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Sounding Out ‘the Scenographic Turn’: Eight Position Statements
Adrian Curtin, University of Exeter / David Roesner, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
(eds.)1
With statements from Ross Brown, Adrian Curtin, George Home-Cook, Lynne Kendrick, David
Roesner, Katharina Rost, Nicholas Till, and Pieter Verstraete
Abstract: This multi-authored essay collects a range of position statements made by leading
scholars/practitioners in the fields of theatre aurality, music theatre/opera, and sound design.
Contributors independently prepared short statements in response to a central provocation—
namely, the mooted ‘scenographic turn’ and its implication for theatre sound studies. The essay
provides snapshots of current opinions about theatre sound design and scenography. It does not
advance a single, unified argument but rather outlines some key ways in which sound/music and
scenography are operating, and have operated, in theatre, and have been discussed in aesthetic
theory. The essay ultimately reinforces the importance of attending to sound and scenography as
co-constitutive elements, and suggests there is no single or best way of doing this.
Keywords: theatre sound; theatre music; sound design; scenography; mise en scène; noise; aurality;
scholarly ‘turns’
At the launch of this new journal on theatre and performance design, we, the editors of this
multi-authored article, wish to draw attention to an area of design traditionally neglected in
academic discourses and the rituals of validation in the creative industries: sonic design. Two
examples of this neglect may indicate that there is still a need to trumpet all things sonic in
theatre: in June 2014 the U.S.-based Tony Award for best sound design was scrapped, and in
Germany the largest annual survey amongst 44 theatre critics singling out best actor, set designer,
director, theatre etc. still has no category for “best sound design” and/or “best incidental music”.
There has, however, been a sonic/acoustic ‘turn’ in recent decades, which has informed
scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.2 Theatre and performance studies have begun
to attend to acoustic phenomena with greater frequency and depth. There is a growing body of
scholarly work that analyses a continuum of theatre sound, noise, and music, both contemporary
and historical.3 Moreover, there is a proliferation of theatre artists in Europe and elsewhere, who
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are creating sound designs and musical compositions for productions that encourage audiences to
attend to what they hear—and, more broadly, what they perceive—in new ways. Now, another
‘turn’ has been mooted—the ‘scenographic turn’. Does this mean the sonic/acoustic ‘turn’ is at
an end? Are we turning from ‘the sonic’ to ‘the scenographic’? What is the significance of
enfolding the former in the latter? Or is this a false problematic?
Assuming the ‘scenographic turn’ is not just a rhetorical contrivance, but identifies
something about the state of current scholarship and artistic practice, what is the role of sound in
this? Put differently, are sound and scenography interacting, or being theorised, in new ways?
Does the ‘scenographic turn’ have an identifiably sonic component? If so, what is it? Branching
out, what positions are scholars and artists taking with respect to the current status and future
development of theatre sound design and theatre sound studies? (How) does scenography figure
into this?
We put these questions to a group of scholars/practitioners who work in the field of sound
design/theatre music and who variously examine the sonic and acoustic aspects of theatre in
relation to meaning making, performativity, architecture and space, and the politics of perception.
We asked each contributor to provide a position statement that responded to the above questions,
and have collated their texts here. They are, as we hoped, quite diverse and touch on different
aspects of the interplay(s) between the sonic and the scenographic. We have deliberately not
sought to harmonize the statements or create smooth transitions between them, but rather have
left each in its unique tone – hard cuts rather than fade ins/ fade outs.
One of the features of scholarship on sound in the humanities is its general lack of unity as
a field. Diversity of opinion, focus, and approach need not, however, be taken as signs of
intellectual incoherence or divisiveness, but rather as indications of vital, vibrant discourse that is
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progressing in multiple directions simultaneously. There are indications of this here, as well as
evidence of shared positionality and thematic consonance. Sound often works to position us as
listening subjects in a particular place, and may be used in performance design to help create
imagined or imaginary space. Conversely, sound (as noise) can be an imposition; it can intrude
upon consciousness and displace our attention. Taking a position with respect to sound means
situating oneself somewhere – taking a stand, as it were – even if this means only being able to
attend to what is within local earshot. Multiple position statements may therefore call to mind a
greater range of ideas and relevant phenomena, and capture a range of current opinions about the
relationships between sound and scenography, both in theory and in practice. This essay presents
snaphsots, provocations, lines of thought, musings, theses, possibilities – not a traditional
scholarly argument. It is a deliberately ‘heteroglossic’ (Bakhtin) attempt to emphasize and
remind us of how intricately the mise en scène of performance – both historical and
contemporary – is intertwined with modes of sounding, musicking, echoing, and listening. Each
position statement has been prepared independently. Prior to proof-reading the essay before
publication, the contributors (with the exception of the editors) had not read each other’s
statements.
Between us, we cover a range of aspects that engage the provocation of a potential
‘scenographic turn’. We point to the philosophical, phenomenological and cognitive links
between space and sound, the visual and the aural. We emphasize that sound and vision are
inextricably linked and co-constitutive, and that collaboration and innovation in the interplay of
sound design and stage design have great productive potential, as evidenced by a number of
theatrical examples (Roesner). We indicate little-known historical connections between sound,
aesthetics, and scenography in theatre (Till, Brown). We highlight the socio-political
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consequences of the post-dramatic ‘musicalisation’ of theatre (Verstraete) and query the
perceptual challenges offered by ‘theatre in the dark’, where visuality falls short (Kendrick). We
affirm the importance of thinking about sound in relation to the other senses (Home-Cook,
Curtin), hypothesise new, geological ways of conceptualising sound design (Rost), and posit
‘atmosphere’ as a paradigm for thinking about theatrical design (Home-Cook). Finally, we
acknowledge the contrariety and multiplicity of audience reception, and the convolutions of
academic ‘turns’ (Curtin). Ultimately, it is our hope that this article will help advance the
ongoing scholarly conversation about sound, scenography, and theatre, and will stimulate future
debate.
