is what defines the social’ (2008, p. 107). The found-
ing material of this newer noise is language, that signal which is derived
from noise in an attempt to be free from it, to carve out sense amidst
the full sensorium of the body within the world. However, Serres finds
language at fault in creating a homogenous sound, which propagates
itself by means of any form which reproduces its meaning—sciences, arts,
philosophies—a myriad of forms which generate a group or a ‘collective
[which] only believes in its own noise’ (2008, p. 86). The sheer scale of
such noise is considerable, and difficult to find resistance to:
 5  NOISE: A POLITICS OF SOUND  109

We can draw a thousand cycles unifying the group’s transmission and

reception, as well as the constant maintenance of this movement. Speeches,
music, constructions, media, performances. Why not call the circulation
of this thunderous flux, meaningful or meaningless, the social contract?
Or for each one of us: concern, passion, enthusiasm for belonging. More
often than not closed by these cycles, rarely open. (Serres 2008, p. 111)

This third form of noise drowns out any other, in effect ‘silencing the
body, silencing the world’ (Serres 2008, p. 107).
Serres’ noise is both the basis for—and consequence of—sonic mat-
ter. It is the very material from which all sound as signal is drawn and
to which all returns, but it is also generated by mass signal, a ‘filthy’
cacophony of all that which has articulated the world. Nevertheless, this
other manifestation of noise is processed. It is produced by a sonic jour-
ney from one form of sound through its processing into another, what
Serres refers to as ‘hard’ and ‘soft’, an information technology analogy
that functions to illustrate how the self both negotiates noise and then,
in turn, produces it.

The given I have called hard is sometimes, but not always, located on
the entropic scale: it pulls your muscles, tears your skin, stings your eyes,
bursts your eardrums, burns your mouth, whereas gifts of language are
always soft. Softness belongs to smaller-scale energies, the energies of
signs; hardness sometimes belongs to large-scale energies, the ones that
knock you about, unbalance you, tear your body to pieces; our bodies live
in the world of hardware, whereas the gift of language is composed of soft-
ware. (Serres 2008, p. 113)

The point is that the hard becomes processed into the soft by sensa-
tion—by the processes and responses to reception—and vice versa, and
Serres’ point is that language is a particular software carved from hard
sound, which can also become hardened in its culmination. For instance,
once a language becomes fixed and embedded, it atrophies into hard-
ness, and its form and structure serve to confirm its form and struc-
ture—and none other. It is a primary means by which homogeneity is
populated and, as a consequence, it is the base material of extremism.
This is how contemporary noise is made. Serres’ noise is thus ‘both the
matrix of possibility and the cauldron of indifference’ (Connor 2008, p.
10) and, it is suggested, can be put to either use.
110  L. Kendrick

What becomes interesting for noise in terms of theatre is Serres’ atten-

tion to the processing of noise from one entity to another, whether
hard or soft (or hardened again), which involves the sensate body and
the mixing and filtering capacities of sensation. His noise is always felt;
it has an actual and visceral impact upon the sensing self, and this feeling
for noise is also a processing of it not just into ‘sense’ (or not), but into
other forms of noise. Thus, Serres’ definitions place audience at the heart
of noise, as receiver and producer, which suggests there’s an agency in
audition (albeit one which is supressed by oppressive hard sounds) and
that something tangible, material—a thing—is produced. In the intro-
duction to Theatre Noise: the Sound of Performance, David Roesner and
I made the case for a material form of noise, which becomes produc-
tive.6 This chapter will extend this research by exploring the ways in
which this productivity takes place, how noise figures within a process
of radical practice and can even be a deliberate strategy for transforma-
tion, both political and aesthetic. To explore these possibilities, this chap-
ter will investigate three manifestations of noise in theatre practice, not
so much adhering to Serres’ three kinds of audible but rather focusing
on that third, other noise which is produced and—in theatre—becomes
producible. But not as an affirming, homogenous racket, rather as a
political, resistive engagement in noise which, in turn, allows theatre
makers to create work outside of homogeneity. This chapter will focus
on three examples of sound in contemporary theatre practice that exem-
plify the different ways in which noise becomes productive and politically
charged. The first is noise as an organising principle for encountering
those sounds which we are coerced to ignore (to adapt Murray Schafer’s
assertion), regarding Teatr ZAR; noise as a methodology, a part of a pro-
cess that makes way for multiplicity of meaning in work by Chris Goode;
and finally, noise as a sonic entity, how the material presence of noise
disperses and disrupts the production of meaning in the practices of the
contemporary sound designers Tom Gibbons, Scott Gibbons and Ben
and Max Ringham.

Noise Ignored
Teatr ZAR‘s production Armine, Sister revisits the impact of the near
extinction of the Armenian people during the genocide in Anatolia a
century ago. The title is derived from a found fragment of the atrocities;
according to the company, it ‘recalls the first two words of a letter with
 5  NOISE: A POLITICS OF SOUND  111

no legible address, doomed to drift around in time and space’ (Teatr

ZAR 2014). It also positions women as the subjects of the production
which explores the ‘double taboo’ (O’Quinn 2015) of their objecti-
fication during times of war. This shockingly dark and sonically noisy
production is not only founded on extensive research from within the
company’s base at Wroclaw and in the far Eastern European regions, but
is also made possible by their post-Grotowskian paratheatrical approach
to performance. Their emphasis on certain physical apparatuses of per-
forming—in particular body and vocality, breath and song—produces
performances that aim to evoke the experiences that they researched
by the physical act of producing sound (played and sung). This type of
performance evocation, as Cláudia Nascimento aptly describes it, is ‘an
act of remembrance that arises from the confrontation between the per-
former’s personal memory and her execution of collective ancient musi-
cal or textual narratives’ (2008, p. 147).7 Teatr ZAR’s emphasis on
theatre as an encounter rather than as a form of representation means
the traumatic is not subject to being re-presented; encounter entails a
different methodology for dealing with the intolerable, one that steers
away from the difficulties of visual representation into the possibilities of
the aural.8 In the case of Armine, Sister the company’s focus is not on
what is recallable but on what is forgotten, in particular the process of
forgetting and ‘the history of ignorance [which] also includes the story
of building an “accord of silence” around each act of violence’ (Teatr
ZAR 2014). This silencing was embedded by the widespread dispersal of
survivors and their musical traditions that produced something of a dias-
pora of song, which the company seeks to uncover through its approach
to music theatre. The emphasis on song is encapsulated in the form of
Zar, perhaps the oldest form of polyphony still in existence, which is a
tradition of funeral chants they researched and learned in Georgia, the
term for which they pay homage to in their company name, which is a
testament to the importance of Zar to their ethos. This ancient form of
durational song is an oral tradition so bespoke to its communities that a
definitive version is hard to identify. Composed entirely of voices remi-
niscent of languages that are no longer spoken or documented, it is a
form of song that exists entirely in its performance and therefore it pre-
sents a challenge when produced in another form, in this case, in thea-
tre. It is, according to company founder and director Jaroslaw Fret, not
improvised (despite its seemingly free structure) but is an artform of
vocal precision. Zar is formed by series of vowels which are sung on a
112  L. Kendrick

different scale according to quite different principles that are not familiar
to our ears.9 Fret and company have more than a decade of experience
in the skill of performing Zar; however, for Armine, Sister the focus on
Anatolian traditions introduced Teatr ZAR to more obscured monodic
traditional forms that are only half remembered and even less recall-
able. This task presented the company with a practical problem, which
explains why representative modes of performance become redundant.
While the songs may not withstand the aftermath of the genocide, would
the process of their disappearance be redeemable? And if so, could the
charting of their disappearance in turn provide a method for the perfor-
mance composition? What process does such sonic absence demand?
Fret and new members of this now very international company,
including Kurdish, Turkish, Armenian and Iranian singers, devised
a complex series of vocal interactions and sharing of ‘fragments’ of
monodic song—sometimes just tones, semi-tones and (seemingly) dis-
sonant sounds—those that are remembered by being ‘felt’. Not unlike
Barthes notion of ‘grain’ (1977, p. 182), these fragments have material
qualities particular to the self that evoke an ‘authentic human presence
through the voice’ (Fret 2014); they are not just traditions repeated.
Each fragment is sung as an offer to another, who responds by sing-
ing another fragment not as a reply but in simultaneous dialogue with
the sounds. Company member Ditte Berkeley described this as a pro-
cess of responding to what sound is doing at any one moment, a way
of working within the sound.10 This process builds like a palimpsest of
repeated fragments which, according to Fret, creates phantoms of rep-
resentations. In this way they create polyphonous material from which
the residues of original monody might be recovered or, at the very least,
how these ancient songs ghost more recent traditions. Fret articulates
this technique as a process which requires the company to decompose,
recompose and then compose, a form of exchange as encounter which,
in keeping with its Grotowskian lineage, generates an entirely new event
of song.11 To describe this process, the director prefers the term ‘heter-
ophony’ rather than ‘polyphony’, which places emphasis on the assembly
of diverse voices rather than their harmonious alignment.12 For Fret, the
journey from polyphony to heterophony is an important part of decom-
position. The recomposing is the staging of the encounter, the para-
theatrical meeting between self and the silenced, a form of ‘witnessing
after the witnessing’13 as the company describes it. But this new form is
created from the encounter with not remembering, so it emerges in the
 5  NOISE: A POLITICS OF SOUND  113

company of their silenced memories, which become the events recom-

posed. The composition is a construction of music from an absence
of sound, which requires the company to investigate its designation as
unwanted signal. It’s a sonic strategy that can be considered an encoun-
ter with noise.
Teatr ZAR’s work is political because of its radical engagement
in sound, not only in the staging of song as encounter, the ‘silencing’
this revokes or act of witnessing it stages; rather, it is embedded in the
group’s material use of sounds in a way that generates noise. This noise,
like Serres’, can be understood as manifest in the company’s work in a
number of ways. First and most obviously, is its loudness, which is bol-
stered in Armine, Sister by strategic points of amplification. Throughout
the production, the sound of heavy instruments (for instance, tubular
bells), objects (a metal bed-frame) and structural remains (a metallic
door) meeting the surface of the floor, which reverberate through per-
formers and audience (who, on the occasion I saw the production, were
perched on low communal seating primed for resonant effect). These are
not so much isolated sound effects (though of course they may be per-
ceived as such), they are also embedded within the production sound-
scape and form an intrinsic part of the encountered song. Loud too is
the singing—piercingly loud—punctuated by peals of Zar through-
out. These culminate in the sound of falling sand, which pours from
the sixteen giant columns that make up the set, each one is split open
with great force to reveal its decayed interior, which spills forth just at
the moment the singing ceases, like a form of white noise. But it would
be cursory to attribute these manifestations of noise to the effort of the
encounter alone; the striving of remembering, the pain of the memory-
carrying process, or anger at that recalled. The sounds of Zar from those
sung to the sound of sand, are not unlike Serres’ first form of ‘hard
sound’, that which is unprocessed, unadulterated and undoubtedly dif-
ficult. Hard sound is a combination of those first two forms of noise—
of our bodies and of the world—it is the realm of sound in which we
first reside before the arrival of softness—of processed sense. The noisi-
ness of Armine, Sister seems to be akin to hard sonority because of this
pre-sensible nature of the sounds—but this is not about lack of meaning.
As Serres states, ‘Far from speech, before any words are spoken, augural
observation of the hard sonorities of the world contains multiple dimen-
sions of meaning’ (2008, p. 118), so too the sounds of Armine, Sister,
and the complex ways in which they are exchanged and revealed, present
114  L. Kendrick

us with meaning unfettered, and for Teatr ZAR, meaning that might
have been in existence prior to the genocide.
Teatr ZAR’s engagement with these hard sonorities of song takes
their work into the territory of noise and suggests a more radical poli-
tics takes place in the music theatre of Armine, Sister. Their approach
reveals a dispositif of musicality in theatre practice, which Roesner (2014)
describes as an aesthetic of music in theatre, which neither conforms to
form or content but in its practice reveals its historical and cultural con-
structs.14 In order to unravel the silencing of their music, Teatr ZAR
resort to re-describing and rehearsing their work in ways that allow them
to navigate the structures of oppression. One way in which this is clearly
evident is in Fret’s dramaturgical approach to the composition process;
it’s one that doesn’t use the languages of music (which have connota-
tions they seek to avoid) or allude to song (which may draw them into
structures they seek to side-step), but focuses on sonic transaction:
‘transmission, transition and transgression’15. It’s a triptych of sonic
encounters of a kind which allows noise—as those sounds ignored—
to steer the process. The transmission is what takes place in the vocal
encounter, it begins with the exchange of modal singing and the ensu-
ing assembly of voices sets it in motion. The transition is the change that
this encounter effects, which Fret and company describe in many ways,
but in terms of the composition of their work it is also the transitions
of song into theatre, as embodied encounters that can be replayed and
performed. Yet there is also the important function of listening in this
process that effects change, which is the responsive mode that Berkeley
described as a form of song which, Fret asserts, our ears are not used
to. That which requires a level of attention and which, in turn, demands
a particular attuning of the ear. This mode of attention combines the
free fall of vocal encounter with the precision of attentiveness to its for-
mation, not just in terms of coping with form but with what that form
means and how creating this form positions them as beholders of it in
both senses of the word—as witnesses and custodians. Such a process
requires risky listening not dissimilar to that which Corradi Fiumara
describes as a ‘radical and reciprocal openness’ (1990, p. 29), political
qualities which she considers to be constitutive of listening; receptive,
questioning and interrogative. Teatr Zar’s transitional phase is charac-
terised by what Corradi Fiumara calls an ‘attitude’ to listening, which is
not limited to the hearing sense but is filtered throughout an encounter
and ‘can be filled with strength whether it finds itself in the position of
 5  NOISE: A POLITICS OF SOUND  115

receiver, or referent, or in the “favoured” position of sender’ (1990, p.

