'Sensing Atmospheres'

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Sounding out ‘the scenographic turn’:eight position statementsAdrian Curtina & David Roesnerb

a Drama Department, University of Exeter, UKb Theaterwissenschaft, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich,GermanyPublished online: 04 Jun 2015.

To cite this article: Adrian Curtin & David Roesner (2015) Sounding out ‘the scenographic turn’:eight position statements, Theatre & Performance Design, 1:1-2, 107-125

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23322551.2015.1027523

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Sounding out ‘the scenographic turn’: eight position statements

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

aDrama Department, University of Exeter, UK; bTheaterwissenschaft, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany

This multi-authored article collects a range of position statements made byleading scholars/practitioners in the fields of theatre aurality, music theatre/operaand sound design. Contributors independently prepared short statements inresponse to a central provocation – namely, the mooted ‘scenographic turn’ andits implication for theatre sound studies. The article provides snapshots of currentopinions about theatre sound design and scenography. It does not advance asingle, unified argument but rather outlines some key ways in which sound/musicand scenography are operating, and have operated, in theatre, and have beendiscussed in aesthetic theory. The article ultimately reinforces the importance ofattending to sound and scenography as co-constitutive elements, and suggeststhere is no single or best way of doing this.

At the launch of this new journal on theatre and performance design, we, the editorsof this multi-authored article, wish to draw attention to an area of designtraditionally neglected in academic discourses and the rituals of validation in thecreative industries: sonic design. Two examples of this neglect may indicate thatthere is still a need to trumpet all things sonic in theatre: in June 2014 the US-basedTony Award for best sound design was scrapped, and in Germany the largest annualsurvey of 44 theatre critics singling out best actor, set designer, director, theatre etc.still has no category for ‘best sound design’ and/or ‘best incidental music’.

There has, however, been a sonic/acoustic ‘turn’ in recent decades, which hasinformed scholarship in the humanities and social sciences (see Meyer 2008). Theatreand performance studies have begun to attend to acoustic phenomena with greaterfrequency and depth. There is a growing body of scholarly work that analyses acontinuum of theatre sound, noise and music, both contemporary and historical.1

Moreover, there is a proliferation of theatre artists in Europe and elsewhere who arecreating sound designs and musical compositions for productions that encourageaudiences to attend to what they hear – and, more broadly, what they perceive – innew ways. Now, another ‘turn’ has been mooted: the ‘scenographic turn’. Does thismean the sonic/acoustic ‘turn’ is at an end? Are we turning from ‘the sonic’ to ‘thescenographic’? What is the significance of enfolding the former in the latter? Or isthis a false problematic?

*Corresponding authors. Email: a.curtin@exeter.ac.uk; d.roesner@lrz.uni-muenchen.de

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

Assuming the ‘scenographic turn’ is not just a rhetorical contrivance, butidentifies something about the state of current scholarship and artistic practice,what is the role of sound in this? Put differently, are sound and scenographyinteracting, or being theorized, in new ways? Does the ‘scenographic turn’ have anidentifiably sonic component? If so, what is it? Branching out, what positions arescholars and artists taking with respect to the current status and future developmentof theatre sound design and theatre sound studies? (How) does scenography figureinto this?

We put these questions to a group of scholars/practitioners who work in the fieldof sound design/theatre music and who variously examine the sonic and acousticaspects of theatre in relation to meaning making, performativity, architecture andspace, and the politics of perception. We asked each contributor to provide aposition statement that responds to the above questions, and we have collated theirtexts here. They are, as we hoped, quite diverse and touch on different aspects of theinterplay(s) between the sonic and the scenographic. We have deliberately not soughtto harmonize the statements or create smooth transitions between them, but ratherhave left each in its unique tone – hard cuts rather than fade ins/fade outs.

One of the features of scholarship on sound in the humanities is its general lackof unity as a field. Diversity of opinion, focus and approach need not, however, betaken as signs of intellectual incoherence or divisiveness, but rather as indications ofvital, vibrant discourse that is progressing in multiple directions simultaneously.There are indications of this here, as well as evidence of shared positionality andthematic consonance. Sound often works to position us as listening subjects in aparticular place, and may be used in performance design to help create imagined orimaginary space. Conversely, sound (as noise) can be an imposition; it can intrudeupon consciousness and displace our attention. Taking a position with respect tosound means situating oneself somewhere – taking a stand, as it were – even if thismeans only being able to attend to what is within local earshot. Multiple positionstatements may therefore call to mind a greater range of ideas and relevantphenomena, and capture a range of current opinions about the relationships betweensound and scenography, both in theory and in practice. This article presentssnaphsots, provocations, lines of thought, musings, theses, possibilities – not atraditional scholarly argument. It is a deliberately ‘heteroglossic’ (Bakhtin) attemptto emphasize and remind us of how intricately the mise-en-scène of performance –both historical and contemporary – is intertwined with modes of sounding,musicking, echoing and listening. Each position statement has been preparedindependently.

Between us, we cover a range of aspects that engage the provocation of apotential ‘scenographic turn’. We point to the philosophical, phenomenological andcognitive links between space and sound, the visual and the aural. We emphasizethat sound and vision are inextricably linked and co-constitutive, and thatcollaboration and innovation in the interplay of sound design and stage designhave great productive potential, as evidenced by a number of theatrical examples(Roesner). We indicate little-known historical connections between sound, aestheticsand scenography in theatre (Till, Brown). We highlight the socio-political con-sequences of the post-dramatic ‘musicalization’ of theatre (Verstraete) and query theperceptual challenges offered by ‘theatre in the dark’, where visuality falls short(Kendrick). We affirm the importance of thinking about sound in relation to the

108 Adrian Curtin and David Roesner

other senses (Home-Cook, Curtin), hypothesize new, geological ways of conceptu-alizing sound design (Rost) and posit ‘atmosphere’ as a paradigm for thinking abouttheatrical design (Home-Cook). Finally, we acknowledge the contrariety andmultiplicity of audience reception, and the convolutions of academic ‘turns’ (Curtin).Ultimately, it is our hope that this article will help advance the ongoing scholarlyconversation about sound, scenography and theatre, and will stimulate futuredebate.