1. Sonic scenography (David Roesner)
I will start with an anecdote: a friend of mine who is a theatre musician and works very
successfully in the German theatre circuit told me once that almost invariably when he’d turn up
to the so-called “Bauprobe” for a new production – a first try-out and mock-up of the model
stage design for a new production on the actual stage, which usually happens weeks if not
months before the actual rehearsals begin – he’d ask the stage designer: “…and where do the
speakers go?” These had usually been forgotten and had to be accommodated retrospectively
into the design.
There is then, on the one hand, an old rivalry between the sonic and the visual in theatre
and theatre design, and on the other, mutual incomprehension and potentially quite conflicting
priorities. The fact that in most professional theatres the artists and respective technical
departments responsible for each design aspect are strictly separated furthers the divide.
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In my – perhaps optimistic – understanding of the idea of the “scenographic turn”, however,
there is plenty of potential (and in the current theatre aesthetic quite some evidence) that the
‘scenographic’ and the ‘sonic’ can co-exist quite happily, actually more than that: can inspire and
enhance each other.
The scenographic turn, as I understand it, is not (just) a paradigm suggesting we should pay
a bit more attention to the stage design of theatrical productions: it is a profound re-evaluation of
the aesthetics, the dramaturgical function and the visceral experience of spaces and images for
performances; an understanding of scenography as emancipated from merely illustrating or
furnishing the realisation of a dramatic text on stage.
While described and discussed as a recent phenomena, we can trace such ideas back
historically at least to one of the pioneers of stage and lighting design: the Swiss theatre
practitioner and writer Adolphe Appia (1862-1928). Surprisingly, perhaps, it was Appia’s
passion for music and his quest to enhance the rather dusty operatic practices of his day that led
to his visionary scenographic ideas about ‘rhythmic spaces’ and light which has “an almost
miraculous flexibility” and can “create shadows, make them living, and spread the harmony of
their vibrations in space, just as music does” (Appia 1993, 114). Recent and current theatre
practitioners such as Pina Bausch, Karin Beier, Filter, Heiner Goebbels, Ruedi Häusermann,
Christoph Marthaler, David Marton, Katie Mitchell, Eimuntas Nekrosius, Einar Schleef, Sound
and Fury, Michael Thalheimer and their creative collaborators integrate stage design intimately
with a keen musical and sonic sensibility (see for a wider context: Meyer 2008) – even a number
of terms have been coined for this already: “sound scenography”, “acoustic scenography”, “sonic
scenography” or “Klangszenographie”4. This may take a number of forms: in Katie Mitchell’s
‘multimedia’ productions, for example, the acoustic separation of the diegetic narrative world
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from the artificially live produced soundtrack we hear is not only a performative device, but also
– through the visibility of the Foley artists and their work – a main design feature of the
performance space.
Karin Beier and her team often create stages that have a mixture of conventional elements
(tables, chairs), musical instruments (both mobile and static) and elements such as water or mud,
which not only have significant impact on the visual development and symbolism of the stage
actions, but also have a sonic materiality that features strongly and interacts with the spoken
word and the – often experimental – music.
Michael Thalheimer – with scenographer Olaf Altmann’s rhythmic spaces and Bert
Wrede’s music and sound design – uses the rhythms of rapid speech, long pauses, echoing walls,
long walks on high heels, etc., to create an often highly stylized and yet surprisingly organic
theatrical style.
Filter’s performances, particularly their adaptations of Shakespeare, look and feel like
slightly messy concerts: instruments, retro electronic sound devices, cables, microphones, etc.,
litter the space but also evoke – both sonically and visually – the wood of Athens (in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream) or Olivia’s mansion (in Twelfth Night) (for more details and a more
in-depth analysis on all three examples see Roesner 2014, 236-256). It has often been said that in
Shakespeare’s theatre words evoke all the scenery (“Wortkulisse” or “verbal scenography”) –
Filter largely passes this task on to music, song and sound effects.
Finally, there are an increasing number of theatre productions that include live musicians
in their stage design, often creating hybrid spaces that are both fictional and real and at once
theatre stage and concert venue. Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch’s Shockheaded Peter
(1998), for example, was based inextricably on the music and the physical presence of the band
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The Tiger Lillies, whose musical style and musical personae (see Auslander 2006) – consisting
of a wild mash-up of Victorian-Gothic-Vaudeville-Cabaret-Circus-Itinerant Balladeers – were
formative for the stage and costume design.
In all these cases, theatre makers have found ways to ensure a dialogue between the scenic
and the sonic: by changing entrenched production rhythms, faciltating early interplay and
exchange between all the creative contributors, and questioning assumptions about established
hierarchies of production and aesthetics. These revised processes ensure that stage design,
composition and sonic design are intimately linked in artistic practice. Commonly, however,
their institutional separation in conservatoires and theatres remains and more mutual
acknowledgement and reciprocal inspiration would be more than welcome.
2. Theses for a sceno-sonic turn (Nicholas Till)
Modernist taxonomies of artistic media, such as that of the neo-Kantian philosopher Susanne
Langer, invariably characterise sonic arts as being essentially temporal, and arts such as
sculpture and architecture (and perhaps scenography?) as being essentially spatial. According to
Langer, each artistic medium occupies its own "primary illusion", that of music being "time
made audible" (1953, 135). Langer considers the concept of space in music to be but a
"secondary illusion" (1953, 117). She also held that there could be no straying from the essential
virtual field of each art; that there could be no valid intermedial combinations (1957, 86). So
where did that leave theatre? We’ll come back to that.