61). In this way, transition takes place not only in the radical assembly of
heterophony, but in the political position of the witnessing ear within it,
which ‘faces all difficulties unarmed and lets unfold what must happen’
(ibid.).
The final stage of Fret’s dramaturgical process is transgression, which
on one level describes that secondary encounter which takes place at the
moment of production, in the presence of the audience, and the trans-
gressive act of staging unwanted sounds. Yet transgression also describes
the alternative that the transition generates; that is, the presentation of
forgotten song by those paying witness to its annihilation. In this way,
one could argue that it is not just the transmission of these songs but the
strength—amplitude, frequency, intensity—which changes their position-
ing. This liberates these sounds from being noises we have learned to
ignore—because of their intolerability as well as their disappearance—to
becoming noises to which we cannot but pay attention. Could this be a
radical reconfiguring of signal-to-noise? Of course there is the argument
that any such shift in transmission merely converts noise to signal, that
openness to transition might be tolerance rather than transgression. As
Connor argued, ‘the more we enlarge our tolerance of noise, the more
we process noise into signal and therefore make it over into our terms’
(2008, p. 171). In terms of radical theatre, perhaps the division between
signal and noise is less the point rather than on whose terms this distinc-
tion is made. In choosing the dramaturgical languages of transgressive
sound, Fret’s practice opens Teatr ZAR’s theatre up to the possibilities
of this distinction, which in itself offers a form of sonic alterity to what
is consigned as worth listening to or not. Suffice to say, Fret and Teatr
ZAR use ‘transmission, transition and transgression’ with the specific aim
of staging witness within their process in order to uncover the lost—and
the loss of Armenian sounds. It’s an approach that directly addresses
those sounds we have learned to ignore and, in this way, noise can be
considered a guiding principle of their work.

Noise as a Methodology

While the processing of sounds means that noise finds its way into the
theatre of companies such as Teatr ZAR, other contemporary theatre
makers embrace its political potential by working in ways that purpose-
fully invite noise. One such example is the work by UK-based artist Chris
116  L. Kendrick

Goode, who is a writer, poet, blogger, director and performer, though it

is difficult to distinguish his work by any one of these disciplines because
of his interest in the blurry spaces in-between what is written, directed or
performed. Goode’s aim is to ‘make space for unheard voices’ particu-
larly, ‘queer, dissident and politically non-conformist perspectives’ (chris-
goodeandcompany.com 2015b). He thinks less formally about theatre as
something scribed but more as a means of ‘think[ing] out loud about
who we all are’ (Ibid.). Like Teatr ZAR, Goode eschews representative
forms, preferring what his company simply describes as ‘mak[ing] theatre
by creating welcoming spaces and interesting structures for something
unexpected to happen in’ (ibid.). Like Teatr ZAR’s approach, Goode’s
theatre is also a form of encounter,16 but this is where the similarity
ends, as his is an entirely different aesthetic, which is in part formed by
the fact that it takes place in more proximate spaces and in more inti-
mate ways. Goode’s productions spring from authentic acts generated in
the rehearsal room—sometimes quotidian, other times more abstract—
often rooted in an ethos of amplification of the unheard, it’s where the
‘thinking out loud’ begins. His work is often collaborative, from early
experiments with his first company Signal-to-Noise, through his artistic
directorship of Camden People’s Theatre, to his current practice with
Chris Goode and Company, the latter composed of a variety of theatre
makers and artists with whom Goode has a number of artistic alliances.
As the title of his earlier company indicates, noise has, at points, been a
feature of Goode’s practice, manifestly as a sonic entity but more signifi-
cantly as a part of his theatre-making methodology. There are two rea-
sons for this; the first is that Goode places great emphasis on the ways in
which theatre communicates; second, he is very much concerned with
how to make theatre that invites a plurality and diversity of meaning-
making. For him, these concerns are intrinsic to theatre, and noise is an
important conduit for the diversity of this communication. One of the
interesting outcomes of this is that noisy processes become couched in
positive terms. For example, Goode describes the use of noise as ‘hos-
pitable’17 even ‘promiscuous’, because it’s used primarily in an ‘effort
to communicate, [and this is] what people really value, an urge, a long-
ing, to say something that will connect with a bunch of strangers.’ In
Goode’s theatre, noise has become convivial as well as political.
For Goode, noise is a necessary condition of theatre reception,
because:
 5  NOISE: A POLITICS OF SOUND  117

Our work as makers becomes noisy when we show it to an audience, that’s

just because it goes through the air, it gets In people’s retinas and cochleas
[sic], or whatever else they are carrying, and turns into a bunch of mean-
ings or values, or a bunch of doubts sometimes, a bunch of ambiguities
that they then have to come into their own relationship with.

Thus noise is initially an important principle of co-authorship, whatever

meaning is actually gleaned from this process. However, employing noise
to affect communication and produce multiple meanings might at first
glance seem antithetical. Is the term ‘noise’ descriptive of an effect not
a process? The use of noise in this way could be considered a semantic
exercise, a neat messy metaphor to describe diversity in meaning-making.
However, in Goode’s theatre, noise is not just a product of perception,
it is also a vehicle for generating heterogeneous meaning. In order to
articulate this, Goode aligns with the idea that this is a product of trans-
mission, ‘the idea of noise is that in any system the information is mov-
ing around and as information moves, it gets a little bit fucked up, It gets
a little bit changed in transit, it gets a bit scuffed, just by movement.’
Goode is drawn towards this movement and the capacity of noise to thus
disperse and alter information, in particular that it agitates information
in its production not just its reception. For this reason he is an advo-
cate of embracing noise in the process of theatre making, which he has
experimented with in a number of ways. One example is how the quality
of movement in noisy oscillation becomes inspiration for embodied pro-
cesses. For instance, Goode has on occasion used this model of noise to
transform physical actions from one identifiable act, to having multiple
identifiable movements within them. To achieve this in practice, he has
used the languages of sound production—for instance pan, loop, gain—
which he refers to as ‘filters’ for altering physical actions. For example,
a simple recognisable gesture becomes elongated and stretched—the
movement dislocated from the actions associated with it—and the com-
ponent parts of this everyday action are revealed and readable in ways
other than of its source. Goode describes these filters as taking an ‘excur-
sion’ with practice, a form of experimentation that might transform the
‘ambiance’ of a moment, but doesn’t nail down what it ‘is’, in particular,
it doesn’t make any recourse to one specific visual description.18 What
is interesting is how such directorial languages based on sound have an
ongoing political affect; Goode’s filters are a set of sonic strategies that
118  L. Kendrick

serve as noisy propositions for the moment of practice in the making

which do not close off or seal their meaning.
Goode’s noisy process is characterised by practice in flux, but it is
nevertheless very carefully constructed by a set of initiations, excursions
and filters; what he describes as a set of ‘formal considerations, formal
and structural choices […] the delivery mechanism of the work.’ Here is
where directorial ‘intention’ can reside, where a methodology of noisi-
ness can be initiated and where noise can be made. Thus, Goode often
makes a clear distinction between the possibility of noise in a process and
the means of creating this noise, which conversely demands volition—in
particular, specificity and intention. A term that he has used in relation to
being specifically noisy is ‘fuzziness’, which alludes to that which is par-
tially recognisable—for instance a blurry action or scuffed image—while
also refering to the beginnings of unrecognisability. However, Goode’s
emphasis on this term is not about dissolving into nothingness; rather he
seeks to describe the potential transition from one meaning to another,
how moments can reside on the edge of another meaning. This notion
of fuzziness features in Serres’ earlier noise theory in The Parasite19 as a
part of his aim to draw attention to the provisional nature of information
systems, the flimsy nature of systems of meaning and the need for more
than logical binaries: ‘yes or no’, the ‘devil or the good lord’, ‘thesis or
antithesis’:

The answer [to which] is a spectrum, a band, a continuum. We will no

longer answer with a simple yes or no to such questions of sides. Inside or
outside? Between yes and no, between zero and one, an infinite number of
values appear, and thus an infinite number of answers. Mathematicians call
this new rigor “fuzzy”: fuzzy subsets, fuzzy topology. (Serres 1982, p. 57)

Serres is interested in the spaces that fuzziness explores, in between one

value and another, in particular the point at which one set of informa-
tion may compete with several others and has not yet been deemed
as signal. The ‘spot where, give or take one vibration, moving a hair’s
breadth in either direction causes the noises to become messages and
the messages, noises’ (Serres 1982, p. 67). Similarly, Goode’s fuzziness
is not a blurring of meaning into infinite silence, but carves a precise
route between meanings, and this is where his notion of intention and
specificity become apparent. He describes these blurry edges of mean-
ing as the space where multiple readings of his theatre become possible;
 5  NOISE: A POLITICS OF SOUND  119

as such fuzziness ‘can make a specific claim on the attention of every-

one in the audience.’ To work with noise is intentional, to create fuzz-
iness is to be specific. Such a precise noisy methodology is the means
by which Goode has staged complex subjects, including particle phys-
ics in Neutrino (Unlimited theatre, Edinburgh 2002) and amnesia and
belonging in Napoleon in Exile (Camden People’s Theatre, 2002 and
The Traverse Theatre, 2003). The influences of these early experiments
continue to resonate in his more recent work, which tackles political sub-
jects of identity and outcast in the Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley
(2009–2012) and murder and complicity in Men in the Cities (Royal
Court Theatre, 2014 and 2015). And the journey towards meaning
has provided the basis for a production made entirely without dialogue,
which is driven by what is unsaid: Longwave (2006 and 2014). In each
case, meaning is not only textual, expounded by dialogue or sustained by
monologue (as in Goode’s many solo performances), but is also found
in the connections between unlikely identities (between, for instance,
amnesiac Gus and Napoleon) and unusual allies (i.e., between the medi-
eval Wound Man and schoolboy Shirley), which seem to be founded in
the fuzzy territory of noisy practice. In these productions various threads
of fictions and testimonies, memories and absences, recognisable and
incomprehensible moments interfere in a way that stages meanings on
the cusp. Goode describes theatre as a ‘medium with an inherently low
signal-to-noise ratio’ (2015a, p. 190) and performance as an encounter
with noise in some way, such as ‘the complex of additional patterns and
occurrences that permeate the event context within which the perfor-
mance takes place’ (2015a, pp. 208–209). As such, he offers the tantalis-
ing idea that ‘theatre is the totality of the performance plus its attendant
noise. Or, to rearrange the equation: noise is the difference between per-
formance and theatre’ (Goode 2015a, p. 209).
Goode’s strategic use of noise demonstrates the extent of its potential
in a theatre process. His emphasis on plurality by means of intentional
interference with the received and the recognisable, and his insistence
on the political importance of different and diverse audience relations
with the thing staged can be seen as a pragmatic manifestation of Serres’
ultimate version of noise—that it is always relational. At the heart of
Serres’ relation too is a hospitability, a constant conviviality of noisy rela-
tions that are always intersubjective, the material of it; ‘the atomic form
of our relations’ (1982, p. 8). What Goode’s process reminds us of is
that the terms of intersubjectivity matter and, in the hands of theatre
120  L. Kendrick

makers, these can be subject to noisy tumult that shakes up the basis on
which meaning resides. Noisy methodologies contest the terms of mean-
ing formation, thus noise in this theatre practice becomes a politics of
sound.