1. Sonic scenography (David Roesner)

I will start with an anecdote. A friend of mine who is a theatre musician and worksvery successfully in the German theatre circuit told me once that almost invariablywhen he’d turn up to the so-called ‘Bauprobe’ for a new production – a first try-outand mock-up of the model stage design for a new production on the actual stage,which usually happens weeks if not months before the actual rehearsals begin – he’dask the stage designer: ‘… and where do the speakers go?’ These had usually beenforgotten and had to be accommodated retrospectively into the design.

There is then, on the one hand, an old rivalry between the sonic and the visual intheatre and theatre design, and on the other, mutual incomprehension andpotentially quite conflicting priorities. The fact that in most professional theatresthe artists and respective technical departments responsible for each design aspect arestrictly separated furthers the divide.

In my – perhaps optimistic – understanding of the idea of the ‘scenographicturn’, however, there is plenty of potential (and in the current theatre aesthetic quitesome evidence) that the ‘scenographic’ and the ‘sonic’ can coexist quite happily,actually more than that: can inspire and enhance each other.

The scenographic turn, as I understand it, is not (just) a paradigm suggesting weshould pay a bit more attention to the stage design of theatrical productions; it is aprofound re-evaluation of the aesthetics, the dramaturgical function and the visceralexperience of spaces and images for performances; an understanding of scenographyas emancipated from merely illustrating or furnishing the realization of a dramatictext on stage.

While described and discussed as a recent phenomenon, we can trace such ideasback historically at least to one of the pioneers of stage and lighting design, the Swisstheatre practitioner and writer Adolphe Appia (1862–1928). Surprisingly, perhaps,it was Appia’s passion for music and his quest to enhance the rather dusty operaticpractices of his day that led to his visionary scenographic ideas about ‘rhythmicspaces’ and light that has ‘an almost miraculous flexibility’ and can ‘create shadows,make them living, and spread the harmony of their vibrations in space, just asmusic does’ (Appia 1993, 114). Recent and current theatre practitioners such as PinaBausch, Karin Beier, Filter, Heiner Goebbels, Ruedi Häusermann, ChristophMarthaler, David Marton, Katie Mitchell, Eimuntas Nekrošius, Einar Schleef,Sound&Fury, Michael Thalheimer and their creative collaborators integrate stagedesign intimately with a keen musical and sonic sensibility (for a wider context, seeMeyer 2008). A number of terms have even been coined for this already: ‘soundscenography’, ‘acoustic scenography’, ‘sonic scenography’ or ‘Klangszenographie’.2This may take a number of forms. In Katie Mitchell’s ‘multimedia’ productions, forexample, the acoustic separation of the diegetic narrative world from the artificially

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live produced soundtrack we hear is not only a performative device, but also –through the visibility of the Foley artists and their work – a main design feature of theperformance space.

Karin Beier and her team often create stages that have a mixture of conventionalelements (tables, chairs), musical instruments (both mobile and static) and elementssuch as water ormud, which not only have significant impact on the visual developmentand symbolism of the stage actions, but also have a sonic materiality that featuresstrongly and interacts with the spoken word and the – often experimental – music.

Michael Thalheimer – with scenographer Olaf Altmann’s rhythmic spaces andBert Wrede’s music and sound design – uses the rhythms of rapid speech, longpauses, echoing walls, long walks on high heels, etc., to create an often highlystylized and yet surprisingly organic theatrical style.

Filter’s performances, particularly their adaptations of Shakespeare, look andfeel like slightly messy concerts. Instruments, retro electronic sound devices, cables,microphones, etc. litter the space but also evoke – both sonically and visually – thewood of Athens (in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) or Olivia’s mansion (in TwelfthNight) (for more details and a more in-depth analysis of all three examples, seeRoesner 2014, 236–256). It has often been said that in Shakespeare’s theatre wordsevoke all the scenery (‘Wortkulisse’ or ‘verbal scenography’); Filter largely passesthis task on to music, song and sound effects.

Finally, there are an increasing number of theatre productions that include livemusicians in their stage design, often creating hybrid spaces that are both fictionaland real and at once theatre stage and concert venue. Phelim McDermott and JulianCrouch’s Shockheaded Peter (1998), for example, was based inextricably on themusic and the physical presence of the band The Tiger Lillies, whose musical styleand musical personae (see Auslander 2006) – consisting of a wild mash-up ofVictorian-Gothic-Vaudeville-Cabaret-Circus-Itinerant Balladeers – were formativefor the stage and costume design.

In all these cases, theatre makers have found ways to ensure a dialogue betweenthe scenic and the sonic, by changing entrenched production rhythms, faciltatingearly interplay and exchange between all the creative contributors, and questioningassumptions about established hierarchies of production and aesthetics. Theserevised processes ensure that stage design, composition and sonic design areintimately linked in artistic practice. Commonly, however, their institutionalseparation in conservatoires and theatres remains, and more mutual acknowledge-ment and reciprocal inspiration would be more than welcome.

2. Theses for a sceno-sonic turn (Nicholas Till)

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

Space first assumed centrality in the architectural thinking of early modernistssuch as Peter Behrens and Adolf Loos (Forty 2000, 256–275). At the Bauhaus,László Moholy-Nagy (1932, 62) insisted that in architecture, ‘Building material is anauxiliary … the principle means of creation is the space itself’. But as Henri Lefebvre(1991, 1; 287) pointed out, the modernist architect’s concern with space is abstract: aEuclidian space of mental ratio rather than a lived place defined by all the modalitiesof embodied social experience. And a correlative of this emphasis upon abstractspace has been a reification of architecture – and perhaps space – as essentiallyvisual: ‘Everything is in the visual’, Le Corbusier asserted (1991, 231).

But if there is one thing that the postmodern spatial turn of the 1960s, initiatedby thinkers such as Foucault, McLuhan and Lefebvre himself, and the more recentacoustic turn in social and aesthetic thinking have taught us, it is that sound andspace must be understood dialectically, since full awareness of space involvesawareness of the relationship of sound to space, and vice versa. Modernist assertionsof the medial exclusiveness of sonic and spatial practices assume a very restrictedontology for each of the practices in question. Music, for instance, is as much spatialas temporal: it is performed in space; what is heard is shaped by the specificdisposition of the performers in that space; and its sonic qualities are determined bythe acoustic properties of the space in which it takes place. Sound art is often evenmore responsive to the specifics of space. Furthermore, sound brings into being alistening subject whose selfhood during the time of listening is spatially andcorporeally defined. As Jean-Luc Nancy (2007, 14) puts it, ‘To listen is to enterthat spatiality by which, at the same time, I am penetrated…’. Architecture, on theother hand, is experienced not simply as a visual object in space but also through theembodied senses of touch, sound and smell, and the modalities of time, associationand social use. We often hear in a built space what we cannot see: footsteps upstairs;a creaking door. Both music and architecture, sound and space, are inherently multi-modal: sonic and scenographic at once. Sceno-sonic.