Space first assumed centrality in the architectural thinking of early modernists such as
Peter Behrens and Adolf Loos (Forty 2000, 256-275). At the Bauhaus, László Moholy-Nagy
insisted that in architecture "Building material is an auxiliary … the principle means of creation
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is the space itself" (1931, 62). But as Henri Lefebvre pointed out, the modernist architect’s
concern with space is abstract: a Euclidian space of mental ratio rather than a lived place defined
by all the modalities of embodied social experience (1991,1 & 287). And a correlative of this
emphasis upon abstract space has been a reification of architecture – and perhaps space – as
essentially visual: "Everything is in the visual", Le Corbusier asserted (1991, 231).
But if there is one thing that the postmodern spatial turn of the 1960s, initiated by
thinkers such as Foucault, McLuhan and Lefebvre himself, and the more recent acoustic turn in
social and aesthetic thinking have taught us it is that sound and space must be understood
dialectically, since full awareness of space involves awareness of the relationship of sound to
space, and vice versa. Modernist assertions of the medial exclusiveness of sonic and spatial
practices assume a very restricted ontology for each of the practices in question. Music, for
instance, is as much spatial as temporal: it is performed in space; what is heard is shaped by the
specific disposition of the performers in that space; and its sonic qualities are determined by the
acoustic properties of the space in which it takes place. Sound art is often even more responsive
to the specifics of space. Furthermore, sound brings into being a listening subject whose selfhood
during the time of listening is spatially and corporeally defined; as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it, "To
listen is to enter that spatiality by which, at the same time, I am penetrated…" (2007, 14).
Architecture, on the other hand, is experienced not simply as a visual object in space but also
through the embodied senses of touch, sound and smell, and the modalities of time, association
and social use. We often hear in a built space what we cannot see: footsteps upstairs; a creaking
door. Both music and architecture, sound and space, are inherently multi-modal: sonic and
scenographic at once. Sceno-sonic.
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Modernist theatre theorists were no less reductive in their search for the essence of
theatre, although they inevitably disagreed upon what constituted the essential medium of
theatre: for Eric Bentley it was language ("every dramaturgic practice that subordinates the
words to any other medium has trivialized the drama without giving full reign to the medium that
has become dominant" (1987, 87)); for Kantor it was space; for Grotowksi it was the human
body. It was not the least of Adolphe Appia’s insights that, although he held to the modernist
attributions of space and time to scenography and music respectively, he recognised that in opera
the human body and light served as mediating elements between the fixity of his scenographic
spaces and the temporality and fluidity of music (1962).
Theatre enacts the dialectic of showing and concealing that underpins the tension
between epistemology (that which is shown is true) and metaphysics (that which is concealed is
true). And it questions the testimony of eye and ear through deception and illusion: theatrical
narratives often turn upon whether we can trust the evidence of our senses – what we see, what
we hear, what we are told. The current practices of site-specific theatre and theatre in the dark
are perhaps the clearest evidence of a sceno-sonic turn that plays directly upon these modalities
and their perceptual unsettling in the dissolution of the sceno-sonic boundaries between the real
and the virtual. A sceno-sonic turn that responds to, and questions, the flickering to-and-fro of
the real and virtual in an increasingly mediated world.
3. On vibrate: the new scenographic picturesque (Ross Brown)
The art of practical noises-off reached its peak between the 1860s and the 1930s (Brown 2010,
18-30; 63-73). This was not noisemaking required by classical dramaturgy, where the action is
carried forward by a continuous momentum of consequence, which passes, transitively, through
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the scenic structure towards the final resolution. Rather it was that required by a new intransitive
dramaturgy of serial-discontinuity, where each scene builds to a situation where forward motion
is halted in a moment of stasis or suspense, and from which the next scene begins afresh (Meisel
1983, 39-42; 97). Rather than performing the disruption and resolution of cosmic order, it
enacted the atmosphere and life of the stage picture. Made backstage, but in the same acoustic
world in which the actors spoke, moved and were seen, this noise had a materiality whose
phenomenology was more than acoustic, and a scenic integrity that proved elusive to
phonographically reproduced noises or subsequent electroacoustic technologies. Loudspeaker
sound lent itself more to extra-diegetic framing, as a mediating gauze that bled the aural focus
between frontcloth immediacy and intra-diegetic world, usually at the beginnings and ends of
scenes. Record players and tape recorders also lacked sensitivity as instruments, playback being
less flexibly interactive than playing and operating less expressive than performing. Theatre, in
the mid-twentieth century, lost patience with scenic noise.
In the late 1980s and 90s, plasticity of noise and the potential for synchrony and dynamic
interaction between electroacoustic soundscape and stage performance returned with the arrival
of digital sampling and MIDI (musical instrument digital interface), which allowed recorded
sounds to be played polyphonically, with touch sensitive expressivity. This suited the devised
mise en scène of physical and visual or design-led theatre, where it brought a precise organicity
of sonic experimentation and enabled a filmic, edited quality. At around the same time, cinemas
acquired surround sound and, in an immersive turn, live theatre also began to address the
dialectic between the aural space of audience and the scenic construct. Even where plays
remained largely acoustic, stage and audience were now placed within a transparent, continuous
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and intermedially-indexed sphere of electroacoustic potential—phenomenologically more than a
sonic turn: a multimodal auralisation of scenic space.