Noise as Sonic Entity

Thus far this chapter has focused on noise as those sounds marginal-
ised or ‘ignored’, as Shafer put it, and on the use of noise as a princi-
ple or as a part of a process of radical re-hearing and political staging
of segregated and marginalised sounds. Yet there is also that version of
sound that arguably cannot be ignored, the sonic entity that arrests the
ear and grasps the body by particularly seductive, intrusive means.20 It’s
this version of excessive sound that requires the most bombastic prose to
describe it. While we may struggle for a definition of what this type of
noise might be, we almost certainly know what it is when we feel it. It
is most manifest when it impacts on upon the body; as Salomé Voegelin
found, ‘noise is only noise because it works on my body’ (2010, p. 48),
it ceases to be if we are not present to be ‘ingest[ed]’ (ibid.) by it. Noise
as a sonic entity needs a body. It becomes an entity by means of us, and
often against our will. One of the reasons for this is that the sheer vibra-
tional force of noise has a much larger capacity than that which the ear
can discern. As Steve Goodman pointed out, ‘sound is merely a thin
slice’ (2012, p. 70) of all that which can affect us.
In theatre, noise is frequently employed for affect as well as an
effect. For instance, as Bates, Gilligan Kaufman and Verghese (2016)
have explored, in a production of Beckett’s Happy Days (Young Vic,
February–March 2015),21 sound designer Tom Gibbons mixed tones
at barely perceptible frequencies, combining infrasonic (under 20 Hz)
and ultrasonic (over 20 kHz) in order to transmit a feeling of the cen-
tral character’s (Winnie) predicament. This created a sense of the mate-
rial conditions of her slow burial, which Tom Gibbons describes ‘as
pieces of audio information from the hillside that she is stuck in.’22 The
affect is one which is subtly unsettling, because these sounds, as he put
it, ‘operate at the edges of perception’. Despite possessing receivable
amplitude, they are not perceived with significant ‘volume’ and are diffi-
cult to distinguish as signal. As such, they remain abstract in the way that
Winnie’s eventual incarceration into the earth is an abstracted state, but
nevertheless they are felt and they have an impact on the space in which
 5  NOISE: A POLITICS OF SOUND  121

the body is situated, for both actor and audience. Tom Gibbons’ design
for Happy Days demonstrated this concept through the transmission of
pink noise,23 which literally moved the earth around Juliet Stevenson (as
Winnie), dislodging stones that fell around and upon her. These forms of
noise make their presence felt and their consequences apparent, but their
source remains oblique; as such, the actual experience of noise is con-
founded by its lack of identifiable location, it is omnipresent and suffuse.
Bruce Johnson, referring to Augoyard and Torgue, describes this as a
form of ‘ubiquity effect’ which, on Johnson’s terms, is more ‘anatomical
rather than cultural’ (2008, p. 53). In theatre this becomes particularly
apparent as the sonic entity of noise affects bodies by being an ‘effect of
space’ (Augoyard and Torgue 2005, p. 131) in which audience is taking
place; thus noise is another way in which the auditorium (that formal
partitioned space of audience) is difficult to distinguish from the dra-
matic space (the domain of the production). The use of noise to collapse
the distinction between produced and perceiving spaces is a key drama-
turgical feature of Rosenberg and Neath’s Fiction, their second ‘sound
journey’ in the dark. In this production, binaural techniques were used
in order to position us as AM (audience member), as the voice-less per-
sona of the story. As AM we are motionless and mute, being assembled
for a forthcoming event to be presented by the ‘speaker’ (who, it is sug-
gested, may be us). We are ‘companions’ who rely entirely on our ‘chap-
erones’—in our case, we are assigned to Julie—to manoeuvre us (in our
chairs) and to speak for us. Our agentless state is evocative of the paraly-
sis of sleep, and Fiction is a production that explores the ‘sprawling archi-
tecture of our dreams’ (Fuel 2015), throughout which the threat of their
abrupt end is anticipated; it might be a car crash in which we’ve fallen
asleep at the wheel, in a forest in which we’ve completely lost our way,
or it might happen as a result of being abandoned by our chaperone,
without whom we cease to exist. Noise features throughout this produc-
tion. Noise is made to transport our seats from the Grand Hall of the
Battersea Arts Centre to the mutable and mutating spaces of the produc-
tion, spaces in which, the script describes, we are to ‘appear and disap-
pear’ (Neath and Rosenberg 2015). The end of our dream turns out to
be the collapse of the building in which we are all individually gathered;
despite our efforts by means of Julie, we haven’t secured our way out.
At this point the director, David Rosenberg, and sound designers, Ben
and Max Ringham, combined the anterior binaural design with exterior
noise in order to immerse us in the obliteration, which is described thus,
122  L. Kendrick

‘Everything is drowned out by the noise which builds into a roar that
loses its definition; it is no longer an explosion but simply a sound that
we “feel”’ (Neath and Rosenberg 2015). The effect is one of deterri-
torialisation. It literally shakes the ground beneath our seats. But this is
not noise that is representative of the sites collapsing (a hotel, a lift, a
basement, a car, a forest), rather these are unidentifiable drones that dis-
rupt the locating capacity of listening. They obliterate not just by being
louder but by arresting listening. This noise brings to a halt that which
Augoyard and Torgue describe as ‘synecdoche effect’ (2005, p. 123),
which is the ‘ability to valorize one specific element through selection’
(ibid.). As selective listening is attention to that which we want to hear,
noise becomes an important disruption of normative modes of listening
and has the potential to bring other sounds to bear upon our percep-
tion. Noise ushers in different terrain and in doing so it atomises atten-
tion and reveals the fragility of signal—particularly in theatre in the dark.
Moreover, noise lays bare the constructs of signal, it reveals its tenuous
relation to the real, making its assembly seem arbitrary. This raises the
question as to what signal really signifies, what remains once signal per-
ishes? This is the fiction that Neath and Rosenberg’s production reveals,
that we rely entirely on sound’s capacity to signify that which sounds
themselves do not possess: ‘I have no sense of the roof now the rain has
stopped’ (2015), calls a lone voice from the dark.
The capacity of noise to collapse meaning is particularly apparent in
the compositions of Scott Gibbons, most notably in his longstanding
collaboration with Societas Raffaello Sanzio and its directors Romeo
and Claudia Castellucci and Chiara Giudi. The company is notorious
for its brutal aesthetic, for the relentless intolerable images of Tragedia
Endogonidia (2001) or the violence of Inferno (2009). Their work is
often referred to as a form of radical spectatorship as the sheer difficulty
and excess of things staged require a virtuoso effort on behalf of an audi-
ence to watch.24 Yet Castellucci’s work does not allow the senses to be
thus distinguished; his theatre presents more of an ‘affective dimension’
(Trezise 2012, p. 207), a total sensorial experience that critiques rep-
resentation and the autonomy of the gaze. It is theatre which, Kelleher
et al. argue, ‘potentially liberates the visible from the status of specta-
cle’ (2007, p. 11), a liberation which Trezise suggests is contingent on
sound.25 While Scott Gibbons’ work frequently features in analysis of the
theatre of Societas Raffaello Sanzio, nevertheless less attention is paid
to the distinct affects of his practice, in particular to the sonic entity of
 5  NOISE: A POLITICS OF SOUND  123

noise in the midst of the company’s work. The visual material appears
in the guise of representation, before its destruction or obliteration
before our eyes. As such, analysis of the visual aspects remains in refer-
ence to the representative; this is a theatre that so radically overhauls the
image that it is lauded as a form of theatre that stages its own failure as
a representative form; it succeeds in undoing itself. What is interesting
is that, deprived of any representative function, Scott Gibbons’ noise is
often interpreted as a signal of theatre itself; it is of the ‘machine’ (Fisher
2013, p. 46) or the forces of the ‘organs’ (Sack 2009, p. 149) of thea-
tre, its material or visceral components. Yet his sound design is a strate-
gic element of the difficult aesthetic, particularly in its manifestation as
noise. For instance, in On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of
God (Spill Festival, Barbican Theatre, London 2011), a production that
stages the abject misery of an incontinent father against a backdrop of an
image of Christ from Antonello da Messina’s The Saviour of the World,
noise arrives at the point at which this iconoclastic image is destroyed.
Tony Fisher describes it thus:

as the father slowly makes his departure from the stage, his absence is grad-
ually replaced by an increasingly excruciating noise: a deafening, inhuman,
soundscape — what appears to be the white noise of grating metal. (2013,
p. 46)

At the point at which Antonello da Messina’s painting dissolves, the

noise has the strange effect of drawing us towards this ultimate difficult
image—the loss of the father and the desecration of the son. Its almighty
scale, its amplitude and omnipresence, evokes the unquantifiable qualities
of the sublime, that which is unfiltered and unfettered by meaning but
also overwhelmingly captivating. The allure of noise in theatre may be
because its arresting and bewildering presence forces us into audience,
a mode of attention without signal to guide us. Paul Hegarty describes
this as a consequence of being thrown from listening into hearing in an
abundance of alterity:

What noise needs, and where noise is […] is a listening that is brought
back to hearing through processes of rejection (as noise), confusion
(through noise as change), excess (including of volume), wrongness or
inappropriateness, failure (of noise, to be noise, to not be noise, to be
music, not be sound, not be). Noise is where all this listening goes when it
has had enough. (2010, p. 199)
124  L. Kendrick

It could be argued that being forced into hearing places audience in

a quest for meaning, a pursuit of listening as a kind of hermeneutic
impulse to regain perceptual control. Or that hearing noise could be a
relinquishment, a submission to it as a form of desire for sublimation.
Either way, what can be said is that, in the theatre, noise has the capacity
to confound perception. It creates a suspension between logos and chaos
that disturbs received ideas of meaning. In this way, noise demonstrates
its capacity to reveal the formation of meaning and demands its audience
to takes a position, to engage in a radical re-attunement as to what might
be signal or noise at that moment. Thus, produced noise is also an inter-
vention in meaning making—the interrogation of sounds and what they
mean is also an investigation into the constructs of meaning. In this way,
the sonic entity of noise is not just an affect of obliteration, but also has
political potential.

Theatre Aurality and Noise

In the field of theatre aurality, noise is an effective generator of theatre
form, it demonstrates how the aural domain is not only where mean-
ing becomes contested but is also where new forms of theatre spring
from, including the radical composition of Teatr ZAR and the politi-
cal processes of Chris Goode and Company. The aural domain is also
an integral part of Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s arsenal; Scott Gibbons’
use of noise emerges from a sustained and in-depth involvement in the
company’s process to the extent that decisions about sound are rooted
in the company’s sense of the aurality of their work. These contempo-
rary theatres utilise noise in a way that recalls its pre-structural, or to
use Serres’ term, pre-sensible form, in a direct bid to challenge received
forms of organised sound. In theatre, noise offers a sonic alterity, which
has a political function that is more than provision of an alternative.
It is a revelation of the base material from which signal is derived. As
Jacques Attali points out, organised sound is a political economy and
one that was harnessed before other signs and visual signifiers, the matter
of Serres’ soft sonorities. For Attali, organised sound is ‘[A]n aesthetics
of repetition […] The noises of a society are in advance of its images
and material conflicts’ (2009, p. 11), therefore, he calls for understand-
ing of received forms of organised sound (music in particular) as that
which ‘must be deciphered through that of noise’ (2009, p. 24). The
hard sonorities of Teatr ZAR’s heterophony are not only an engagement
 5  NOISE: A POLITICS OF SOUND  125

in the pre-sensible, they offer a radical account of sound in its organ-

ised and marshalled form. Noise demonstrates that Teatr ZAR’s work is
radical in other ways than the para-theatrical model of encounter. The
politics is not just in the witnessing but in the engagement in noise, a
politics of sound that produces a transgression of form. Noise reminds us
of theatre’s capacity to be proto-structural, to offer not just new forms,
but to make the space for their precursor.

Notes
1. Attali’s seminal text Noise: the Political Economy of Music demonstrates
how the organisation of sound (as music but also as not noise), is cru-
cial to the consolidation of a totality. In order to understand how the
structures of capital are organised, he makes the point that ‘any theory
of power today must include a theory of the localization of noise and its
endowment with form’ (2009, p. 6).
2. Cage’s experience in Harvard University’s anechoic chamber features in
Silence, Lectures and Writings (2009).
3. As described in recent publications of histories according to sound, for
instance, David Hendy (2013) Noise: A Human History of Sound and
Listening and Karin Bijsterveld’s edited collection (2013) Soundscapes of
the Urban Past.
4. Chion is scathing of the term, which he finds is ‘a strange hybrid of ass
and lion that leaves me perplexed’ (2011, p. 241). He considers bruit to
be sonically segregationist because it partitions certain sounds as noises.
5. Emily Thompson (2012) explains the consequence of the designation of
organised sound as signal as the founding of a new set of criteria ‘whose
origins, like the sounds themselves, were located in the new electrical
technologies. Electrical systems were evaluated by measuring the strength
of their signals against the inevitable encroachments of electrical noise,
and this measure now became the means by which to judge all sounds’
(p. 118).
6. In Theatre Noise: the Sound of Performance we referred to noise as an ‘agi-
tatory acoustic aesthetic’ (Kendrick and Roesner 2011, p. xvii) which
captures the materiality of noise in theatre and our engagement with it.
7. Nascimento is referring to Eli Rozik’s The Roots of Theatre: Rethinking
Ritual and Other Theories of Origin and his argument for ritual as
a mode of action and how this shifts in relation to its framing as the-
atre. For more on Teatr ZAR’s development of what could be consid-
ered a Grotowskian lineage, see Nascimento (2008), Allain (2005) and
Shevtsova (2013).
126  L. Kendrick

8. I refer here to Jacques Rancière’s identification of the intolerable image,

his critique of the visual object of witnessing which, he argues, is not the
property of that which is visually evident but is also of the visually unevi-
dent; ‘Representation is not the act of producing a visible form, but the
act of offering an equivalent—something that speech does just as much
as photography. The image is not the duplicate of a thing. It is a com-
plex set of relations between the visible and the invisible, the visible and
speech, the said and the unsaid’ (2009, p. 93). As such, Rancière seems
to suggest sonic interventions for tackling intolerability.
9. Jaroslaw Fret described how Zar is performed and how the company
incorporated this as a compositional tool at Armine: Drama in Music,
a Teatr ZAR work demonstration at Goldsmiths College, University of
London, 7 October 2014.
10. Ditte Berkeley described the way in which she worked with the sphere of
sound at Armine: Drama in Music, a Teatr ZAR work demonstration at
Goldsmiths College, University of London 7 October 2014.
11. Fret frequently refers to the process of decomposition and recomposition
(see, for instance, Kornaś 2013). At the Armine: Drama in Music work
demonstration, he also placed an emphasis on composition as third com-
ponent which is generative rather than interpretive.
12. Heterophony usually refers to several voices or instruments aligned
around a melody but varying in pitch, the Balinese Gamelan for instance,
in ways that don’t always adhere to the rules of polyphony. As such, het-
erophony is thought to represent more ancient forms of song pre-mon-
ody (see Brown, Steven 2007).
13. Witnessing after the Witnessing was the title of an exhibition by Teatr
ZAR, which gathered together images and artefacts that represent the
‘”small history” of the Armenian people’ see http://www.teatrzar.art.
pl/en/history/2015-04-10-witnessing-after-the-witnessing-exhibition
(2015).
14. Roesner draws on the concept of the dispositif to avoid ontological defi-
nitions and in doing so (and drawing on Foucault’s definition of the
dispositif) he demonstrates how this can reveal ‘currents and vectors of
power’ (2014, p. 12) at work in the segregation of forms and practices.
This is particularly the case with music, which theatre makers draw on
precisely because of its capacity to be political revelatory; Roesner makes
the point that ‘the notion of power, sometimes in the form of hierarchy,
is never far from the aesthetic dispositif of musicality: musicality is at times
invoked to reverse or disperse concentrations of power’ (2014, p. 14).
15. This phrase captures an important part of Fret and Teatr ZAR’s approach
to recomposition and was the main focus of their work demonstration in
2014 (see demonstration brief invitation at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/
cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=scudd;68a1f4a2.1410, (2014).
 5  NOISE: A POLITICS OF SOUND  127