Modernist theatre theorists were no less reductive in their search for the essenceof theatre, although they inevitably disagreed upon what constituted the essentialmedium of theatre. For Eric Bentley it was language (‘every dramaturgic practicethat subordinates the words to any other medium has trivialized the drama withoutgiving full reign to the medium that has become dominant’ [Bentley 1987, 87]); forKantor it was space; for Grotowksi it was the human body. It was not the least ofAdolphe Appia’s insights that, although he held to the modernist attributions ofspace and time to scenography and music respectively, he recognized that in operathe human body and light served as mediating elements between the fixity of hisscenographic spaces and the temporality and fluidity of music (Appia 1962).

Theatre enacts the dialectic of showing and concealing that underpins the tensionbetween epistemology (that which is shown is true) and metaphysics (that which isconcealed is true). And it questions the testimony of eye and ear through deceptionand illusion: theatrical narratives often turn upon whether we can trust the evidenceof our senses – what we see, what we hear, what we are told. The current practices ofsite-specific theatre and theatre in the dark are perhaps the clearest evidence of asceno-sonic turn that plays directly upon these modalities and their perceptualunsettling in the dissolution of the sceno-sonic boundaries between the real and thevirtual. A sceno-sonic turn that responds to, and questions, the flickering to and froof the real and virtual in an increasingly mediated world.

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

The art of practical noises-off reached its peak between the 1860s and the 1930s(Brown 2010, 18–30; 63–73). This was not noisemaking required by classicaldramaturgy, where the action is carried forward by a continuous momentum ofconsequence, which passes, transitively, through the scenic structure towards the finalresolution. Rather it was that required by a new intransitive dramaturgy of serial-discontinuity, where each scene builds to a situation where forward motion is haltedin a moment of stasis or suspense, and from which the next scene begins afresh(Meisel 1983, 39–42; 97). Rather than performing the disruption and resolution ofcosmic order, it enacted the atmosphere and life of the stage picture. Made backstage,but in the same acoustic world in which the actors spoke, moved and were seen, thisnoise had a materiality whose phenomenology was more than acoustic, and a scenicintegrity that proved elusive to phonographically reproduced noises or subsequentelectroacoustic technologies. Loudspeaker sound lent itself more to extra-diegeticframing, as a mediating gauze that bled the aural focus between frontclothimmediacy and intra-diegetic world, usually at the beginnings and ends of scenes.Record players and tape recorders also lacked sensitivity as instruments, playbackbeing less flexibly interactive than playing, and operating less expressive thanperforming. Theatre, in the mid-twentieth century, lost patience with scenic noise.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, plasticity of noise and the potential for synchrony anddynamic interaction between electroacoustic soundscape and stage performancereturned with the arrival of digital sampling and MIDI (musical instrument digitalinterface), which allowed recorded sounds to be played polyphonically, with touchsensitive expressivity. This suited the devised mise-en-scène of physical and visual ordesign-led theatre, where it brought a precise organicity of sonic experimentation andenabled a filmic, edited quality. At around the same time, cinemas acquired surroundsound and, in an immersive turn, live theatre also began to address the dialectic betweenthe aural space of audience and the scenic construct. Even where plays remained largelyacoustic, stage and audience were now placed within a transparent, continuous andintermedially indexed sphere of electroacoustic potential – phenomenologically morethan a sonic turn: a multimodal auralization of scenic space.

From around 1994 I started to hear the word ‘scenography’ used to imply a morekinetic process than ‘stage design’. It formed part of an exotic new academicterminology in UK theatre design, which included various ‘dramaturgies’ (of light,action, objects etc.), synergy, allusions to the neurological condition of synaesthesiaand talk of a paradigm shift from the literary to the material.Material, I then argued,was habitually and lazily equated with visible, which perpetuated an ocularcentric biasin post-enlightenment episteme. My argument is now differently nuanced: that intheatre history (if not historiography), concepts of picture and spectacle have neverbeen visual, but always sensorily multimodal. Indeed, the theatre provides a trope ofmultimodality to other disciplines. That the visual might be atmospheric, or noisemight be dramaturgically organized into what we might now call soundscape (thepictorial connotation of the suffix –scape is often overlooked) are notions arising fromeighteenth-century scenic art.

The scenic revolution institutionalized at Drury Lane in the 1760s–1770s is afamiliar chapter in histories of visual culture. Less well known is that Garrick wanted‘scenic virtue to form the rising age’ through ‘the charms of sound’ (as well as the

‘pomp of show’ [Johnson 1749]), or that his scenic artist, de Loutherbourg, wasequally celebrated for his ‘Picturesque of Sound’ (Baugh 2007; Brown 2010). ThePicturesque is traditionally a footnote to Romanticism, but its discourse wasconceptually anti-Romantic, pursuing neither immanence nor the sublime, but asynthetic aesthetic of pictorial composition and effect. It did not fetishize truth butvalorized contrivance in art, and saw a beauty in surface irregularity, roughness anddecay. Its viewpoint was touristically mobile and aural. As Dr Syntax says inCombe’s cartoon parody of the movement, ‘… we the picturesque may find inthunder loud, or whistling wind; and often, as I fully ween, it may be heard as well asseen’ (Combe 1812, 111). If the scenographic turn of the 1990s aspired Romantic-ally, like Appia, to the holistically singular (Brown 2010, 46–48; 106–112), I detect aresonance of the Picturesque in the immersive, intermedial scenography of thecurrent moment. At this turn, scenography seems to delight in an atomized pluralityof scenic effect; in distractions, fragmentation, entropy; in alert and notificationrather than signal; in surface rather than deep vibration. The new picturesque of anew weather: of vibrating phones, not cosmic vibes?