From around 1994 I started to hear the word scenography used to imply a more kinetic
process than stage design. It formed part of an exotic new academic terminology in UK theatre
design, that included various ‘dramaturgies’ (of light, action, objects etc.), synergy, allusions to
the neurological condition of synaesthesia and talk of a paradigm shift from the literary to the
material. Material, I then argued, was habitually and lazily equated with visible, which
perpetuated an ocularcentric bias in post-enlightenment episteme. My argument is now
differently nuanced: that in theatre history (if not historiography), concepts of picture and
spectacle have never been visual, but always sensorily-multimodal. Indeed, the theatre provides
a trope of multimodality to other disciplines. That the visual might be atmospheric, or noise
might be dramaturgically organised into what we might now call soundscape (the pictorial
connotation of the suffix –scape is often overlooked) are notions arising from eighteenth-century
scenic art.
The scenic revolution institutionalised at Drury Lane in the 1760s-70s is a familiar
chapter in histories of visual culture. Less well known is that Garrick wanted “scenic virtue to
form the rising age” through “the charms of sound” (as well as the “pomp of show”5) or that his
scenic artist, de Loutherbourg was equally celebrated for his ‘Picturesque of Sound’ (Brown
2010; Baugh 2007 passim). The Picturesque is traditionally a footnote to Romanticism, but its
discourse was conceptually anti-Romantic, pursuing neither immanence nor the sublime, but a
synthetic aesthetic of pictorial composition and effect. It did not fetishize truth but valorised
contrivance in art, and saw a beauty in surface irregularity, roughness and decay. Its viewpoint
was touristically mobile and aural. As Dr Syntax says in Combe’s cartoon parody of the
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movement: “…we the picturesque may find in thunder loud, or whistling wind; and often, as I
fully ween, it may be heard as well as seen” (Combe 1812, 111). If the scenographic turn of the
1990s aspired Romantically, like Appia, to the holistically singular (Brown 2010, 46-48; 106112), I detect a resonance of the Picturesque in the immersive, intermedial scenography of the
current moment. At this turn, scenography seems to delight in an atomised plurality of scenic
effect; in distractions, fragmentation, entropy; in alert and notification rather than signal; in
surface rather than deep vibration. The new picturesque of a new weather: of vibrating phones,
not cosmic vibes?
4. Designing vibrational space: from aesthetic to socio-political enquiry (Pieter Verstraete)
Antonin Artaud’s ‘cathartic’, vibrational theatre,6 which was to surround the audience, “attack
the spectator’s sensibility on all sides” (Artaud 1958: 86) and break with the old proscenium
theatre, was perhaps the most radical attempt in modernist theatre to which both a sonic and
scenographic turn today are still indebted in many regards. Vibrational space was a bold effort on
Artaud’s part to use the full potential of sound design, including the architectonics and acoustics
of the theatre space, to activate the individual spectator through general discomfort and
unfamiliarity with new sounds, resonating from instruments of “new alloys of metal” and overly
loud sounds “or noises that are unbearably piercing” (Artaud 1958: 95).
In spirit, Artaud’s scenographic ideas may be understood to respond to the ideas of ‘total
theatre’ in ways that are much indebted to, but also diverge strongly from, the Wagnerian
Gesamtkunstwerk. His ideas about the spatial reverberation of voice may recall Wagner’s
experiments with a soundboard and pillars in his Festspielhaus that projected the sound of the
orchestra from under the stage into the auditorium, or as Artaud formulated it: “A cry uttered at
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one end of the room can be transmitted from mouth to mouth with amplifications and successive
modulations all the way to the other” (97). Yet Artaud’s revolutionary vision about the purpose
of sound as bodily titillating wavelengths resonates more with post-Marxist notions of collective
experience, ‘mass spectacle’ and social change rather than with Wagner’s democratic principles
of ideal listening, formulated as an imperative: “abandon individual psychology, enter into mass
passions, into the conditions of the collective spirit, grasp the collective wavelengths, in short,
change the subject” (Cahiers de Rodez V: 153; qtd. in Weiss 1992: 279). It is in this political
spirit that Artaud’s ‘cruel’ sound-system proposed “to seek in the agitation of tremendous masses,
convulsed and hurled against each other, a little of that poetry of festivals and crowds when, all
too rarely nowadays, the people pour out into the streets” (1958: 85).
Artaud’s desire to channel passions and energies against distraction is not of an equal
order to Wagner’s aspiration to channel the spectator through synthesis and integration of all the
senses. Susan Buck-Morrs has criticised the superimposed, all-encompassing, comforting unity
of the senses that is based on the concealment of alienation, the sensual impoverishment and
fragmentation in the individual’s experience of modern existence (1992: 26). Artaud, on the
contrary, aims at an implicit awareness of the individual entering into mass passions through an
immersion that causes dread and discomfort. In this way, Artaud’s vibrational theatre is rather a
contrivance that calls for a critical understanding of the power that sound and audio scenography
can convey: “especially in a domain where the endlessly renewed fatigue of the organs requires
intense and sudden shocks to revive our understanding” (Artaud 1958: 86). This exemplifies a
rupture with the tradition of the Gesamtkunstwerk, and instates a new ‘total’ theatre that serves to
shake the individual by “sudden and unforeseen electricity” (Cahiers de Rodez IX: 43; qtd. in
Weiss 1994: 51).