16. The ‘encounter’ of Goode’s theatre is not so much one of actor-encoun-

tering-story or audience-encountering-actor, rather this takes place on
the border between presentative and representative modes of theatre,
something which Peter Boenisch identifies as a ‘reflexive dramaturgy’
(2010, p. 163). This has the effect of opening up spaces of experimen-
tation with theatre form whereby dramaturgy becomes a form of ‘tex-
ture [and] texturing’ rather than taking the form of a dominant text
(ibid.). This is most apparent in Goode’s approach to performing which
frequently involves aspects of the performer’s self, not to tell autobio-
graphical stories, but to bring who is performing to bear upon what is
performed (rather than the performer’s work being wholly directed
towards representing a story). A good example of this is his piece of thea-
tre in darkness, Who You Are (2010), which tells the story of his attempt
to be with and amongst the audience assembled at the How It Is exhibi-
tion (Tate Modern London, 2010). This production captures this blurry
space between that presented and that represented and also had the effect
of blurring the presenter—Goode himself—as various different voices in
the darkness ‘appear’ to perform ‘Chris’. This production suggests that
the substance of Goode’s theatre ‘encounter’ is with identities, which
Martin Welton argues takes place amidst the virtuality and theatricality
of performing in the dark where ‘who you are, it seems, is not what you
appear to be’ (2013, p. 14).
17. All quotations, unless otherwise cited, refer to workshops with MA
Advanced Theatre Practice students at the Royal Central School of
Speech and Drama, University of London. Specifically, these quotes are
from the session on the 3 November 2014, with kind permission from
Chris Goode.
18. A more recent example of this is Goode’s somatic experiments with his
new ensemble Ponyboy Curtis (The Yard Theatre, London 2015), in
which gestures and actions are sampled, offered, replayed and repeated
in ways that occasionally refer to the character of Coppola’s The Outsiders
(1983) but don’t recreate him as a singular identity. The performance of
Ponyboy Curtis is shared, by the excursions and abstractions of his move-
ments as well as by each adopting the name for the duration of the per-
formance. Their production, At the Yard, performed to constant score of
dance and indie music, was also deafeningly noisy.
19. Serres describes this book as ‘rigorously fuzzy’ (1982, p. 57).
20. Katharina Rost (2011) describes theatre noises as particularly intrusive
because there is an element of ‘auditory captivation’ (p. 45) as well as
difficulty in their reception, which ‘can arouse feelings like curiosity and
fascination as well as bewilderment’ (p. 53).
21. The research into this production of Happy Days was undertaken by
Jennifer Bates, Aimhirghin Gilligan, Jessica Kaufman and Miriam
128  L. Kendrick

Verghese, post-graduate students at the Royal Central School of Speech

and Drama, and was jointly presented at the Performing Research confer-
ence, 2015 and was recently published in the Theatre and Performance
Design Journal (see Bates et al. 2016). I am most grateful for their per-
mission to reference their findings while I was compiling this chapter.
22. The quotes are used here with kind permission from Tom Gibbons; they
are referenced from email communication with him in February 2015.
23. Pink noise contains multiple frequencies produced at equal energy levels.
24. Sack describes his spectatorial experience as a form of audience anxiety,
an overwhelming ‘relational simultaneity of the event before which I was
prostrate. There was simply too much for a single body to experience and
hope to witness’ (Sack 2007, p. 35, emphasis in original).
25. In reference to Jean-Luc Nancy’s Listening (2007) Trezise makes the
point that the ‘becomingness’ of the audience as an act of listening is ‘a
methexic practice of self-extension or self-sameness on the level of sound’
(p. 154), and that this engagement in sound is intrinsic to the affect of
the theatre of Societas Raffaello Sanzio.

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 CHAPTER 6

Listening: Sonority and Subjectivity

As the previous chapters have demonstrated, theatre aurality is not just

the prioritisation of sound but is also a form of theatre that is rooted
in it; whether this is the art of headphone theatre, the performance of
vocality, or the politics of noise, the possibilities of sound are its mission
as well as its material. Theatre aurality is made from sound, in any (or
sometimes all) of its manifestations. A characteristic of this approach is
the shift in the perspective and dominance of the visual, from the audi-
tory performance of the visual world (see Chap. 3) to the call of the
visual by the performance of sound (see Chap. 4) or the revelation of
the intolerability of the visual by immersion into noise (see Chap. 5).
But what are the possibilities of an aural aesthetic that isn’t predicated
on the translation of ‘seeing’, whether recalled through our imagina-
tion, transcribed for the ear or interpreted through our fingertips? What
is the potential of theatre aurality for the visually impaired, audiences for
whom, as Amelia Cavallo says, ‘the act of seeing may not manifest in a
normative way’ (2015, p. 129)? Indeed, one of the key questions for
audience—as in hearing, not assembly and its associations with spectator-
ship—is how might sound form the sole means of audience engagement,
not as a translation of the visual by techniques such as audio description,
but how can sound in all its sonorous, sensual and sensitising potential
form the audience experience? And is this possible if an audience—as
an assembly—is not fixed to an auditorium but is mobile, as in prom-
enade theatre or immersive performance? Can sound not only move us
but allow us to move? These questions became increasingly important

© The Author(s) 2017 133

L. Kendrick, Theatre Aurality,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-45233-7_6
134  L. Kendrick

to director and writer Maria Oshodi and her team of collaborators at

Extant, the UK’s leading theatre company that makes work for the vis-
ually impaired. Oshodi’s focus as a theatre maker and writer for com-
panies, including Graeae Theatre Company, is centred on the audience
experience beyond that which falls upon the ear. She has become drawn
towards the opportunities that sonic technologies can offer the visually
impaired audience to get out of their seats, a radical shift from being
guided to guiding new forms of access. This chapter focuses on Oshodi’s
version of headphone theatre, which, though it involves the voice around
the head, isn’t directly on-ear. It begins with the direct relation of voice
to ear; then it extends the listening potential of the audience via our
cheeks and hands, through our skin down to the soles of our feet. It
explores how a non-visual theatre, by means of sonic technologies, can
engage and mobilise the listening body.
In order to explore audience motility, Oshodi developed Flatland
(2015), a platform for a unique experiment in sound, haptic technology
and theatre that was researched and developed with partners at the UK’s
Open University and Haunted Pliers/Yale University in the US.1 This
was an artistic project, described by the company as a large-scale instal-
lation as well as an immersive theatre experience, based on what Oshodi
describes as the science of the ‘tactile and the senses’ (2015, www.extant.
org.uk). For the research partners, Dr Janet van der Linden and Dr
Sarah Wiseman at the department of Computing and Communications
at the UK’s Open University, Flatland provided a model of a cultural
space for their investigation into modes of aural engagement and access.
For Dr Adam Spiers of Haunted Pliers, a robotics expert and also a
researcher at Yale University’s GRAB Lab, this was an opportunity to
experiment with navigation technologies in an artistic environment in
ways that could generate the freedom of movement that Oshodi’s pro-
ject was designed to explore. Though each organisation had a specific
research aim and brought their own approaches to the technology of the
project, nevertheless all collaborators were, in different ways, exploring
the material and experiential aspects of sonority.
Flatland, written by Michael Achtman for Extant, is an adaptation of
the novella by Edwin A. Abbott (1992 [1884]), which describes a world
that consists only of two dimensions. Flatland is a ‘world inside your
own, hidden to most people’ (Achtman 2015, p. 1), with area but no
volume, with a north but no ‘upwards’ (Abbott 1992, p. 106), which
lends itself well to experiments with a non-spectating audience (whether
 6  LISTENING: SONORITY AND SUBJECTIVITY  135

visually impaired or not), because in this two-dimensional world there is

no light whatsoever. As a consequence, the characters of this partitioned
place live their lives through highly developed auditory and tactile senses
which, when adapted by Oshodi and partners for the theatre, become
the means by which audience takes place. Flatlanders live by hearing and
‘the art of Feeling’ (Abbott 1992, p. 28), and so we encounter a piece
of theatre that, by touch, is entirely heard. Our presence as an audience,
as three-dimensional beings in a two-dimensional world, is radically dif-
ferent and must be disguised and protected so that we can experience
this other dimension without it annihilating us in the process. We are
identified as ‘spacelanders’, which doesn’t just describe our orbit into
Flatland itself, but articulates our three-dimensionality and our exces-
sive sensorial state. The audience are outsiders, alien to the culture of
Flatland and, ostensibly, to its rigid hierarchies of class, gender and
regularity.
The non-visual nature of Flatland is by no means a simple metaphor
for the visually impaired. Though there is an absence of light, sight is
available to Flatland’s inhabitants, but it can only be used in exclusive
circumstances and by the chosen few. This is a place ruled by strict hier-
archies with versions of the laws of nature that control almost every
aspect of conduct, movement and engagement, one of which is the
rare opportunity to ‘see’ (albeit only in the conditions of Flatland’s
dense fog) which is only used by the well-educated as a form of ‘Sight
Recognition’—a means of discerning ‘between the middle and lowest
orders’ (Abbott 1992, p. 25). Abbott describes this hierarchy as a con-
stitution based on a ‘theory of configuration’ (1992, p. 52) whereby tri-
angles beget squares, and squares beget pentagons and so on, in which
the development of the regular shape is maintained by the extinction—or
consumption—of all ‘irregular’ shapes at their birth. Achtman’s adap-
tation explores this as a regime of ‘configural evolution’ (2015, p. 6),
how homogeneity is established and difference is extinguished. Extant’s
Flatland placed an emphasis on how this world is governed by a regime
that upholds ‘regularity’ by displays of experiments in reductive exist-
ence, exemplified by the ambitions of the Professor Dodadecahedron,
who has created the ultimate singular ‘Lineland’ culture, ‘a hypotheti-
cal culture consisting of no complex figures or shapes but only lines.
Lines existing in a linear universe of one dimension’ (Achtman 2015,
p. 7).2 Oshodi’s vision of this adaptation of Flatland was prompted by
the parallels with disabled culture and the lurking presence of eugenics
136  L. Kendrick

in Abbott’s story, but within it she also found modes of engagement

that offer a critique of and an alternative to the hierarchies of sight. As
a consequence, the production has a political imperative; yet Flatland is
not designed to replicate the disabled experience, rather it positions both
sighted and visually impaired audience members as different. It is, as
our guide and Flatland exile, Elder Square describes it, a journey which
should be ‘transformative for both cultures’ (Achtman 2015, p. 2).