4. Designing vibrational space: from aesthetic to socio-political enquiry (PieterVerstraete)

Antonin Artaud’s ‘cathartic’, vibrational theatre,3 which was to surround theaudience, ‘attack the spectator’s sensibility on all sides’ (Artaud 1958, 86) andbreak with the old proscenium theatre, was perhaps the most radical attempt inmodernist theatre to which both a sonic and scenographic turn today are stillindebted in many regards. Vibrational space was a bold effort on Artaud’s part touse the full potential of sound design, including the architectonics and acoustics ofthe theatre space, to activate the individual spectator through general discomfort andunfamiliarity with new sounds, resonating from instruments of ‘new alloys of metal’and overly loud sounds ‘or noises that are unbearably piercing’ (Artaud 1958, 95).

In spirit, Artaud’s scenographic ideas may be understood to respond to the ideas of‘total theatre’ in ways that are much indebted to, but also diverge strongly from, theWagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. His ideas about the spatial reverberation of voice mayrecall Wagner’s experiments with a soundboard and pillars in his Festspielhaus thatprojected the sound of the orchestra from under the stage into the auditorium, or asArtaud formulated it, ‘A cry uttered at one end of the room can be transmitted frommouth to mouth with amplifications and successive modulations all the way to theother’ (1958, 97). Yet Artaud’s revolutionary vision about the purpose of sound asbodily titillating wavelengths resonates more with post-Marxist notions of collectiveexperience, ‘mass spectacle’ and social change than with Wagner’s democraticprinciples of ideal listening, formulated as an imperative: ‘abandon individualpsychology, enter into mass passions, into the conditions of the collective spirit, graspthe collective wavelengths, in short, change the subject’ (Cahiers de Rodez V: 153,quoted in Weiss 1992, 279). It is in this political spirit that Artaud’s ‘cruel’ soundsystem proposed ‘to seek in the agitation of tremendous masses, convulsed and hurledagainst each other, a little of that poetry of festivals and crowds when, all too rarelynowadays, the people pour out into the streets’ (Artaud 1958, 85).

Artaud’s desire to channel passions and energies against distraction is not of anequal order to Wagner’s aspiration to channel the spectator through synthesis and

integration of all the senses. Susan Buck-Morrs (1992, 26) has criticized thesuperimposed, all-encompassing, comforting unity of the senses that is based on theconcealment of alienation, the sensual impoverishment and fragmentation in theindividual’s experience of modern existence. Artaud, on the contrary, aims at animplicit awareness of the individual entering into mass passions through animmersion that causes dread and discomfort. In this way, Artaud’s vibrationaltheatre is rather a contrivance that calls for a critical understanding of the power thatsound and audio scenography can convey, ‘especially in a domain where the endlesslyrenewed fatigue of the organs requires intense and sudden shocks to revive ourunderstanding’ (Artaud 1958, 86). This exemplifies a rupture with the tradition of theGesamtkunstwerk, and instates a new ‘total’ theatre that serves to shake theindividual by ‘sudden and unforeseen electricity’ (Cahiers de Rodez IX: 43, quotedin Weiss 1994, 51).

Artaud’s theatre gave us a glimpse of what the scenographic turn in sound designand devising has arguably become today. After Artaud, our theatres have begun toembrace the potential of sound not only to communicate other, non-verbal or self-referential aspects of drama and human experience, but also to push the barriers of ourinner sense perceptions. The scenographic turn gives us at least two good reasons for adifferent sensory rationale: the first is spatial thinking; the second is a return to atheatre that has a logic in common with pre-dramatic forms. The former materializedin the use of spatialization of sound for the stage, embracing immersive technologies;the latter was most prominently formulated as ‘musicalization’ (Lehmann 2006;Roesner 2003; Varopoulou 1998) and ‘chora-graphy’ as post-dramatic traits whichliberated the contemporary theatre stage from the restraints of goals (‘a space beyondtelos’), hierarchy and causal logic, hitherto defined by a verbal theatre text (Lehmann1997, 56). In both developments, a choreographic turn was immanent, which wouldenable us to conceptualize the physical, experiential and cultural barriers that soundseeks to transgress.

However, when thinking about how spatialization and musicalization take centrestage in a larger scenographic turn to sound design, and how these aestheticstrategies are also grounded in a larger historical body of knowledge about the use ofsound on the modernist stage, I cannot but think how culturally and historicallycontingent these principles are with regard to the audiences they try to activate andsatisfy. Surely, on-stage sonic experiments from the 1980s onwards did have politicalmeaning in a larger sense of a politics of the sensible (Rancière 2004), or in ananarchist-inspired breaking with all hierarchies within the theatre sign system, whichled to Lehmann’s formulation of the post-dramatic as a larger paradigm shiftregarding spectatorship and devising. The post-dramatic theatre experimentationswere envisioned to reach other audiences whose senses – mostly visual – were alreadybeing reshaped by mass media as well as rapidly evolving cinema aesthetics. So thepost-dramatic theatre sought again a greater integration of the audience in themeaning-making process, or as Lehmann contends:

[P]ostdramatic theatre is not simply a new kind of text of staging – and even less a new typeof theatre text, but rather a type of sign usage in the theatre that turns both of these levelsof theatre upside down through the structurally changed quality of the performance text:it becomes more presence than representation, more shared than communicated

experience, more process than product, more manifestation than signification, moreenergetic impulse than information. (Lehmann 2006, 85, original emphasis)

Despite the renewed communal aspects of this new way of experiencing theatre’s signsystems – much like Artaud’s concrete language of signs as ‘hieroglyphs’ (Artaud1958, 90) – on a practical basis, most of those investigations seem again to favour thehighly individual experience of the postmodern spectator. Moreover, it appears nowthat we are slowly coming to an end of the post-dramatic paradigm, as it has beencriticized more recurrently for its ‘passé postmodern tools to describe an environmentin which harmless simulation of conflicts is a distant dream’ (Stegemann 2009, 22).

As new abrasive forms of applied, community and storytelling theatre indicate, amore local and socially engaged outlook – with renewed attempts towards a re-politicized theatre – is emerging, which embraces again the importance of the word(and thereby the logos, both in its specific and widest sense) to discuss or at least posesome questions to the problems of our late-capitalist times. It is in this transitionalspace, from theatre as aesthetic investigation to social interaction, from hyper-individual to an ever-recurring collective experience, that the ‘sonic’ – with all itstransgressive and intangible potentiality as ‘vibration’ beyond metaphor – is in needof redefinition.