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Artaud’s theatre gave us a glimpse of what the scenographic turn in sound design and
devising has arguably become today. After Artaud, our theatres have begun to embrace the
potential of sound not only to communicate other, non-verbal or self-referential aspects of drama
and human experience, but also to push the barriers of our inner sense perceptions. The
scenographic turn gives us at least two good reasons for a different sensory rationale: the first is
spatial thinking, the second is a return to a theatre that has a logic in common with pre-dramatic
forms. The former materialized in the use of spatialization of sound for the stage, embracing
immersive technologies; the latter was most prominently formulated as ‘musicalization’
(Varopoulou 1998; Lehmann 1999; Roesner 2003) and ‘chora-graphy’ as post-dramatic traits
which liberated the contemporary theatre stage from the restraints of goals (“a space beyond
telos”), hierarchy and causal logic, hitherto defined by a verbal theatre text (Lehmann 1997: 56).
In both developments, a choreographic turn was immanent, which would enable us to
conceptualize the physical, experiential and cultural barriers that sound seeks to transgress.
However, when thinking about how spatialization and musicalization take center-stage in
a larger scenographic turn to sound design, and how these aesthetic strategies are also grounded
in a larger historical body of knowledge about the use of sound on the modernist stage, I cannot
but think how culturally and historically contingent these principles are with regard to the
audiences they try to activate and satisfy. Surely, on-stage sonic experiments from the 1980s
onwards did have political meaning in a larger sense of a politics of the sensible (Rancière 2004),
or in an anarchist-inspired breaking with all hierarchies within the theatre sign system, which led
to Lehmann’s formulation of the post-dramatic as a larger paradigm shift regarding spectatorship
and devising. The post-dramatic theatre experimentations were envisioned to reach other
audiences whose senses – mostly visual – were already being reshaped by mass media as well as
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rapidly evolving cinema aesthetics. So the post-dramatic theatre sought again a greater
integration of the audience in the meaning-making process, or as Lehmann contends:
[P]ostdramatic theatre is not simply a new kind of text of staging – and even less a new
type of theatre text, but rather a type of sign usage in the theatre that turns both of these
levels of theatre upside down through the structurally changed quality of the performance
text: it becomes more presence than representation, more shared than communicated
experience, more process than product, more manifestation than signification, more
energetic impulse than information. (Lehmann 2006: 85)
Despite the renewed communal aspects of this new way of experiencing theatre’s sign systems –
much like Artaud’s concrete language of signs as ‘hieroglyphs’ (Artaud 1958: 90) – on a
practical basis, most of those investigations seem again to favour the highly individual
experience of the post-modern spectator. Moreover, it appears now that we are slowly coming to
an end of the post-dramatic paradigm, as it has been criticized more recurrently, for its “passé
postmodern tools to describe an environment in which harmless simulation of conflicts is a
distant dream” (Stegemann 2009: 11-23).
As new abrasive forms of applied, community and storytelling theatre indicate, a more
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 pose some questions to the problems of our latecapitalist times. It is in this transitional space, from theatre as aesthetic investigation to social
interaction, from hyper-individual to an ever-recurring collective experience, that the ‘sonic’ –
with all its transgressive and intangible potentiality as ‘vibration’ beyond metaphor – is in need
of redefinition.
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Artaud was onto something: sound in the theatre can make us ‘abandon’ our individual
selves without necessarily losing ourselves. Now we must stay put and take the potency of the
social, with all its derisive and paradoxical mechanisms, seriously.
5. Scene in the dark (Lynne Kendrick)
Scenography is not without sound. As an ‘orchestration’ of potentially all that which constitutes
theatre (see Butterworth & McKinney), relinquishing the sonic is not the aim of the scenographic.
However, the idea of a post-sonic, scenographic turn suggests a move away from sound, an
implication that one belies the other. This invites old divisions – of the sonic versus the visual, or
ear versus eye – back into the conversation, but perhaps this is for good reason. Sound has
recently penetrated theatre-making practices in ways that suggest the opposite turn, a move
towards sound, might be the case. The sound designer has, according to Carolyn Downing,7
recently emerged from the ‘tech box’ and, taking a position within the rehearsal room, has
embedded the sonic in the mix of theatre making. This, in turn, has brought sound designers as
theatre artists to the fore, Melanie Wilson and Adrienne Quartly to name but two. This attention
to the sonic is not merely a trend, often dismissed as the happenstance of technological advances,
or as symptomatic of collaborative practice models. These instances of sonic scenography are
emerging because of possibility: theatre makers are drawn to the potential of sound for its ability
to generate scenography where visuality falls short.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Theatre-in-the-Dark, as its scenography is almost
entirely sonic. This is an emergent form of theatre which is garnering much interest, particularly
in the UK, and it is one which takes the ‘blackout’ of mainstream theatre – the negative space of
stage and auditorium convention – as its base material, the ground from which its scenography
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springs. In the darkness of Rosenberg and Neath’s ‘sound journeys’, the haptic dramaturgies of
Extant Theatre and the ‘white-out’ spaces of Lundahl and Seitl’s performance events, the ‘scene’
is carved out of sound in all its incarnations. The visual space may at points appear – seeded by
visual prologues, or glimpses of shapes, contours and shades invented in half-light – but the
design is entirely sonic and, as such, the scenographic encounter is primarily an aural experience.
Thus Theatre-in-the-Dark places the perceptual emphasis on audience rather than spectatorship,
indeed the growing popularity of this form of theatre is predicated on the less certain terrain of
listening and the unpredictable experiences this may offer. Any scene can be conjured in the dark.
When the first experiments with darkness took place at the Playing in the Dark season (BAC
London 1998) some joked it was a neat solution to budget cuts. No need for lights, no need for
any material that makes theatre visually evident. Yet the sonic scenography of darkness is more
than visual absence. Theatre-in-the-Dark entirely reinvents scenographic spaces, transporting
audiences and immersing us within them. This produces an aesthetic of uncertainty which
frequently re-casts us as various subjects within its midst, questioning our identity and our
processes of identification. However, this is not a case of ‘not seeing’; in the darkness we are
invited to visualise a myriad of spectacles, but we see through ears. Visuality falls short because
it remains the object before us; separated and distinct it can only be gazed upon for all its pomp
and expense. Sound, it is often said, moves us and moves through us, and it is this subjective
property that can transform a scenographic design from object to an experience.