Design for Sound and Audience

The design for a two-dimensional world in which a three-dimensional
audience moves was accomplished by an extensive creative team includ-
ing: Dramaturg, Alex Bulmer; Technical Partner, the aforementioned
Adam (Ad) Spiers; eTextiles Designer, Emilie Giles; Costume Designers,
Ali Ruth and Clare McGarrigle; Sound designer, Matthias Kispert; and
Scenographer Lyndsey Housden, who summed up the design task as one
of ‘cancel[ing] out the visual components but to nevertheless engage
[the] audience through lots of other senses’ (2015, www.extant.org.uk).
The principle of the design was the use of sound to create a sense of
scale and dimension, and haptic technology to enter and encounter it;
as such, Flatland was a space designed from the perspective of hands as
well as ears. The upshot of this for the audience is that a kit is required
to experience the production: we are clad in a full spacelander’s suit (see
Fig. 6.1), which is adorned with sensors that track our movement in the
space; we are also equipped with wireless bone headphones, which perch
on our cheeks just in front of our ears; and we are provided with an
‘animotous’, the haptic device that moves us in the dark (which will be
explained in more detail later on in this chapter, see page p.145). This
costume is cumbersome with delicate components and is somewhat fid-
dly, therefore our preparation and training is incorporated into the per-
formance. When we first meet our guide, Elder Square, he is in exile in
our three-dimensional world. We are ushered into his workshop and pre-
pared for our journey by donning our protective suit and learning how
to use the animotous, the device through which he communicates with
us. Our bodies are almost entirely covered but crucially our ears are not.
Once plunged into darkness all our modes of engagement are in some
way regulated, but our hearing remains open to a range of listening
experiences.
 6  LISTENING: SONORITY AND SUBJECTIVITY  137

Fig. 6.1  Audience member Patrick Roberts, wearing a spacelander suit and

holding the haptic device referred to as the ‘animotous’, in Flatland by Extant,
(dir. Maria Oshodi), photograph by Terry Braun

Matthias Kispert was responsible for designing sound that created

the unusual dimensions of the space, delivered the narrative, articulated
the different four zones of the story and contributed to the mobilisation
of us within it. The first task presented the particular challenge of cre-
ating the sense of a two-dimensional space from the very three-dimen-
sional form of sound (Kispert referred to the nature of sound as such).3
The vast scale of Flatland was created by an ‘acoustic blanket’, which
consisted of a continuous drone comprised of low frequency sounds
and white noise (including a sample of an air conditioning unit) ‘that
soak[ed] up those sound details which are essential for getting a sense
of the size of the space [including] reverb, sounds of other audience
members in the distance, sounds intruding from outside [and so on].’
Thus any sounds from the audience were rendered inaudible by this con-
stant and considerably (though not unbearably) loud drone, even our
own breath was difficult to discern, as such our presence felt acoustically
138  L. Kendrick

absent, as well as visually so. Kispert’s acoustic blanket served as a back-

drop for the narrative itself, as it was easily ‘filled in’ (as he put it) with
isolated, directional sounds found in the specific zones of the story and
delivered through the bone headphones. The effect was less one of sound
compressed or flattened out to give an impression of a two-dimensional
world, but rather was one of ‘spatial ambiguity’. Kispert engineered this
by experimentation with different effects from different sound sources
and for different points of listening. For example, a scene transmitted via
the bone headphones may be recorded with reverb, giving the sense of
spaciousness near the ear against the dense drone of the acoustic blanket.
This had the effect of creating a space within a space that was incongru-
ous (Flatland being not a place of volume) and thus there was a dou-
bling of spaces, with scenes made from spatial effects that were at odds
with its dimensions. This spatial ambiguity was also the result of various
shifts in sound sources. For instance, at the beginning of the production
(and after we are kitted out for the pending trip), we are taken through
a ‘dimensional shift corridor’, which transports us to Flatland and which
involves a short journey between the sides of a corridor that close in
on you as you walk through it, threatening to flatten you at its end. As
there is one corridor per audience member, this can be a rather claus-
trophobic experience, through which we are encouraged forth by the
diminishing voice of Elder Square behind us. It is here that the drone
begins, growing in the bone headphones, drowning out the sound of
our guide’s voice, and as we progress through the corridor, the drone
‘expands to a pair of speakers either side of the dimensional corridors
[…] two subwoofers [which] play a bass tone slowly rising in volume’
till, on our arrival, the corridor abruptly disappears and simultaneously
the drone suddenly fills the space. This expansion of sound as we are con-
tracted had the effect of creating, as Kispert put it, ‘the otherworldliness
of Flatland’—the sound was moving in ways other than we were.
For Flatland’s narrative, Kispert decided to focus on the particu-
lar shapes of the inhabitants, including the sounds these might make as
they move, their vocal qualities and how these might cluster around the
narrative zones of the space. These were made using mallet instruments,
including xylophones and kalimbas, which produced crisp sounds that
were discernible against the drone of Flatland itself. Each zone of the
story—Church, Home, Hospital and University—is marked out by physi-
cal shapes that are encountered and e-textiles that, when touched, trigger
recordings of moments that, when assembled by our roving ear, comprise
 6  LISTENING: SONORITY AND SUBJECTIVITY  139

Fig. 6.2  Michael Achtman (the production’s playwright) testing the Hospital

zone of Flatland by Extant, (dir. Maria Oshodi), photograph by Terry Braun

the scenes. For example, the Hospital zone is played through sounds
delivered via a series of vertically stacked pipes and articulated tubes,
some of which the audience strain upwards to catch, others drift from
apertures at angles that are found by feeling the shapes and directions of
the structures (see Fig. 6.2). Some of these listening points were made
with MP3 players replaying looped voices, others contained little battery-
powered motors with bits of rubber attached that gently thrumped the
interior of the pipe and produced sounds reminiscent of distant genera-
tors and incinerators, an effect reminiscent of the engine of a hospital. As
the audience moves amongst these sounds, up to five different vignettes
can be heard, some convey the recognisable exchanges of ordinary hospi-
tal activity but others reveal its real business of maintaining configuration.
The audience may encounter, in any order, some of the following:
140  L. Kendrick

Tube 2

Doctor: Pentagon 23774b4884. Age 18 months

Nurse: Angle [1] 106.45 degrees. Angle [2] 106.92 degrees. Angle [3]
108.48 degrees. Angle [4] 109.45 degrees. Angle [5] 108.62 degrees.

Doctor: Inoperable

[…]

Tube 4

Nurse: [Whispering] They’re forging the records. I’ve seen the disposal
centres, I’ve worked here for seven years and each month they’re under-
reporting. The records show less than 2 percent failure rate and just 0.76
percent eradication, but that’s not true. It’s more like 22 percent failure
rate. And the disposals. We can hardly keep up. All those corpses, little
Squares and tiny Triangles. Just a fraction of a degree off and destroyed. In
the name of “regularity”. (Achtman 2015)

This kind of engagement in sound is not without its difficulty. As the

audience eavesdrop on troubled lives, cast a clandestine ear over inti-
mate details and hover unseen over misery and unrest, we perceive as an
undisclosed witness. It’s as though we are asked to listen as we might
gaze. The upwards direction of the amplification and our lofty posi-
tions atop the pipes give us the sense that we are looming above the
Hospital in a god-like way, overviewing without intervention. The dif-
ficulty of engagement is also compounded by the fact that this is just one
of many layers of the sound design that begs for our attention; the pre-
recorded voice of Elder Square carries us to each zone and invites us to
find what sounds lie hidden there; the sounds of Flatland’s intervening
streets filter forth with sounds of passers-by, traffic, Muzak and public
service announcements—‘lines and irregulars to the side’; ‘assume your
configuration’; ‘mind the angles’; all against the acoustic blanket of the
constant drone. Audience to all this requires considerable concentra-
tion, the sheer scale of the sound design and its multichannel composi-
tion was something that researchers van der Linden and Wiseman found
occasionally overwhelmed its listeners—some of whom decided to stop
moving to gain a sense of what was happening aurally, or simply went
 6  LISTENING: SONORITY AND SUBJECTIVITY  141

off-piste to try and find a quieter or more comprehensible spot. This

form of audience required particular effort on our part, and multiple
modes of engagement that we had to commit to—or give ourselves over
to—in order to fully experience the performance. Sometimes this was a
case of relinquishing control of our movement over to sounds in order
to navigate the unknown spaces, whereupon we had to shift our mode
of perception and engage in auditory focus to catch parts of narrative, or
we had to allow ourselves to be distracted by distant or drifting signals
to capture other stories. This type of audience requires a commitment
towards encountering something before we know what it is. As such it is
a form of aural engagement that requires trust, something which games
critic Naomi Alderman emphasised.4 In my experience, the sonic design,
aural accumulations and the perceptual complexities this demanded
revealed something about the acts of listening within our efforts to hear,
and the critical relationship between audience and meaning of this piece
of theatre.
This chapter will now explore the ways in which listening brings us
into audience by drawing on three aspects of Jean-Luc Nancy’s seminal
theory of listening: first, his version of sense and how hearing and listen-
ing figure within this; second, his concept of listening as an openness to
sonority, and third, listening as an opening to resonance—the position of
his listening subject. Nancy’s listener is never in isolation, but is always
in relation to or with, which has intersubjective possibilities that can
tell us something about audience, in particular, audience that is entirely
sonorous.

Hearing and Listening
Jean-Luc Nancy’s Listening is a significant anti-ocular thesis that pro-
poses a critique of philosophy from the perspective of the ear. For him,
the enduring image of the philosopher is just that—one that has become
so easily aligned with vision—because seeing has become the predom-
inant sense. For this reason, ‘figure and idea, theater [sic] and theory,
spectacle and speculation suit each other better, superimpose themselves
on each other, even can be substituted for each other with more affin-
ity than the audible and the intelligible, or the sonorous and the logi-
cal’ (Nancy 2007, p. 2). According to Nancy, any aural engagement in
philosophy is not that which is audible but is that which is understand-
able. However, the dislocation between the understanding of the ear
142  L. Kendrick

and that which may fall upon it means that listening has become neu-
tralised so that proper philosophical thought can take place. Listening,
it was thought, got in the way of thinking. Nancy’s frequently quoted
declaration, ‘What secret is at stake when one truly listens’ (2007, p. 5,
emphasis in original) is usually cut short; the sentence continues ‘[…]
that is, when one tries to capture or surprise the sonority rather than the
message?’ (ibid.). Nancy’s call is for a form of listening that is unshackled
from what forms we think meaning takes—for example, that normative
notion that sounds should always signify—and instead is let loose in the
sonorous world, in other words it is listening amidst aurality. However,
this is not an auricular immersion into a dispersed and meaningless
world, far from it. At the heart of his listening is an exploration of the
feeling of sound and how, in feeling, we form a sense of ourselves. It’s
a particularly material approach,5 articulated through the ear and mani-
fested through the motility and resonance of sound and its affects, which
invites an exploration of sound as experienced—particularly in theatre.
Indeed, Nancy’s theory of sonority, resonance—we might say ‘sound and
speculation’—and the formation of a listening subject offer a model of
audience that can elucidate the experience of theatre aurality.
In Listening, Nancy begins with addressing the assumed distinctions
between hearing and listening. In English, the difference is usually consid-
ered to be that the former is passive and the latter is active, because hearing
is most commonly thought of as the sense and listening is associated with
attentiveness and directionality, as an intentional mode of engagement. One
senses, the other makes sense of it. This is one reason why the perception
of sound is ordinarily considered to be a journey from hearing to listening,
from sensing to sense, which suggests a linear route that arrives at meaning.
And listening is the honed mode of hearing that secures this, thus listening
has become equivalent to understanding. One reason for the conflation of
listening with meaning-making is that the French terms have quite differ-
ent connotations for the modes of reception of sound. Écouter, to ‘listen’, is
associated with the openness to sonority of ‘hearing’, and similarly entender,
to ‘hear’, can be directional and intentional. The translation of these terms
(into English at least) misses the nuances between the two and what these
reveal about the aural sense and the making of sense within aurality. Brian
Kane explains the consequences as such:

As the French makes explicit, the struggle between sense and truth is a
struggle between écouter and entendre. The ear is the common thread
 6  LISTENING: SONORITY AND SUBJECTIVITY  143

upon which the tension travels, an ear that oscillates between sense organ
and sense maker. Perhaps, the English translation is doomed to sever the
thread that ties the listening ear to the hearing ear, écouter to entendre,
by unloosing sensation from understanding and encouraging the reader to
falsely cast the difference in terms of faculty psychology — sensibility ver-
sus the understanding — rather than an oscillation of difference within the
same. (Kane 2012, p. 442)

Nancy does not consider the making of sense—as in the production of

meaning—as the primary aim or goal of listening; rather, his theory of
listening strongly refutes, as he puts it, ‘the signifying perspective as a
final perspective’ (2007, p. 31). This refutation is an important tenet
of his theory which, as Adrienne Janus (2011) has noted, is problem-
atised by the fact that the French sens (in the works of Jacques Attali
as well as others) is often mistranslated as primarily referring to ‘mean-
ing’, thus obfuscating the French term’s relation to sensual perception
(p. 185). Nancy, on the other hand, employs the term throughout his
philosophical writings to make use of the blurry territory between sense,
signification and sensing in order to collapse their opposition. As Martta
Heikkilä (2008) demonstrates in her thesis on his philosophy and its rel-
evance to aesthetics, translation can draw attention to the mutability of
the term:

The French sens is the equivalent of the English “sense” in that both of
these concepts are polysemantic. They may point to direction, intuition,
reason, the five senses, or meaning. In his writings Nancy uses the whole
semantic field of “sense” […] First, he uses “sense” in order to differen-
tiate between “meaning” or “signification”, which indicates something
given and fixed. Sense, in turn, refers to what precedes the separation
between the sensible and the intellectual: sense exceeds or is beyond any
signification. (Heikkilä 2008, p. 15)

Nancy employs sens in all its nuances to capture the ways and means by
which we understand (or sense) our presence and our relation to the
world. Sense, as B. C. Hutchens usefully summed up, is both Nancy’s
philosophical task and the means by which it should be undertaken,
‘sense is the coextensivity of thinking and the world, the absolute con-
tact that makes meaning possible but is not reducible to it’ (2005,
p. 42). For Nancy, there can be no clear cut division between the sens-
ing apparatus and the self that senses, between the perception of sound
144  L. Kendrick

and the reception of meaning. On his terms, hearing is not some sort of
neutral position amidst sound that is devoid of meaning, without sense:
‘“to hear” is to understand the sense (either in the so-called figurative
sense, or in the so-called proper sense: to hear a siren, a bird, or a drum
is already each time to understand at least the rough outline of a situa-
tion, a context if not a text)’ (Nancy 2007, p. 6). And listening is a kind
of hearing within hearing, it might be ‘in hearing itself, at the very bot-
tom of it’ (Nancy 2007, p. 6) but it is also a movement of sensing that is
‘a straining toward a possible meaning, and consequently one that is not
immediately accessible’ (ibid.).