Artaud was onto something: sound in the theatre can make us ‘abandon’ ourindividual selves without necessarily losing ourselves. Now we must stay put andtake the potency of the social, with all its derisive and paradoxical mechanisms,seriously.

5. Scene in the dark (Lynne Kendrick)

Scenography is not without sound. As an ‘orchestration’ of potentially all that whichconstitutes theatre (see Butterworth and McKinney 2009), relinquishing the sonic isnot the aim of the scenographic. However, the idea of a post-sonic, scenographicturn suggests a move away from sound, an implication that one belies the other. Thisinvites old divisions – of the sonic versus the visual, or ear versus eye – back into theconversation, but perhaps this is for good reason. Sound has recently penetratedtheatre-making practices in ways that suggest the opposite turn, a move towardssound, might be the case. The sound designer has, according to Carolyn Downing,4

recently emerged from the ‘tech box’ and, taking a position within the rehearsalroom, has embedded the sonic in the mix of theatre making. This, in turn, hasbrought sound designers as theatre artists to the fore, Melanie Wilson and AdrienneQuartly to name but two. This attention to the sonic is not merely a trend, oftendismissed as the happenstance of technological advances, or as symptomatic ofcollaborative practice models. These instances of sonic scenography are emergingbecause of possibility: theatre makers are drawn to the potential of sound for itsability to generate scenography where visuality falls short.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in theatre in the dark, its scenography isalmost entirely sonic. This is an emergent form of theatre that is garnering muchinterest, particularly in the UK, and it is one that takes the ‘blackout’ of mainstreamtheatre – the negative space of stage and auditorium convention – as its basematerial, the ground from which its scenography springs. In the darkness of

Rosenberg and Neath’s ‘sound journeys’, the haptic dramaturgies of Extant Theatreand the ‘white-out’ spaces of Lundahl and Seitl’s performance events, the ‘scene’ iscarved out of sound in all its incarnations. The visual space may at points appear –seeded by visual prologues, or glimpses of shapes, contours and shades invented inhalf-light – but the design is entirely sonic and, as such, the scenographic encounter isprimarily an aural experience. Thus, theatre in the dark places the perceptualemphasis on audience rather than spectatorship; indeed the growing popularity ofthis form of theatre is predicated on the less certain terrain of listening and theunpredictable experiences this may offer. Any scene can be conjured in the dark.When the first experiments with darkness took place at the Playing in the Darkseason (Battersea Arts Centre [BAC], London, 1998) some joked it was a neatsolution to budget cuts. No need for lights, no need for any material that makestheatre visually evident. Yet the sonic scenography of darkness is more than visualabsence. Theatre in the dark entirely reinvents scenographic spaces, transportingaudiences and immersing us within them. This produces an aesthetic of uncertaintywhich frequently re-casts us as various subjects within its midst, questioning ouridentity and our processes of identification. However, this is not a case of ‘notseeing’; in the darkness we are invited to visualize a myriad of spectacles, but we seethrough ears. Visuality falls short because it remains the object before us; separatedand distinct, it can only be gazed upon for all its pomp and expense. Sound, it isoften said, moves us and moves through us, and it is this subjective property that cantransform a scenographic design from object to an experience.

My response to the question as to whether a sonic or scenic ‘ography’ now takesits turn, would be to ask: how much is the latter predicated on the former? Not interms of genealogy, but materially, in the case of theatre in the dark, entirely. It is notnecessary to seek a position for sound in all this; the sonic imposition is that a visualcan be entirely cast by sonic means. Moreover, this potential is ever present becausesound is never not present. It stalks scenography, haunts its perimeter, threatening tochallenge any residual visual bias. In this way sound is the noise in the scenographicturn, but it is not an annihilation of it. Rather, as sound designers/theatre makershave demonstrated, sound has the capacity to extend the reach of scenography, notonly beyond the finite realm of the visual object but beyond what we mightunderstand scenography to be. This development of what constitutes scenography isintegral to its emergence. As Patrice Pavis recently stated, ‘scenography extends itspower just as it loses its specificity’ (Pavis 2013, 73). Perhaps it is sound that signals ascenographic turn?

6. Sensing atmospheres (George Home-Cook)

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

and make sense of, designed theatrical environments or ‘atmospheres’. Theatre is‘something perceived’ (Styan 1975, 30), and scenography is manifestly sensed. Toproperly account for (and begin to understand) the ‘scenographic’, we must firstexplore what it means to sound scenography.

The notion of scenography (at least as originally conceived) assumes that the worldof light, whether designed or otherwise, is quite separate from that of sound.‘Scenography’, writes Ross Brown (2010, 134), ‘is traditionally associated withperspective, whereas sound immerses not just the psychoacoustic mind, but the wholebody’. Yet how does such a distinction tally with the perceptual particularities of livedexperience? How accurate is it to depict visual perception in terms of detachment anddistance, while figuring sonic experience in terms of an all-encompassing, sphericalsubjectivity? To compartmentalize our experience of visual and aural design in thisway is not only unhelpful, but phenomenologically untenable.

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

Audiences make sense of the phenomenal affordances of an environment (or‘atmosphere’) through a dynamic, embodied and intersensorial process of attending(see Home-Cook 2015).

The notion of ‘atmosphere’ not only provides an effective means of bypassing theaudiovisual (sonic/scenographic) divide, but also allows us to reconsider (thephenomenology of) theatrical design. ‘In general, it can be said that atmospheresare involved wherever something is being staged, wherever design is a factor – andthat now means: almost everywhere’ (Böhme 2013, 2). Atmosphere, theatricality anddesign are thus intimately interwoven. Indeed, not only is atmosphere fundamentalto the phenomenon of theatre, but theatre would appear to present itself as thereadiest model for an aesthetics of atmosphere (Home-Cook 2015).