My response to the question as to whether a sonic or scenic ‘ography’ now takes its turn,
would be ask: how much is the latter predicated on the former? Not in terms of genealogy, but
materially, in the case of Theatre-in-the-Dark – entirely. It is not necessary to seek a position for
sound in all this; the sonic imposition is that a visual can be entirely cast by sonic means.
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Moreover this potential is ever present because sound is never not present. It stalks scenography,
haunts its perimeter, threatening to challenge any residual visual bias. In this way sound is the
noise in the scenographic turn, but it is not an annihilation of it. Rather, as sound
designers/theatre makers have demonstrated, sound has the capacity to extend the reach of
scenography, not only beyond the finite realm of the visual object but beyond what we might
understand scenography to be. This development of what constitutes scenography is integral to
its emergence. As Patrice Pavis recently stated, ‘scenography extends its power just as it loses its
specificity’ (Pavis 2013, 73). Perhaps it is sound that signals a scenographic turn?
6. Sensing Atmospheres (George Home-Cook)
We tend to associate ‘scenography’ with the scenic, and hence, with the seen. Scenography,
moreover, as the act and art of staging, is also, and fundamentally, about design. Yet, what
precisely is design and how is it experienced? What is the relationship between the sonic and the
scenographic? And what part does the audience play in shaping theatrical experience? In
response to the suggestion that we might be experiencing a ‘turn’ to scenography within theatre
and performance studies, I offer the following provocation: that rather than shifting our attention
from the sonic to the scenographic, and thus from one sensory faculty to another, we should
instead pay closer attention to the manifold ways in which audiences sense, and make sense of,
designed theatrical environments or ‘atmospheres’. Theatre is “something perceived” (Styan
1975, 30), and scenography is manifestly sensed. To properly account for (and begin to
understand) the ‘scenographic’, we must first explore what it means to sound scenography.
The notion of scenography (at least as originally conceived) assumes that the world of light,
whether designed or otherwise, is quite separate from that of sound. “Scenography”, writes Ross
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Brown, “is traditionally associated with perspective, whereas sound immerses not just the
psychoacoustic mind, but the whole body” (2010, 134). Yet, how does such a distinction tally
with the perceptual particularities of lived experience? How accurate is it to depict visual
perception in terms of detachment and distance, whilst figuring sonic experience in terms of an
all-encompassing, spherical subjectivity? To compartmentalise our experience of visual and
aural design in this way is not only unhelpful, but phenomenologically untenable. “[T]he
environment that we experience, know and move around in is not sliced up along the lines of the
sensory pathways by which we enter into it. The world we perceive is the same world, whatever
path we take, and each of us perceives it as an undivided centre of activity and awareness”
(Ingold 2007, 10). Audiences make sense of the phenomenal affordances of an environment (or
‘atmosphere’) through a dynamic, embodied and intersensorial process of attending (see HomeCook 2015 n.p.).
The notion of ‘atmosphere’ not only provides an effective means of bypassing the
audiovisual (sonic/scenographic) divide, but also allows us to reconsider (the phenomenology of)
theatrical design. ‘In general, it can be said that atmospheres are involved wherever something is
being staged, wherever design is a factor – and that now means: almost everywhere’ (Böhme
2013, 2). Atmosphere, theatricality, and design are thus intimately interwoven. Indeed, not only
is atmosphere fundamental to the phenomenon of theatre, but theatre would appear to present
itself as the readiest model for an aesthetics of atmosphere (Home-Cook 2015 n.p.).
Design is fundamental to theatre, as are its definitive characteristics, namely, playfulness,
contrivance, and manipulation. Theatrical design consciously strives to manipulate audience
attention, and hence, to shape our perception of the theatrical event. Yet, crucially, this is not a
one-way process (cf. McKinney and Butterworth 2009, 4): theatrical experience is manifestly
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shaped not only by the machinations of design, but by the inter-subjective attentional enactions
of the audience. How we attend affects our perception of what we perceive. Design may well
demand our attention, but how does the phenomenon of attention (and the inter-subjective act of
attending) shape our perception of theatrical design? What role does the listener-spectator play in
the process of shaping theatrical atmosphere(s)? What is thus called for is a more dynamic and
broad-ranging conception of performance design that not only recognises the essential
enmeshment of the senses, but that also acknowledges and explores the inevitable slippage that
exists (and that is continually played out) between production and perception.
Theatre and performance design consists of a variety of different (and often quite
disparate) components, one of which comprises the scene/seen. However, rather than segmenting
the senses, and pitching sound against scenography, we should instead begin to explore the
manifest ways in which we ‘sense’ or feel our way around the designed theatrical environment.
If we are to unravel the secrets and phenomenal complexities of theatrical design, then perhaps it
is to atmosphere(s), not scenography, that we should turn our attention.
7. Sonic caves, walls, drifts, and flood waves (Katharina Rost)
Contemporary understanding of scenography does not exclusively focus on the things actually
visible on stage, but more on the processes effected, felt, transmitted or evoked between the stage
and the audience – thus, on the performative dimension of what is experienced (cf.