Listening in Sonority
Nancy’s theory of listening is also a call for openness to sonority, which
is in part a strategy to make available those meanings, experiences and
encounters which we aren’t already aware of (or have sensed), that
are hitherto unknown. In this way, it is also a political strategy as it is
a move away from meaning as fixed and into meaning as potential, in
the broadest sense. This has interesting consequences for the design
of sonorous immersion such as that of Flatland, which is only avail-
able through sonority, in particular its design for audience that is almost
entirely regulated except for the ear: our vision is censored by the pitch
black environment, our bodies are ambulated by feeling and our touch
is directed—but our hearing sense is let loose, and more so it seems
without any of the other senses, particularly sight, to indicate what will
generate sound’s presence (because we do not see the things, spaces or
events that create the sounds we encounter). In many ways this audience
experience is the reverse of Shuhei Hosokawa’s autonomous walk-act of
the personal stereo listener, whereby the exclusive listening experience
provides a form of agency, an ‘interpenetration of Self and world’ (2012,
p. 113) as a sort of private theatricalisation of it. By encasing the body—
both in costume and within darkness—and leaving the ear bare to the
sonic elements, Flatland’s design inverts Hosokawa’s effect. Here is a lis-
tener whose body is theatricalised by the immersion of the ear into the
theatrical world around it. It could be assumed that this results in a lack
of autonomy over the listening experience, a problematic immersion over
which there is little to no agency other than to feel the way through it.
However, this is not the case. Rather, this type of audience commands a
 6  LISTENING: SONORITY AND SUBJECTIVITY  145

listening not unlike that of Nancy’s, because sounds have to be engaged

in as just that—as sound—not meaning: as sonorous, not just as forms of
signification. Sounds themselves have unknowable qualities that force the
audience into a listening position in order to figure out how to respond
(not just to fathom out what the sounds mean). The sounds of Flatland
are unheralded by visual clues but also frequently happen upon us with-
out any other indication. They are delivered by unusual means (through
materials and textiles, as well as secreted in objects) and always in multi-
ple layers—listening to a voice in your cheek, to another hidden within a
found object and they are not encountered in any particular order, their
assembly is done by us. The sounds may come at us from all directions
or specify a place we didn’t know was there, and these are also sounds
that require us to make a choice: to move in a direction, to explore the
journey of the ear or to activate other sounds. In order to make these
choices, our audience attention is always to the sounds in and of them-
selves. It’s a form of listening that becomes open, in Nancy’s sense, by
not being tied to signification. By hearing Flatland’s sound design, we
hear again, and then we encounter that which lies hidden in its acoustic
midst. This form of immersive theatre is not aural abandonment but an
exposure to aurality that makes available those un-encountered—or yet
to be encountered—meanings that Nancy’s theory calls for.
Yet there is another material aspect of sound that immerses us in the
unknown, that which extends hearing to the body of the audience. While
our exposed ear and the sound design immerse us in sonority, in order
for us to listen, we must feel our way through our hearing experience.
The motility that Oshodi and the Flatland team desired was not just
about new modes of access, it treated listening as an experiential aes-
thetic. In Flatland, the invitation to listen also takes place by touch.

Touch
The journey through Flatland is propelled by a handheld robotic device,
the ‘animotous’, a form of haptic technology that moves in our palms
indicating the direction of travel from one zone to the next. Tracking
devices in the spacelander suits are picked up via an internal GPS sys-
tem, with multiple infrared beacons scattered throughout the space,
which allow the technical team to send its audience in different direc-
tions so that sections of the narrative are discovered in various sequences,
146  L. Kendrick

ensuring there is space in each zone for free exploration of the listen-
ing points (and so that audience members do not collide in the dark).
The animotous, nicknamed the ‘haptic sandwich’ by the technical team,
is formed of two parts. The top slice shifts an inch in the required direc-
tion of travel, rotating and extending accordingly; it moves rapidly from
side to side if we go too far, at which point we should turn in the oppo-
site direction for the device to recalibrate our position in the space. The
design of the animotous is based on the movement of a lotus flower6
and our instructions for its proper use are to hold it in our palms facing
upwards with our fingers arranged around it like petals. Our index finger
settles in a groove at the front of the base, poised to sense its movement,
and once the top section springs into action, we are to place our other
hand atop the device on an embossed triangle to be sure the direction we
are heading in feels right.
The designer of the animotous, Ad Spiers, was keen to avoid more
common haptic interfaces based primarily on leading. He developed
a more intuitive device that moves with the person holding it rather
than indicating what is ahead. The animotous constantly changes its
shape as we move, responding directly to the audiences’ movement in
the space, and once in motion, it ‘actuates to different “poses”’ (Spiers
et al. 2015), which we then interpret rather than follow. In the con-
text of Flatland, we are informed that the device also allows us to move
undetected through the two-dimensional world. In terms of the story,
we are told the animotous is ‘inhabited’ by Elder Square, therefore it has
a dramaturgical function: our response to it is not just about our move-
ment in the space but is the means by which we proceed through the
narrative. Yet the animotous is also designed to move us without ‘draw-
ing on attentional resources’ (Spiers et al. 2015). It is the one aspect of
our entire audience encounter that doesn’t make direct use of audio (as
Elder Square’s communications with us are via the headphones not the
haptic device) and therefore it does not distract from our immersion in
sound. For this reason, the animotous prompts us into movement via
vibrotactile feedback, it quickly vibrates in our pockets and gently reso-
nates in our palms as we progress. It functions entirely through touch;
the reverberant tactility not only draws us towards the particular sonic
encounters of Flatland, it resonates in our palms as it does so. Albeit
without ‘sound’ the animotous moves—and moves us—in ways that are
sonorous.
 6  LISTENING: SONORITY AND SUBJECTIVITY  147

Hapticity
The haptic refers to the sense of touch, but also to the act of contact
and the manipulation of that touched and held. An example of this is
the type of material which, like the animotous, can be both held and
beholden: it comes into our possession but remains something that we
regard, or look upon (as the traditional meaning of behold alludes to),
as we hold it. Hapticity refers to the strange quality of the haptic; to that
sensation that when we hold something we also sense that it is not of us,
and how this difference is marked out and bridged by touch. Of all the
senses, touch has become significant because it brings us into an immedi-
ate and actual relation to the world around us. To touch is to affect, and
the action of touching brings us into affective relations with things and
beings around us. It actualises feeling. Touch not only brings us into the
contact but is contact with the world, it is the chief way in which things
become ‘real’. The importance of touch, Aleksandar Mijatović argues,
is a tenet of experience that is upheld by metaphysics as ‘the sense of
immediate perception which warrants certainty to empirical knowledge’
(2010). Touch is the fundamental way in which the idea becomes the
real, epitomised by contact with deities and promulgated by rituals which
evolved around the partaking of flesh.7
We know sound moves us because we feel it. It can be literally felt
through our bodies, on our skin and, depending on the frequency,
through to our bones. Sound can be touching. We can feel it touching
us, as we can feel it touch the bodies of others. It is tactile to the extent
that it has some of the qualities of the haptic; it can hold us but cannot
be fully held by us. Thus, there is a discrepancy between our feeling of
sound and our capacity to feel it. We may be certain when we experi-
ence it but we cannot grasp it. It is the feeling of sound that articulates
our exposure to it. The interface between touch and sound is explored
in Flatland through e-textiles, materials and objects with MP3 players
which, once felt, activate sound. These make use of the haptic technol-
ogy (commonplace in touch-sensitive screens of tablet interfaces and
smart devices) of the live circuit that we complete on contact, changing
the properties of the circuit, which means the current runs through the
player and the sound is triggered. In the Church zone, these are threads
sown into the fabric of the luxurious heavy curtains that envelope the
space. Kispert has composed codes that react to how much pressure
audience members exert; the harder we press, the louder they become.
148  L. Kendrick

The sounds contrast with the velvet texture of the curtains; they are rem-
iniscent of shattering glass, hammers on pipes and electric saws through
metal. As we pass through the ‘congregation’ chanting praise to the
‘Circulus Divine/Who gives us this Day/Your Eternal Configuration/
Immutable Order’ (Achtman 2015), these sounds give us the feeling of
spatial destruction. In the two-dimensional world of Flatland, these are
sounds of material dissent.
What is interesting about the intersection between touch and listening
is that it gives a version of sound that can be felt in more specific ways
than just resonating through us. There is a contingency between touch
and sound—literally so in Flatland—which means that sound is more
than that felt but in its feeling it has an affect, it does something to us.
For Nancy, this is a form of listening as an openness to sonority which,
by being felt, becomes constitutive of selves in the world. Nancy’s theory
of listening is also a theory of subjectivity.

Listening and Resonance
Nancy’s theory of listening—as well as advocating openness to sonority
and immersion in sense—is also a theory of subjectivity, of sensing of the
self and selves in the world. Listening, as a kind of hearing within hear-
ing, begins as an opening to an unexplored sonorous world, but its fruits
are not just in the discovery of the new but are about the disclosure of
being in this sonorous world. For Nancy, listening is constitutive of, not
just reflexive of, subjectivity.

To be listening is thus to enter into tension and to be on the lookout for a

relation to self: not, it should be emphasized, a relationship to “me” (the
supposedly given subject), or to the “self” of the other (the speaker, the
musician, also supposedly given, with his subjectivity), but to the relation-
ship in self, so to speak, as if forms a “self”. (Nancy 2007, p. 12, emphasis
in original)

This affective formation of a ‘self’, of subjectivity in the sense of being

(not the received versions Nancy points to above), becomes clearer in
his analysis of the act of sounding: ‘To sound is to vibrate in itself or by
itself: it is not only, for the sonorous body, to emit a sound, but it is also
to stretch out, to carry itself and be resolved into vibrations that both
return it to itself and place it outside itself’ (2007, p. 8). Such sound
 6  LISTENING: SONORITY AND SUBJECTIVITY  149

may be of hearing, listening or vocalisation, but sounding is not parti-

tioned by any of these. The capacity of the body for sounding positions
the self amidst sonority in a way that renders subjectivity an experience of
resounding. Nancy’s notion of a simultaneously receptive and generative
sonority is encapsulated in his concept of resonance, which is the cor-
nerstone of his theory of listening. Resonance is the motility of sound
in which listening takes place. Nancy’s point is that: ‘All sonorous pres-
ence is […] made up of a complex of returns [renvois] whose binding
is the resonance or “sonance” of sound’ (2007, p. 16). This is not an
unfamiliar definition of sound; however, less attention has been paid to
resonance and its relation to subjectivity—in particular ‘listening’ as its
opening, and this is the absence that Nancy’s theory seeks to address.
Resonance is not constant but is set off by sound. It announces sound
by means of the ‘attack’ of its beginnings, and it constitutes sound by
its movement between surfaces and amongst bodies, amidst both sub-
jects and objects. This return or ‘renvoi’ of sound is how resonance is
best understood. The referrals of resonance are not just of its movement
between surfaces but also lie in its capacity to delineate space and ‘spac-
ing’ which, in turn, creates the distances necessary for repetition, and so
on. The distance is a demarcation of resonance—for instance, of sound’s
return—yet it is its spacing that makes the return discernible. Space
forms sound’s referral by creating the conditions for the return. This is
how sound marks out its own presence—or more particularly its pres-
ences—made by concurrent multiple referrals that constitute resonance.
Therefore, it is not repetition, the re-ignition of sound by resonance that
delineates ‘the present’, it is its referral to its own material to ‘the reprise
of a present that is (already) past and reopening [relance] of a present
(still) to come’ (Nancy 2007, p. 18).
This capacity of resonance to create a sense of presence is the space
in which Nancy’s subject is formed. Nancy describes the route to this
formation as first, an understanding of resonance as the ‘opening up
of sense, as beyond-sense or sense that goes beyond signification’;
­secondly, it is a positioning of the body within this (by means of listen-
ing) as a ‘resonance chamber’ and ‘from there, to envisage the “subject”
as that part, in the body, that is listening or vibrates with listening to’
(Nancy 2007, p. 31). Janus describes it thus: ‘the space opened up by
renvoi is at once the space of perception and proprioception, the space
that opens the self to itself and to the world as presence to self’ (2011,
p. 194). For Nancy, being is founded in resonance. His version of the
150  L. Kendrick

phenomenological knowing of being is a form of resounding. Yet it is

significant that it is the reverberant model of sound and the spaces of this
to which Nancy turns to illustrate being, the resonant subject, because:

meaning and sound share the space of a referral, in which at the same time
they refer to each other, and that […] this space can be defined as the
space of a self, a subject. A self is nothing other than a form or function of
referral; a self is made of a relationship to self, or of a presence to self […] A
subject feels: that is his characteristic and his definition. (Nancy 2007, pp.
8–9, emphases in original)

Listening as a manifestation of resonance repositions the body in a

more mutable space than that of the autonomous listener, the identifi-
able position of the body that sound moves towards and through, the
locus of sonic engagement. It offers the body up in relation to others as
it becomes known in relation to itself. If sound is social, then resounding
is promiscuously interpersonal.