Design is fundamental to theatre, as are its definitive characteristics, namely,playfulness, contrivance and manipulation. Theatrical design consciously strives tomanipulate audience attention, and hence to shape our perception of the theatricalevent. Yet, crucially, this is not a one-way process (cf. McKinney and Butterworth2009, 4): theatrical experience is manifestly shaped not only by the machinations ofdesign, but by the inter-subjective attentional enactions of the audience. How weattend affects our perception of what we perceive. Design may well demand ourattention, but how does the phenomenon of attention (and the inter-subjective act ofattending) shape our perception of theatrical design? What role does the listener-spectator play in the process of shaping theatrical atmosphere(s)? What is thus calledfor is a more dynamic and broad-ranging conception of performance design that notonly recognizes the essential enmeshment of the senses, but also acknowledges andexplores the inevitable slippage that exists (and that is continually played out)between production and perception.

Theatre and performance design consists of a variety of different (and often quitedisparate) components, one of which comprises the scene/seen. However, rather thansegmenting the senses, and pitching sound against scenography, we should insteadbegin to explore the manifest ways in which we ‘sense’ or feel our way around the

designed theatrical environment. If we are to unravel the secrets and phenomenalcomplexities of theatrical design, then perhaps it is to atmosphere(s), not sceno-graphy, that we should turn our attention.

7. Sonic caves, walls, drifts and flood waves (Katharina Rost)

Contemporary understanding of scenography does not exclusively focus on thethings actually visible on stage, but more on the processes effected, felt, transmittedor evoked between the stage and the audience – thus, on the performative dimensionof what is experienced (see Bohn and Wilharm 2013). The term ‘scenography’ in thissense does not refer to a static setting, but to a dynamic and fragile process, a‘component of performance’ (McKinney and Butterworth 2009, 3). Sound, thusunderstood, is a means, among others, to generate the scenographic effects of theperformance. But even though sound is specified as a dimension of scenography incontemporary theatre theory (see McKinney and Butterworth 2009; McKinney andIball 2011), the dominance of the visual might still easily prevail as, firstly, someapproaches still abide by the predominance of visuality (for example, a notion ofscenography as a primarily visual art form is found in Balme 2014, 347; Collins andNisbet 2010, 1; Pavis 2009, 314; Tabacki 2014, 19).5 Secondly, sound enhances theephemerality of the relevant processes, which are therefore even more difficult tograsp.6 Sound possesses specific qualities that are often described as fluid, dynamic,diffuse and immersive see Kahn 1999, 27; Kim-Cohen 2009, xviii; Toop 1995; Toop2010, 36; Voegelin 2010, 5, 10).7

Because of these qualities, sound is conceptualized as transitory and poses achallenge to theatre studies. On the one hand, sound has to be ‘put into words’ foran analysis of the auditory dimension of performances, but on the other hand, anadequate terminology to describe what was actually heard and experienced aurallyand physically during performances still has to be refined, if not firstly developed inmany cases. In addition, the various and complex ways in which sound andscenography are connected in contemporary theatre performances have not yet beenfully recognized by theatre studies. The employment of sound often exceeds or differsfrom an illustrative, atmospheric or musical support of the stage setting. Instead ofjust being a supportive means to convey a certain mood or to signalize a specificsocial setting like birdsong, machine noise or music, in many theatre works soundbecomes one of the central aesthetic components and can even function as a way to‘set the scene’. In abstract, conceptual and mostly post-dramatic forms of theatre,sound is employed non-realistically, but also at the same time not just musically.

For example, in Falk Richter’s and Anouk van Dijk’s Trust (Berlin, 2009), thescenography consisted in its visual components of an empty forestage with a fewstanding microphones, a sofa and a lamp hanging from the stage ceiling, and highscaffolds in the back, which could signify a construction site or a building torn openon one side. It is an abstract scenographic structure that is open for interpretationand possesses an affective impact in its specific material qualities, its height, itsmetallic nature, its dark colours and its potentially temporary, changeable constitu-tion. Beyond what is seen on stage, the sounds open up other spatial dimensions, andin this regard can be described as a means to ‘set the scene’. Malte Beckenbachcomposed the sound design in a way that during the first few minutes of theperformance the bass sounds evolved out of each other, like a series of increasingly

powerful explosions, and simultaneously seemed to ‘move deeper’, thereby creatingin my perception the auditory impression of spatial depth in the direction of thestage. The stage floor was flat and stretched out almost evenly in front of theaudience in the Schaubühne, but the sounds created a sonic landscape that Iperceived as interfering with the visual. For a short moment, there was a ‘depth’ infront of me that I could not see, but hear – and feel. The bass sounds were so strongthat they made my whole body vibrate, and I could sense the sonic depth and widthphysically. It therefore felt real, even though it was not visually verifiable, and it notonly created a sombre atmosphere as a background mood for the presented dancemovements and spoken text sequences, but it also caused physical and attentionalalertness in me through the deep bass sounds and vibrations. As the title suggests,Trust deals mainly with the question of the (im-)possibility of trust, and thus, theshaking of the ground on which we, the audience, are seated might not only stand assymbolic for the ‘earthquake’ that broken trust might provoke (i.e. the ‘earth-shattering’ insight that one was deceived by one’s beloved partner or that all one’ssavings are gone due to the risky investments of the bank), but can also directlyproduce that concrete impression in the listeners.8

Other examples of contemporary theatre in which sound is employed primarily ina spatial and material way include: Gisèle Vienne’s Kindertotenlieder (Brest, 2007),in which I remember how the bass sounds of the electronic noise music produced aneffect in me as a listener of confronting ‘hardness’; Meg Stuart’s Violet (Essen,2011), in which the musician Brendan Dougherty produces layered sound streamsthat in my listening experience did not mix or melt into one, but stayed separate in asimultaneous juxtaposition in their temporal as well as spatial extension; and RomeoCastellucci/Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s The Four Seasons Restaurant (Avignon,2012), in which the sounds of a black hole were heard at such a high volume thatthe seats and bodies trembled from the strong vibrations in the air so that I feltoverwhelmed by the heard, almost unbearable noise.9