Bohn/Wilharm 2013). The term ‘scenography’ in this sense does not refer to a static setting, but
to a dynamic and fragile process, a “component of performance” (McKinney/Philip Butterworth
2009: 3). Sound, thus understood, is a means, among others, to generate the scenographic effects
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of the performance. But even though sound is specified as a dimension of scenography in
contemporary theatre theory (cf. McKinney/Iball 2011; McKinney/Philip Butterworth 2009), the
dominance of the visual might still easily prevail as, firstly, some approaches still abide by the
predominance of visuality (for example, a notion of scenography as a primarily visual art form is
found in Balme 2014: 347; Tabacki 2014: 19; Collins/Nisbet 2010: 1; Pavis 2009: 314)8.
Secondly, sound enhances the ephemerality of the relevant processes, which are therefore even
more difficult to grasp.9 Sound possesses specific qualities that are often described as fluid,
dynamic, diffuse and immersive (cf. Toop 2010: 36; Voegelin 2010: 5, 10; Kim-Cohen 2009:
xviii; Kahn 1999: 27; Toop 1995).10
Because of these qualities, sound is conceptualized as transitory and poses a challenge to
theatre studies: on the one hand, sound has to be ‘put into words’ for an analysis of the auditory
dimension of performances, but on the other hand, an adequate terminology to describe what was
actually heard and experienced aurally and physically during performances still has to be refined,
if not firstly developed in many cases. Thirdly, the various and complex ways in which sound
and scenography are connected in contemporary theatre performances have not been fully
recognized by theatre studies yet. The employment of sound often exceeds or differs from an
illustrative, atmospheric or musical support of the stage setting. Instead of just being a supportive
means to convey a certain mood or to signalize a specific social setting like birdsong, machine
noise or music, in many theatre works sound becomes one of the central aesthetic components
and can even function as a way to ‘set the scene’. In abstract, conceptual and mostly
postdramatic forms of theatre, sound is employed non-realistically, but also at the same time not
just musically.
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For example, in Falk Richter’s and Anouk van Dijk’s Trust (Berlin 2009), the
scenography consisted in its visual components of an empty forestage with a few standing
microphones, a sofa and a lamp hanging from the stage ceiling, and high scaffolds in the back,
which could signify a construction site or a building torn open on one side. It is an abstract
scenographic structure that is open for interpretation and possesses an affective impact in its
specific material qualities, its height, its metallic nature, its dark colours and its potentially
temporary, changeable constitution. Beyond what is seen on stage, the sounds open up other
spatial dimensions, and in this regard can be described as a means to ‘set the scene’. Malte
Beckenbach composed the sound design in a way that during the first few minutes of the
performance, the bass sounds evolved out of each other, like a series of increasingly powerful
explosions, and simultaneously seemed to ‘move deeper’, thereby creating in my perception the
auditory impression of spatial depth in the direction of the stage. The stage floor was flat and
stretched out almost evenly in front of the audience in the Schaubühne, but the sounds created a
sonic landscape that I perceived as interfering with the visual. For a short moment, there was a
‘depth’ in front of me that I could not see, but hear – and feel. The bass sounds were so strong
that they made my whole body vibrate, and I could sense the sonic depth and width physically. It
therefore felt real, even though it was not visually verifiable, and it not only created a sombre
atmosphere as a background mood for the presented dance movements and spoken text
sequences, but it also caused physical and attentional alertness in me through the deep bass
sounds and vibrations. As the title suggests, Trust deals mainly with the question of the (im)possibility of trust, and thus, the shaking of the ground on which we, the audience, are seated,
might not only stand as symbolic for the ‘earthquake’ that broken trust might provoke (i.e. the
‘earthshattering’ insight that one was deceived by one’s beloved partner or that all the savings
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are gone due to risky investments of the bank), but can also directly produce that concrete
impression in the listeners.11
Other examples of contemporary theatre in which sound is employed primarily in a
spatial and material way include; Gisèle Vienne’s Kindertotenlieder (Brest 2007), in which I
remember how the bass sounds of the electronic noise music produced an effect in me as a
listener of confronting ‘hardness’; Meg Stuart’s Violet (Essen 2011) in which the musician
Brendan Dougherty produces layered sound streams that in my listening experience did not mix
or melt into one, but stayed separate in a simultaneous juxtaposition in their temporal as well as
spatial extension, and Romeo Castellucci/Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s The Four Seasons
Restaurant (Avignon 2012), in which the sounds of a black hole were heard at such a high
volume that the seats and bodies trembled from the strong vibrations in the air so that I felt
overwhelmed by the heard, almost unbearable noise.12
How are sound designs to be described that are neither predominantly illustrative nor
primarily musical, but instead lead to the creation of sonic spaces and forces that are not visible
but audible and palpable? How can we write about and express the experience of such diverse
‘sonic scenographies’? Sonic scenographies cannot merely be categorised as ‘sound sculptures’,
because they are embedded in a performance that simultaneously consists of visual, audible and
tactile perceptions that are deeply intertwined.13 I suggest generating a vocabulary – or
borrowing it from other domains – that might allow us to describe felt sonic sensations.
Regarding the previous examples, I propose adopting terms from geology and transferring them
to auditory perceptions, thus speaking of a deep, hollow ‘sound cave’ in Trust, a ‘sound wall’ in
Kindertotenlieder, parallel ‘sound drifts’ in Violet and a powerful, strong ‘sound flood wave’ in
The Four Seasons Restaurant.14 By using geological terms in this metaphorical way to describe
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the listening experience in the aforementioned performances, it becomes possible to clarify and
point out the spatial, material and physically affective dimensions of the sounds.15 Through
sound, the scenographic effect of the performance can feel smooth or broken, plain or bumpy,
distant or near, hard or soft, and thus has an impact on the listeners through this specific
materiality. Sound is not merely audible, but also sensible – and consequently it also possesses
qualities comparable to visible things, i.e. resistance, hardness, jaggedness, or layeredness.