Resonant Subjectivities
Nancy states that, ‘we have known since Aristotle, sensing [sentir] (ais-
thesis) is always a perception [ressentir], that is, a feeling-oneself-feel [se-
sentir-sentir]’ (2007, p. 8), to which he adds an important third sentir
to assert that the subject ‘feels [oneself] feeling a “self”’ (p. 9). Thus,
it is not a case of reflexivity; rather, there is a hapticity to Nancy’s res-
onant subject. Nor is Nancy’s resonant subjectivity one of repeated
affirmation. Indeed, the listening subject is one which, because of its
foundation in resonance, can be dispersed as it is felt. He suggests that
deviation is a necessary condition of resonant subjectivity, because it is
a function of resonance, which ‘by finding itself deviates [s’écarte] from
itself in order to resound further away’ (Nancy 2007, p. 35, emphasis
in original).8 This continually shifting and altering quality of resonance
is echoed in Nancy’s earlier thesis of the syncope.9 The syncope—which
in simple terms means the interrupted beat—was a way of finding con-
nection with (what was often assumed to be) the disconnected, and a
way of showing how contact, in turn, involves its opposite. The syn-
cope describes the limits of touch because it is neither a full adherence
nor a constant, but in its moment holds the promise of its withdrawal.
For Nancy, the syncope is ‘not anything and has no power. It is not a
 6  LISTENING: SONORITY AND SUBJECTIVITY  151

negative movement from one moment to the next, nor is it a whole that
serves as a bridge […] The syncope simultaneously attaches and detaches
(in Greek, for example, the suppression of a letter in a word; in music a
strong beat over silence)’ (Nancy 2008a, p. 10, emphasis in original). As
Trish McTighe (2013) elaborates, Nancy uses the ‘image’ of the syncope
to show how ‘Touch, contact, and proximity are permeated […] by dis-
tance and separation’ (p. 8). The syncope describes the way touch oper-
ates as both an act of contact and departure, it captures the syncopated
nature of feeling oneself feeling a self, and recognises the discontinuity of
subjectivity. For Jacques Derrida, Nancy’s version of the syncope articu-
lates the limits of self; there is always an end to touch, there is always that
which can’t be fully felt or reached. This limitation represents a kind of
loss inherent in contact: ‘It is to lose the proper at the moment of touch-
ing upon it, and it is this interruption, which constitutes the touch of
the self-touching, touch as self-touching, that Nancy calls syncope’ (Derrida
2005, p. 111, emphases in original). In terms of resonance, the syn-
cope demonstrates how sonority—and listening as the opening into this
sonority—is, all at once, a feeling of being and not being at the same
time.
A listening subject is not a complete subject, but as a form of reso-
nance it is in a state of syncopated coming into being. The syncope can-
not be accomplished, there will never be a sense of completion, but there
will always be a return to it. This is the draw, the desire for that which
touched us or brought us into a sense of feeling of being ourselves. But
touch—the promise of the syncope, the action of the haptic, the tactility
of sound—cannot take place by ourselves alone. It is, by its very nature,
about our relation to anything and (potentially) everything outside of
ourselves. And what is interesting about Nancy’s theory of resonant sub-
jectivity is that it is predicated on being with. It is this important dis-
tinction of his arguably postphenomenological theory of subjectivity that
facilitates a collective understanding of the listening subject as plural: the
corps sonore as audience.

Resonance as Audience
The sonic scenography of Flatland created an assembled and autono-
mous audience, while the ear remained open to ubiquitous sound, the
body of the audience, both individually and collectively, was also free
to encounter the haptic devices in any sequence. Furthermore, the
152  L. Kendrick

animotous (and its voice in our cheek bones) could position us sever-
ally in different places, individual or collectively, depending on the audi-
ences’ migration through the space. This combination of autonomous
and directed movement made us aware of what is at stake when we are
moved: whether we are about to be brought together or dispersed, we
are always on the cusp of an encounter. This is the final and perhaps the
most pertinently political aspect of Nancy’s listening: just as it is a foun-
dation of subjectivity, as an opening to the sensing of the self, listening
also becomes a sensing of the self in relation to other selves in the world.
The resonance of listening is not an exclusive, singular act, we resonate
with and within sonority that contains within it all kinds of subjects,
selves, objects and events. It is a form of engagement that by its very
materiality places our-selves in inter-subjective relations. Listening brings
the self into exchange with others, it is a means of moving from the sin-
gular (whether a self, a meaning or a position or belief) into the plural:
it is a route towards—or a sense of—the coextensive state with the out-
side world. As such, Nancy’s listening has a political function, in that the
being of the self is always in relation to being with.10 This has significant
potential for unveiling the political potential of the sonority of theatre
sound.
By engaging us in the haptics of sonority, the resonant feeling of feel-
ing, the team behind Flatland asks us to engage in a form of audience
that opens us up to the possibilities of intersubjectivity. In this way, the
subjectivities of the visually impaired are not replicated, but some of
what they experience can be encountered through navigating the sono-
rous world. In Flatland we are brought into relation with those mean-
ings and experiences that are by no means easy to encounter; the power
between beings and shapes, and the oppression and erasure that take
place. The aural intersubjectivity of this production is an encounter with
the politics of difference, created with carefully selected design and tech-
nology that serves as a prototype for theatre sound research, particularly
in politically motivated immersive theatre. This extensive sonic experi-
ment has significant potential for other art forms that place listening at
the forefront of engagement. The research involved in creating Flatland
extended beyond the reach of the production itself. The aims of Oshodi,
Extant, Haunted Pliers and the university partners were to explore
modes of encounter that may, as Oshodi put it, ‘usher in a new era of
collaboration across the arts, heritage and technology sectors’.11 As such,
Flatland demonstrated the capacity of sonority and its tactile cousin,
 6  LISTENING: SONORITY AND SUBJECTIVITY  153

hapticity, to reinvent the audience experience for other arts and cultural
forms, an indication of the potential of aurality.

Notes
1. Haunted Pliers is the research and development company of Dr Ad
Spiers who develops robotic and haptic devices for surgical and artistic
endeavours.
2. Extant’s version combines two threads of Abbott’s narrative. In the
novella, the one-dimensional world of ‘lineland’ appears to the narra-
tor as a dream, it is not the product of experiment by Circles (the high-
est ranking shape ‘to which all other objects are subordinated’) (Abbott
1992, p. 51). Although the doctrines and hierarchies by which Abbott’s
two-dimensional residents are forced to abide form a critique of the late
Victorian societal hierarchies, Extant’s adaptation for performance (and
with, of course, the advantage of adapting over a hundred and thirty
years later) features the experiences of inequality through incidences of
protest (against the regime), and disquiet, particularly amongst the low-
est of the shapes, Women—who are all straight lines—whose ‘peace-cry’
that they must emit at all times to announce their movement (lest a male
shape is pierced by their sharp ends), Achtman reimagines as a quiet dis-
senting chorus of unheard complaint.
3. These and other quotes from Matthias Kispert are taken from inter-
views with the author of this book in person and via email; they are
cited here with kind permission from Kispert. Quotes from him are also
from Extant’s research dissemination event held at Theatre Delicatessen,
Farringdon Road, London, 29 April 2015.
4. Naomi Alderman speaking at Extant’s research dissemination event held
at Theatre Delicatessen, Farringdon Road, London 29 April 2015.
5. I use the term ‘material’ here to refer to the way in which listening, as
a sense (in all senses of the word that Nancy uses it), has fundamental
corporeal implications. Ian James (2006) makes the point that Nancy’s
notion of sense ‘is therefore “material,” not because it implies the notion
of substance, but because it is the precondition for the bodily know-how
through which, prior to conscious thought or cognition, we orient our-
selves …’ (p. 106). These particular material conditions were described
by Rolf Großmann as an ‘auditory dispositif;, see Schulze (2013) for
analysis of this in spatial, temporal and corporeal ways.
6. Extant experimented with haptic technology for visually impaired audi-
ences in The Question (2010), an immersive theatre in the dark per-
formance in collaboration with partners BAC (London) and the Open
University, UK Computing Department. The haptic device was shaped
154  L. Kendrick

like a flower with several moving components that opened outwards

when the audience encountered moments of action and contracted when
they moved away (see Machon 2013). At the Flatland research dissemina-
tion event, Spiers described his haptic interface prototype as more akin
to the ‘hot or cold’ children’s game, in that it indicated the proximity of
that which is yet to be encountered.
7. Touch features throughout Nancy’s philosophical writings, often in rela-
tion to the deconstruction of Christianity. Daniele Rugo (2013) makes
the point that Nancy doesn’t use the term flesh ‘due to its inscription
within the Christian and phenomenological register’ (p. 18) and that
phenomenology in particular often ‘returns the thinking of the body to
interiority’ (ibid.). However, Nancy’s philosophy brings touch into the
realm of sensing rather than the making sense of the immaterial. This is
an important political turn away from theological dominance and towards
autonomy. Nancy utilises sense—and in particular touch as a sense—to
position the body in relation to the world, not in potential sublimation to
it. Rugo points out that it is the body ‘which triggers the relation to the
outside: it establishes the fact that every relation can only be a relation to
an outside’ (p. 19).
8. Here Nancy refers to the ‘arch-music’ of speaking to dispel the notion of
a functional voice, which is always in service to meaning; for instance, as a
‘musicality of a text’ (2007, p. 35). Nancy turns this utility of vocality on
its head by positing the idea that speaking is rather the ‘echo of the text
in which the text is made and written’ (ibid.). According to Nancy, speak-
ing as a form of listening is of the same resonant materiality in which
meaning may occur but is not a condition of it. Interestingly, Nancy takes
recourse to echo to circumnavigate the common correlation between
subjectivity with narcissism, about which he vents his frustration in the
foreword to Szendy’s Listen: A History of our Ears, ‘but is there a way,
when in the vicinity of the subject, simply to have done with narcissism?
And how, and where, can one locate the difference, which is in fact visible
and audible, between Echo and Narcissus?’ (Nancy 2008a, p. xii).
9. Nancy’s syncope is a problematisation of touch, which he uses to describe
the ways in which the othered concepts of philosophical thought—the
incompleteness or the undecided, as opposed to reasoning or the idea—
were intrinsic to philosophy in seemingly paradoxical yet syncopated
ways. For example, the syncope reveals the terms by which the undecided
are converted to ‘a lack or an absence, circumscribed by discourse, into
the plenitude of a true outside, hanging out beyond discourse but sur-
reptitiously controlled by it and by the discursive conditions of the pro-
duction of the outside itself’ (Nancy 2008b, p. 7). In this way, Nancy’s
syncope signals the beginnings of his very specific use of sonority to artic-
ulate the ambiguities of discourse.
 6  LISTENING: SONORITY AND SUBJECTIVITY  155

10. Nancy’s theories of being take a departure from Heidegger’s Dasein and

relate more to mitsein—being-with, or mitseinsfrage—or the question of
being-with (see Heikkilä 2008, p. 10 and Hutchens 2005, p. 27). It is
this move from the emphasis on singular being to singular/plural exist-
ence (see Nancy 2000) that distinguishes Nancy’s work from mid-century
phenomenologies.
11. This quotation is from Extant’s publicity material. This and further infor-
mation including research dissemination can be found at the company’s
website www.extant.org.uk.

References
Abbott, Edwin A. 1992 [1884]. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. New
York: Dover Publications.
Achtman, Michael. 2015. Flatland: An Adventure in Many Dimensions, dir.
Maria Oshodi. London: Extant Theatre Company.
Cavallo, Amelia. 2015. Seeing the Word, Hearing the Image: The Artistic
Possibilities of Audio Description in Theatrical Performance. Research in
Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 20 (1):
124–134.
Derrida, Jacques. 2005. On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Heikkilä, Martta. 2008. At the Limits of Presentation: Coming-into-presence and
its Aesthetic Relevance in Jean-Luc Nancy’s Philosophy. Frankfurt am Main:
Peter Lang.
Hosokawa, Shuhei. 2012. The Walkman Effect. In The Sound Studies Reader, ed.
Jonathan Sterne. Abingdon: Routledge.
Hutchens, B.C. 2005. Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophy. Chesham:
Acumen.
James, Ian. 2006. The Fragmentary Demand. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Janus, Adrienne. 2011. Listening: Jean-Luc Nancy and the “Anti-Ocular” Turn
in Continental Philosophy and Critical Theory. Comparative Literature 63
(2): 182–202.
Kane, Brian. 2012. Jean-Luc Nancy and the Listening Subject. Contemporary
Music Review 31 (5–6): 439–447.
Machon, Josephine. 2013. Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in
Contemporary Performance. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
McTighe, Trish. 2013. The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama.
Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
Mijatović, Aleksandar. 2010. Division of Touch: Distinct in Jean-Luc Nancy and
Jacques Derrida. Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 17: 17. http://
www.inst.at/trans/17Nr/5-3/5-3_mijatovic17.htm. Accessed 14 May 2016.
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Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2000. Being Singular Plural. Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham
University Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2008a. The Discourse of the Syncope: Logodaedalus. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2008b. Ascoltando. In Listen: A History of our Ears, ed. Peter
Szendy. New York: Fordham University Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2014. After Tragedy In Encounters in Performance Philosophy,
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Rugo, Daniele. 2013. Jean-Luc Nancy and the Thinking of Otherness: Philosophy
and Powers of Existence. London: Bloomsbury.
Schulze, Holger. 2013. The Corporeality of Listening, Experiencing
Soundscapes on Audio Guides. InSoundscapes of the Urban Past: Staged Sound
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Spiers., A., J. van der Linden., M. Oshodi, and A. Dollar. 2015. First Validation
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 Conclusion