How are sound designs to be described that are neither predominantly illustrativenor primarily musical, but instead lead to the creation of sonic spaces and forces thatare not visible but audible and palpable? How can we write about and express theexperience of such diverse ‘sonic scenographies’? Sonic scenographies cannot merelybe categorized as ‘sound sculptures’, because they are embedded in a performancethat simultaneously consists of visual, audible and tactile perceptions that are deeplyintertwined.10 I suggest generating a vocabulary – or borrowing it from otherdomains – that might allow us to describe felt sonic sensations. Regarding theprevious examples, I propose adopting terms from geology and transferring them toauditory perceptions, thus speaking of a deep, hollow ‘sound cave’ in Trust, a ‘soundwall’ in Kindertotenlieder, parallel ‘sound drifts’ in Violet and a powerful, strong‘sound flood wave’ in The Four Seasons Restaurant.11 By using geological terms inthis metaphorical way to describe the listening experience in the aforementionedperformances, it becomes possible to clarify and point out the spatial, material andphysically affective dimensions of the sounds.12 Through sound, the scenographiceffect of the performance can feel smooth or broken, plain or bumpy, distant or near,hard or soft, and thus has an impact on the listeners through this specific materiality.Sound is not merely audible, but also sensible – and consequently it also possessesqualities comparable to visible things, i.e. resistance, hardness, jaggedness, orlayeredness. Sound can create and shape space, and when it does it is a scenographic

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

8. Turning (Adrian Curtin)

There’s a saying of Gertrude Stein that I sometimes think about when at the theatre:‘I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it’ ([1933] 1990, 4). Thecontrariness of this position – acknowledging a view but opting not to attend to it,deriving pleasure from turning away – amuses me, and I have sometimes used it tojustify closing my eyes at a performance and only focusing on what I can hear. Thisis, admittedly, a somewhat perverse thing to do, as few theatre pieces, with theexception of ‘theatre in the dark’-style experiments by British company Sound&Fury, for example, hone in on one sense to the apparent detriment of another.Theatre typically works to engage the senses holistically so that what one sees isinvariably inflected by what one hears, and vice versa, often without our fullawareness. Consequently, when analysing theatre sound one must be mindful of thesight, touch, feel, smell and perhaps even taste of performance, and account for thepotential interaction of these modalities—and not just in ‘immersive’ theatre. As Ihave written elsewhere, ‘[t]he goal is not to disentangle sensory effects but rather toreveal the significance of their entanglement and highlight aspects that might gounnoticed or unremarked in the experiential flux of perception’ (Curtin 2014, 6).Does it matter, then, that some audience members may attend performancecontrariously or in an idiosyncratic fashion? I think it does.

The mooted ‘scenographic turn’ would appear to promote a holistic engagementwith the intersensorial aspects of performance, as opposed to the ostensibly moreniche concerns of sonic enthusiasts. And yet this supposed turn of events does notring true. Semioticians and other theorists of mise-en-scène have long endeavoured toanalyse the constituent elements of performance and explain their complex interplay.Similarly, sound scholars have sought to understand how hearing works dynamicallywith the other senses; they have not tried to institute a ‘countermonopoly of the ear’,to borrow a phrase from Erlmann (2004, 4). Therefore, attempting to plot a linear‘progress’ narrative with respect to scholarship on sound and scenography is tricky,and possibly misguided. After all, ‘sound studies’, as a perpetually emergent, not-quite-cohesive-or-unified interdisciplinary field, has not advanced a singular set ofinterests, apart from helping to dismantle ocularcentrism. There is a sharedvocabulary, yet some terms remain contested and vaguely used (e.g. soundscape).It has never been clear where sound studies is ‘going’, if anywhere, how it willdevelop or if it will get folded into ‘sensory studies’. The intersection of sound studieswith theatre and performance studies is equally uncertain in this regard. One cannotsuppose, then, that the sonic/acoustic ‘turn’ is necessarily at an end, or has beenmade redundant by the recent, renewed interest in the conceptual possibilities andsociocultural importance of the ‘scenographic’ (broadly construed). We should bewary of blindly following the latest academic ‘turn’, especially if this involves aturning away from other, still potentially productive, areas of enquiry. Scholarship inthe humanities does not follow neat paradigm shifts. This may be a good thing. AsDoris Bachmann-Medick remarks:

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

The challenge for contemporary scholars is to engage the coexistence of multipletheoretical turns, integrating insights from the linguistic turn, the spatial turn, theperformative turn and so on into their analyses without simply being faddish.

I turn to some thoughts on the future of scholarship on theatre and performancesound. Scholars will, I hope, continue to examine the sociocultural significance andhistorical specificity of how audiences individually and collectively make sense ofsound in performance, highlighting the peculiarities and contrariety of these processes.We should protect against making assumptions that are transhistorical, universalist orableist (i.e. that normalize able-bodied people). There are many ways of responding tosound in performance and all are potentially valid. Yet there is not enough scholarshipon deaf theatre or on how differently-abled audience members make sense of theatresound, for instance.15 Formalist, taxonomic studies that treat the ‘performance text’as an autonomous entity, a closed circuit, are defunct. We have only begun to soundout the acoustic aspects of theatre history. The promise of the ‘scenographic turn’, aswith all scholarly turns, is that the ‘theoretical landscape’ in which scholarship takesplace might be revitalized and reimagined. The ‘scenographic turn’, if this is morethan just a turn of phrase, could (or should?) be sonorous, if not downright noisy.

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes1. See, for example, Brown (2010); Curtin (2014); Home-Cook (2015); Kendrick and Roesner

(2011); Ovadija (2013); Roesner (2014); Symonds and Taylor (2014); Verstraete (2009).2. See, for example, http://soundscenography.com/post/94140598815/fruehling-erwachen-klangs

zenografie-im-theater; http://xmodal.hexagram.ca/projects/interactive-real-time-acoustic-scenography-for-live-stage-environments; or http://www.hands-on-sound.com/?lang=en (all acces‐sed 7 October 2014).

3. See Kahn (2001, 356–357) on the notion of vibrational space in Artaud’s Le théâtre et sonDouble (1938).

4. Downing, speaking at the Theatre Sound Colloquium, Royal Central School of Speechand Drama (RCSSD), Association of Sound Designers (ASD) and Royal NationalTheatre (RNT), June 2013.

5. Even though the editors Jane Collins and Andrew Nisbet include sound-related articles intheir publication, in their introduction they define scenography as the ‘visual compositionof performance’ (Collins and Nisbet 2010, 1). In his dictionary article on ‘Scénographie’,Patrice Pavis speaks of scenography as an art form that is related to primarily visual artlike sculpture and architecture, although his definition as ‘la science et l’art del’organisation de la scène et de l’espace théâtral’ (Pavis 2009, 314) might be employedto include the kind of ‘sound scenography’ that my text is highlighting.

