Book of Abstracts. - Sound und Performance

52
Lynne Kendrick
Samstag, 06.10.2012, 15.30-17.00
S 123 (GW I)
Aurality and the Performance of Noise
Can attention to the aurality of performance simultaneously
reveal and problematise the production of meaning? How
does noise become productive within this? If noise permeates
performance, as a form of aural agitatory aesthetic, how does
the performer’s aurality – in particular their vocal aura, breath,
body and air – function as the arbiter of this? This paper investigates
how theatrical acousmatic practices, in particular
the performance of the unaudited voice, create an Gestic aurality,
which in turn generates an opportunity for non-occularcentric
dialogue between the body and voice. Focusing on Elin
Diamond’s version of the Gestic, I will explore ways in which
this dialogical relation between body and vocality creates interference
rather than coheres meaning, drawing attention to the
potential sonic disturbance of ‘feedback’ within the autopoietic
loop. If Diamond’s Gestic disrupts the stability of the spectatorial
subject, how is this ‘cited’ dialogical performance aurally
manifested? With reference to Vanishing Point’s Interiors*, a
production in which, save sparse narration, vocality and text
are performed but entirely unheard, this paper will offer a reconsideration
of highly visual performance in order to re-hear
theatre as a noisy aural art form.
* A co-production between Scotland’s Traverse Theatre, Napoli
Teatro Festival Italia, Teatro Stabile di Napoli and in association
with the Lyric Hammersmith (London) and Tron Theatre (Scotland)t
Lynne Kendrick is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at the Central
School of Speech and Drama, University of London. Recent
publications include “A Paidic aesthetic” in Theatre, Dance
and Performance Training, Vol 2 (1), 2011. Theatre Noise: the
Sound of Performance co-edited with Dr. David Roesner, 2011
and “Mimesis and Remembrance” in Performance Research:
On Technology Vol 17 (3), 2012. Lynne is a founding member
and director of Camden People’s Theatre, a north London venue
that produces contemporary theatre and has a history of
exploring experimental and applied theatre practices including
verbatim theatre, intergenerational, intercultural and interdisciplinary
practices.
Sabine Kim
Freitag, 05.10.2012, 17.00-19.00
S 121 (GW I)
Performing Historiography:
Sound and the ‘Canadian Subject’
in Cardiff and Bures Miller
One of the effects of living in the wake of colonialism, according
to critic Mary Louise Pratt, is the belief that history happens
elsewhere, in the metropolitan centre, and is embodied by the
citizen proper rather than the colonial subject. This paper proposes
tracing the multisensory experience produced by and in
the experimental sound works of Janet Cardiff and George Bures
Miller – the feeling of inhabiting multiple time periods past
and present, hearing or perhaps eavesdropping on conversations
intended for someone else’s ears, following in the steps of
someone who has already experienced what is about to unfold
– as an investigation of the problem of historiography. Ostensibly
created in and for museums in Germany and Denmark,
respectively, Münster Walk and Louisiana Walk both explicitly
stage the outsider status of “Janet,” a Canadian who not only
comes from elsewhere but has trouble with the gaps between/
entanglement of the media image of these countries and all
that she perceives as she traces the route which the walkerlistener-participant
follows. Sound, I will argue, is deployed by
Cardiff and Bures Miller as an exemplary performative element,
because it can both work to support or undermine visuality as
the sovereign, enlightened sense, which disciplines the unruly
body. In the same way, history, and subsequently the sense of
accountability for and responsibility in the acts and events that
unfold, that may have been displaced, emerge more fully, as
problems, which, by troubling the symbiotic relationship between
hearing and sight, trouble historiography.
Sabine Kim works in the American Studies Department at the
University of Mainz. She is writing her PhD within the framework
of the International Postgraduate Programme “Performance
and Media Studies” (Mainz) on the relation of sound and
writing in artistic practices since the 19th century. Her research
interests include contemporary Canadian poetics, critical animal
studies, transnationalism and modernist conceptions of
the self. Recent publications include: “Transing the Nation:
Re-Reading Ethnicity in Fred Wah.” In: The Canadian Mosaic in
the Age of Transnationalism. Ed. Brigitte Glaser and Jutta Ernst.
Universitätsverlag Winter, 2010.