And Sound
When the components of theatre are listed, more often than not sound
is the last word in the sentence; it usually reads thus: acting, directing,
lighting, movement, playwriting, and so on … and sound. Being last
on the list is not just a problem of alphabetical order, even when writ-
ing about theatre-making is organised in ways other than by discipline, I
am struck by the frequency with which sound is almost an adjunct—just
remembered in the nick of time. Can this be attributed to the late arrival
of sound technologies in the theatre, the more recent development of
the art of theatre sound, or is it the result of a lack of critical investiga-
tion? Or is this latency perhaps a consequence of sound’s ultimate imma-
teriality? The rapid development of the ways and means of theatre sound
and their application in contemporary theatre practice are almost a disa-
vowal of its creation and plasticity. In Complicite and Simon McBurney’s
production The Encounter (see introduction), sound is at once exposing
and concealing; the production lays bare all its sonic technologies yet in
doing so gets away with a myriad of effects that even the nerdiest ear
would struggle to pick up. The biggest conceit of sound in this produc-
tion is how it reinforces the performance of the ‘live’, not just an effect
of ‘happening now’, but by an assertion of sound’s mediating presence
that appears not to be in conflict with the live performance. Composer
and sound designer Tom Parkinson describes the effect as follows:

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 157

L. Kendrick, Theatre Aurality,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-45233-7
158  Conclusion

The newest of sound techniques are being used [in The Encounter] — in
real time by two invisible operators — to shore up the liveness of the actor
resulting in an extremely complex kind of diegetic double bluff. By being
“made live” the sound effects seem to escape the problem of reproducibil-
ity, the actual “mediatic potential” is dissipated.1

What is striking about The Encounter is how its creative team articulate
the production’s research and creation. The terms of this form of thea-
tre sound, both the critical terminology and its creative conditions, are
no longer just those of technology (of live or mediated, effect or affect,
and so on), they are also of performance. Its sound designer, Gareth Fry,
describes the show’s operation as a task of being able ‘to anticipate and
to lead with sound, so that […] the division between storytelling and
sound design are non-existent’ (Fry in Complicite and McBurney, 2015).
This fusion of performance and sound is not so much a sonic sleight-of-
hand, but more of a sonic set-up so that each reveal, such as an effect
as being just that, an effect, reinforces one presence of sound so that it
can actually accomplish a number of other effects in its wake. The design
for The Encounter is also an organisation of its own sonic syntax (to
adapt Christopher Baugh’s phrase about the scenic, see 2005, p. 204),
and the audience for this production is primed for what these sounds are
doing rather than what they diegetically reinforce (or not); it’s the aural-
ity of The Encounter we’ve come to experience; to be transported to the
Amazon river or McBurney’s flat within the blink of an ear.
As theatre embraces what aurality has to offer, new specificities and
skills have become a necessary part of theatre sound creation and pro-
duction. The expansion of the audience experience in turn demands a
new creativity on behalf of those who work with theatre sound. As this
book has demonstrated, there are a number of forms of theatre that
require sound to perform in some way, and the extent to which sound
can constitute theatre means that, in turn, sound is required to be per-
formed—whether it is in the process of production, rehearsal or during
the performances themselves, such as Fry and Malkin’s performance of
sound for The Encounter. As the skills and practice of the art of theatre
sound develop in this way, sound can take up any place in theatre per-
formance. This recent development is in stark contrast to the position it
is granted in any writing about theatre and performance. This is because
theatre aurality presents something of a disciplinary challenge, not just
to the ways in which university teaching and conservatoire training are
 Conclusion   159

organised, but also to the categories of theatre research practice: where

does such a study of the extent of sound belong: with design, scenog-
raphy or music theatre; amongst theatre and philosophy; or in other
categories of embodied, engaged, collaborative, participatory or even
performance practices? The significant development of theatre sound
alone warrants a more embedded consideration than the alphabet per-
mits and, if sound is recognised as a perceptual and critical phenomenon
of theatre making, as aurality, it might find itself featured at the fore-
front of any alphabetical listing (and, following the same logic, lighting,
looking and visuality would experience something of a demotion).

Theatre Aurality
Theatre aurality is more than a recognition of the art of theatre sound.
It is, as noted in the introduction to this book, a new field of enquiry
that explores the reasons why theatre made predominantly from sound
emerges and what this offers the academic field of theatre and perfor-
mance. This exploration of the aurality of theatre has found the follow-
ing: that sound performs, and it can perform theatre, from its present-ing
of the ‘liveness’ of theatre (see Chap. 1) to the staging of identities
through voice acts (Chap. 4); that to work with sound is to get to grips
with theatre’s meaning—for instance, as demonstrated by the sonic sen-
sibility (as Salomé Voegelin termed it) of the directors and theatre mak-
ers featured throughout this book (Chaps. 4 and 5)—and with theatre’s
constructs, such as the spaces created through sound in the dark (Chaps.
3 and 6). Theatre is also a form wherein the organisation and politics of
sounds can be exposed and, by working in ways that invite noise in—
either as a part of a process, methodology, or as a sonic entity—can, in
turn, demonstrate how noise can be an effective generator of theatre
form. This book has also uncovered how some of the assumptions about
sound and our engagement in it don’t quite hold in theatre practice: for
instance, sound may immerse but theatre sound can do so in precise ways
that demonstrate how immersion can be a directed and critical experi-
ence (Chaps. 3 and 6). This book has re-engaged with the innate aural-
ity of audience (Chap. 1), exploring the ways in which listening is active
and can be generative; from listening as a form of auditory performance
(Chap. 3) to the intersubjectivity of the corpssonore of theatre’s listen-
ing body (Chap. 6). The art of theatre sound can also shift the bounda-
ries of sensual perception and expose the terms of theatre engagement, for
160  Conclusion

instance: how the visual can be conjured through sonic means (Chap. 3);
how voice is a form of sound rather than a carrier of linguistic meaning
(Chap. 4); how noise is politics of sound that can dismantle constructed
meaning (Chap. 5); and how sensing (in all the meanings of the word)
are formed through the feeling and resonance within sound (Chap. 6).
The case studies of this book (Chaps. 3–6) have traced the movement
of Serres’ cyclical return between mouth and ear, which he described as
being ‘what produces theatre itself, its form and its structure’ (2008, p.
87): from listening as a starting point, in theatre staged for and made
through the ear (Chap. 3); through voice as a performance of sound
(Chap. 4); noise as the extent of theatre sound from mouths and on ears
(Chap. 5); with a return to listening as an experience of sonority, as a
sensation that is formed through resonance (Chap. 6). These case studies
demonstrate the reach of aurality, from the intimate to the promiscuous,
from the sotto voce to the ear-splitting, from an intentional, finite starting
point to an immersive omnipresent experience. They also demonstrate
some of the ways in which the voice and ear of theatre are being restaged
through sound. And this is the kernel of theatre aurality: though it might
not (or not yet) be possible to conclude what form of contemporary
practice this refers to (for there are potentially so many, and many more
in the offing), what theatre aurality is doing is seeking a radical recon-
figuration between voice and ear for all the critical, sometimes political
and radical, reasons explored in this book. In the introduction, I drew
on Frances Dyson’s statement that aurality refers to ‘the phenomenal and
discursive field of sound’ (2009, p. 6): aurality is not just a matter of
the phenomena of sound and our perception of it, but also concerns the
structures in which these occur. Following this, and as this book has laid
out, the aurality of theatre refers to the phenomenal and discursive field
of theatre sound and to the structures in which these occur; the socio-
political and philosophical, as well as the aesthetic. Theatre aurality pre-
sents a critical field of theatre and performance research that explores the
practice, purpose and philosophical implications of the art of sound in/as
theatre.

Note
1. This quote is from personal communication (2 January 2017) with the
author of this book and is cited with kind permission from Tom Parkinson.
 Index

A Auditory ‘I’, 13
Acousmatic
voice, 88
sound, ix
Acousmatisation, 82, 87–90
Acoustic spatialisation, 63
Amplification, 30, 35, 36, 63, 113,
116, 140
Animotous, 136, 145–147, 152
Attali, Jacques, 103, 124, 143
Attention, 4–7, 9, 12, 14, 19, 39, 40,
42, 43, 57, 64, 87, 90, 110, 114,
115, 118, 119, 122, 123, 140,
143, 145, 149
Audience
agency of, 52, 65, 144
corps sonore, 44, 151, 159
Audio theatre, 42, 51
Audio visual litany (Jonathan Sterne),
11–12
Auditory
dimension, 55–57, 59, 61, 62
field, 59, 61, 64
phenomenology, 55, 62, 64, 67
physiology, 55, 62–64
space, 18, 59, 62–64, 66
Aura, 16–18
Aural
alterity (Frances Dyson), 19, 21
anachronism (Thomas Docherty),
18
dimension, 66
Auratic, 35
B
Benjamin, Walter, 17, 35
Binaural recording, 51, 52, 54, 60, 62
Broadcast, 14, 37
Brown, Ross, 16, 32
C
Cavarero, Adriana, 96
Collison, David, 30, 33
Complicite, 32, 157, 158
Connor, Steven, 13, 65, 83, 107
Corporeality, 5, 41, 44, 97, 98
Corradi Fiumara, Gemma, 8
Crary, Jonathan, 4

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 161

L. Kendrick, Theatre Aurality,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-45233-7
162  Index

D J
Deacousmatisation, 88, 90–92, 98 Jay, Martin, 4
Diegesis, 38
Docherty, Thomas, 18
Dolar, Mladen, 77 K
Dyson, Frances, 8, 66, 160 Kahn, Douglas, 15, 106
Kispert, Matthias, 43, 136, 137

E
Erlmann, Veit, 13, 20, 105 L
etextiles, 136 Listener-function (Veit Erlmann), 13,
Extant, 43, 134, 135, 152 16, 21
Listening
and hearing, 1, 7, 13, 141, 142
F regimes of (Peter Szendy), 14
Foleying, 29, 30, 32, 33, 47 subject (Jean-Luc Nancy), 78
Fry, Gareth, 158 Liveness, 35, 38, 41, 158, 159

G M
Gibbons, Scott, 43, 110, 122, 124 Mediatic resistance, 34, 35, 37, 38
Gibbons, Tom, 110, 120 Microphone, 30, 32, 34, 36, 54
Goode, Chris, 38, 43, 110, 115, 116, Music theatre, 40, 111, 114, 159
124 Musicality/musicalisation, 40, 41, 114
Gramophone, 30

N
H Nancy, Jean Luc, 7, 41, 128, 141
Hapticity, 41, 44, 147, 150, 153 Noise
Headphones interference, 107
bone, 136, 138 methodology, 110, 115, 118, 159
Hearing and listening, 1, 7, 13, 141, as organising principle, 107, 110
142 pink noise, 121
Heterophony, 112, 115, 124 sonic entity, 110, 120–122, 124, 159
three forms of, 107
white noise, 113, 123, 137
I
Ihde, Don, 17, 20, 55
Immersive theatre, 40, 67, 134, 145, O
152 Object voice, 77–83, 87, 91, 92,
Ingold, Tim, 2, 36 94–96, 98
Objet petit a, 77
 Index   163

Ocularcentrism, 2–5, 9, 13, 14, 55 Sound

Oshodi, Maria, 134 event, 16, 44, 104
medium, 34, 38
of nature, 11
P object, 1, 16, 20, 60, 78, 80–82
Panatrope, 30, 31 original, 10, 16, 18
Phonograph, 15, 17, 30, 34 performance of, 19, 31, 74–76, 82,
Polyphony, 111, 112 97, 98, 133, 158, 160
Postdramatic theatre, 39 reinforcement, 34–36
Precedence effect, 62, 63 Sound effects
Presence/present, 41–42, 69, 106, 149 electronic, 30, 31
history of, 30, 38
mechanical, 29, 31
R Spectatorship, 1, 4–7, 28, 122, 133
Resonance Sterne, Jonathan, 1, 29, 106
and subjectivity, 64 Syncope, 150, 151
renvoi, 149 Synecdoche effect, 122

S T
Schizophonic split (R. Murray
Schafer), 15
Scopic
control, 7, 13
regimes, 4, 5, 14
Sense
sens (Jean-Luc Nancy), 143
sensorial divide, 2
sensorial hierarchies, 13
Serres, Michel, 105, 107
Signal to noise, 43
Societas Raffaello Sanzio, 122, 124
Sonic motility, 43, 44, 64, 134, 142,
145, 149
Sonic sensibility (Salomé Voegelin),
43, 159
Sonic subjectivity/intersubjectivity, 41,
119, 148–152, 159
Sonophobia, 10, 13, 27
Sonority, 18, 19, 39, 41, 42, 44, 94,
96, 97, 113, 134, 141, 142, 144,
145, 148, 149, 151, 152, 160
Teatr ZAR, 110–116, 124
Theatre-in-the-dark, 21, 40, 42, 57,
58, 65, 73, 122, 153
Thêàtrophone, 34, 51, 67
Touch, 3, 14, 16, 135, 144–148, 150,
151
U
Ubiquity effect, 121
V
Vibration, 106, 118
Vibrotactile feedback, 146
Visual
object, 6, 7, 10, 18, 42, 43, 57
reference, 41–43, 76
Visuality, 1, 5, 6, 38, 42–44, 58, 159
Vocality, 19, 20, 37, 39, 73, 80,
82–87, 91, 95, 96, 111, 133
Voegelin, Salomé, 43, 106, 120, 159
164  Index

Voice performed, 81–84, 86, 90, 91,

aesthetic, 82–84, 89 96, 98
the call of, 133 as sound, 88
distraction of, 82, 83 topology of, 80, 82, 90–92, 98
as object, 77 Voicing (Brandon 'LaBelle'), 97