6. To comprehend the sonic dimension of scenography it is necessary to let go of theimportance of visibility and visuality. In this regard the term ‘effect’ and the metaphor of‘magic’ are central in Heiner Wilharm’s and Ralf Bohn’s publication on scenography andits impact (cf. Bohn and Wilharm 2013, 19–20).

7. Because of the ascription of these qualities, sound was often described by the analogy toan ‘ocean’ in which the listeners are immersed (cf. Toop 1995). It is a traditional tropewithin theories of listening and sound and in my opinion it can be connected to andaligned with the proposal of further geological analogies in my text.

8. Scenographic elements and processes are perceived in two modes: in the semiotic and theperformative dimension, because they can be understood as signs for something referredto on stage (i.e. a social setting) and they possess a specific materiality which can have anaffective impact on the audience (cf. Fischer-Lichte 2001). The same can be said about‘sonic scenography’ as the sounds tend to provoke the ascription of a reference (of an‘earthquake’, for example), while at the same time through their ‘materiality’ (which istheir specific ‘sounding’), they might have a direct physical effect on the listeners. Bothdimensions are only heuristically separable, but for the analysis of ‘sonic scenography’ it isimportant to differentiate them.

9. The music for Vienne’s Kindertotenlieder is produced live on stage by the collaborativeproject KTL, consisting of Stephen O’Malley and Peter Rehberg. For Castellucci’s TheFour Seasons Restaurant, the sound design was created by Scott Gibbons.

10. They also do not fall into the category of ‘aural architecture’ because that term is definedas primarily referring to the way that architecture manifests itself aurally to the perceivers/listeners, but not as the manner in which sound itself is used to actually create‘architectural shapes’ in space (cf. Blesser and Salter 2007, 2–3).

11. These are only a few examples of how sound actually shapes, or rather generates, thespace of the performance. Many other works could be mentioned in this context. Also,I thank Adrian Curtin for highlighting that the theme of the 2014 InternationalFederation of Theatre Research (IFTR) conference was ‘Theatre & Stratification’ andposed the question ‘How is theatre stratified?’ (see http://iftr2014warwick.org/theme/). Itemphasizes the relevance of further analysis of the forms and the impact of ‘sonicgeology’. Besides a more metaphoric – historical, dramaturgical or social – employment ofthe term ‘stratification’, it could be shown that theatre can be concretely stratifiedsonically insofar as different ‘layers’ of sound are created and arranged side by side orintertwined in a complex manner.

12. To draw such a terminological analogy between audible and geological phenomena has itslimits, as the materiality of the denoted phenomena differs in its specific qualities (as a visiblerock is harder than a ‘rock-like’ sound, etc.) and because these termsmight only be applicableto a series of particular and highly distinctive theatre sound compositions. Still, inmy opinionthere is a lot to gain from this terminological analogy since it becomes possible to highlightthe strong, diverse and complex affective impact some sound designs possess and it permits usto go further than just emphasizing the spatial and material dimensions of sound: it gives ustools to begin to differentiate certain shapes and forms of various sound spatialities. Eventhough a visible rock might be ‘harder’ in the way that we cannot pass through it, unlike arock-like sound, the experience of touching the rock or being ‘touched’ by a rock-like soundmight be similar and comparable. To employ the geological terms opens up the possibility toemphasize, describe and classify the affective, physical effect of the audible.

13. This could almost seem like an inversion of the relation of space and sound according toroom acoustics after which the spatial proportions, conditions and the used materialsdefine the resulting sound. In the mentioned examples, digital audio technology isemployed to create sonically defined shapes and spaces. But instead of an inversion Isuggest to assume an overlayering of different spatialities; the sonic does not erase thevisual space, but they enter a relation of mutual influence and interference.

14. Regarding the question of methodology, it would be possible and interesting to continuethis exploration in various ways, i.e. through further descriptive-interpretative analyses oflistening experiences by theatre scholars, but also through empirical qualitative research,questioning the audience about their listening experiences to derive further ideas foradequate terms and further potential fields of analogy.

15. For some notable exceptions, see Kochhar-Lindgren (2006) and Kendrick (2011).

Notes on contributorsRoss Brown is Professor of Sound and Dean of Studies at the Royal Central School of Speechand Drama, University of London. He has been researching the dramaturgy of sound since1994, prior to which he investigated it for 10 years as a professional composer and performerof theatre noise and music.

Adrian Curtin is a Lecturer in the Drama Department at the University of Exeter. He is theauthor of Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)and assorted articles and book chapters on theatre sound, music and modernism.

George Home-Cook is an independent theatre practitioner-researcher, based in the UK. He isthe author of Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Lynne Kendrick is a Senior Lecturer in New Theatre Practices at the Royal Central School ofSpeech and Drama, University of London. Her publications include “A Paidic Aesthetic,” inTheatre, Dance and Performance Training (2011), Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performanceco-edited with David Roesner (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011) and “Mimesis andRemembrance,” in Performance Research: On Technology (2012). Lynne is a foundingmember and trustee of Camden People’s Theatre, a north London venue that producescontemporary experimental theatre and performance.

David Roesner is Professor for Theatre and Music-Theatre at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and has recently published his monograph Musicality in Theatre(Ashgate, 2014).

Katharina Rost is currently finishing her PhD in Theatre Studies at the Freie UniversitätBerlin with a focus on listening and attention dynamics in contemporary theatre performancesin Germany. Her main research interests are sound and listening in theatre performances,gender and queer theory, pop music and star images, performance theory, phenomenologyand methodological questions of Theatre Studies.

Nicholas Till is a theatre practitioner, theorist and historian working mainly in opera andmusic theatre. He is currently Professor of Opera and Music Theatre and LeverhulmeResearch Fellow at the University of Sussex.

Pieter Verstraete is Assistant Professor of American Culture and Literature in HacettepeUniversity Ankara and Honorary University Fellow at the University of Exeter. He haspublished in Sonic Mediations (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), Performance Research(2011), Theatre Noise (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), The Legacy of Opera (Rodopi,2013), and has also co-edited Inside Knowledge (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) andCathy Berberian: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality (Ashgate, 2014).

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Weblinkshttp://www.adriennequartly.com/http://extant.org.uk/http://www.fueltheatre.com/projects/ringhttp://www.lundahl-seitl.com/http://www.melaniewilson.org.uk/

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