Sound can create and shape space, and when it does it is a scenographic process (cf. Birringer
2013).16 Sound design in this way demonstrates that appearance, spatiality, plasticity, perspective,
encounters, collisions or distance are not bound to visual perception and visibility, but can be
effected by sonic scenographies that should be explored further in the future as essential
scenographic elements of theatre.17
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’ (4). The contrariness of this position –
acknowledging a view but opting not to attend to it, deriving pleasure from turning away –
amuses me, and I have sometimes used it to justify closing my eyes at a performance and only
focusing on what I can hear. This is, admittedly, a somewhat perverse thing to do, as few theatre
pieces, with the exception of ‘theatre in the dark’-style experiments by British company
Sound&Fury, for example, hone in one sense to the apparent detriment of another. Theatre
typically works to engage the senses holistically so that what one sees is invariably inflected by
what one hears, and vice versa, often without our full awareness. Consequently, when analysing
theatre sound one must be mindful of the sight, touch, feel, smell, and perhaps even taste of
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performance, and account for the potential interaction of these modalities—and not just in
‘immersive’ theatre. As I have written elsewhere: ‘The goal is not to disentangle sensory effects
but rather to reveal the significance of their entanglement and highlight aspects that might go
unnoticed or unremarked in the experiential flux of perception’ (Curtin 2014, 6). Does it matter,
then, that some audience members may attend performance contrariously or in an idiosyncratic
fashion? I think it does.
The mooted ‘scenographic turn’ would appear to promote a holistic engagement with the
intersensorial aspects of performance, as opposed to the ostensibly more niche concerns of sonic
enthusiasts. And yet, this supposed turn of events does not ring true. Semioticians and other
theorists of mise-en-scène have long endeavoured to analyse the constituent elements of
performance and explain their complex interplay. Similarly, sound scholars have sought to
understand how hearing works dynamically with the other senses; they have not tried to institute
a ‘countermonopoly of the ear’, to borrow a phrase (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-cohesiveor-unified interdisciplinary field, has not advanced a singular set of interests, apart from helping
to dismantle ocularcentrism. There is a shared vocabulary, yet some terms remain contested and
vaguely used (e.g. soundscape). It has never been clear where sound studies is ‘going’, if
anywhere, how it will develop, or if it will get folded into ‘sensory studies’. The intersection of
sound studies with theatre and performance studies is equally uncertain in this regard. One
cannot suppose, then, that the sonic/acoustic ‘turn’ is necessarily at an end, or has been made
redundant by the recent, renewed interest in the conceptual possibilities and sociocultural
importance of the ‘scenographic’ (broadly construed). We should be wary of blindly following
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the latest academic ‘turn’, especially if this involves a turning away from other, still potentially
productive, areas of enquiry. Scholarship in the humanities does not follow neat paradigm shifts.
This may be a good thing. As Doris Bachmann-Medick remarks:
Are we really progressing in our knowledge of culture? Findings from cultural
studies don’t simply make their way rung by rung up a progressive ladder of
paradigms, one replacing the other. Instead, they emerge because of the recurrent,
new changes of theoretical attention from within a theoretical landscape where the
eclectic coexistence of “turns” becomes productive. (Bachmann-Medick and
Buden 2008, n.p.)
The challenge for contemporary scholars is to engage the coexistence of multiple theoretical
turns, integrating insights from the linguistic turn, the spatial turn, the performative turn, etc.,
into their analyses without simply being faddish.
I turn to some thoughts on the future of scholarship on theatre and performance sound.
Scholars will, I hope, continue to examine the sociocultural significance and historical specificity
of how audiences individually and collectively make sense of sound in performance, highlighting
the peculiarities and contrariety of these processes. We should protect against making
assumptions that are transhistorical, universalist, or ableist (i.e. that normalise able-bodied
people). There are many ways of responding to sound in performance and all are potentially
valid. Yet, there is not enough scholarship on deaf theatre or on how differently-abled audience
members make sense of theatre sound, for instance.18 Formalist, taxonomic studies that treat the
‘performance text’ as an autonomous entity, a closed circuit, are defunct. We have only begun to
sound out the acoustic aspects of theatre history. The promise of the ‘scenographic turn’, as with
all scholarly turns, is that the ‘theoretical landscape’ in which scholarship takes place might be
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revitalised and reimagined. The ‘scenographic turn’, if this is more than just a turn of phrase,
could (or should?) be sonorous, if not downright noisy.
Notes
1
Corresponding authors: [email protected], [email protected].
2
See Meyer (2008).
3
See, for example, Brown (2010); Curtin (2014); Home-Cook (2015); Kendrick and Roesner
(2011); Ovadija (2013); Roesner (2014); Symonds and Taylor (2014); Verstraete (2009).
4
See for example: http://soundscenography.com/post/94140598815/fruehling-erwachenklangszenografie-im-theater [07.10.2014] or http://xmodal.hexagram.ca/projects/interactive-realtime-acoustic-scenography-for-live-stage-environments [07.10.2014], http://www.hands-onsound.com/?lang=en [07.10.2014] etc.
Johnson, Samuel. 1749. “Prologue Spoken by Mr. Garrick at the Opening of the Theatre-Royal.”
Bartleby.com. Accessed Jan 3rd 2013. http://www.bartleby.com/333/76.html
5
See Kahn (2001: 356-7) on the notion of vibrational space in Artaud’s Le théâtre et son Double
(1938).
6
7
Downing speaking at the Theatre Sound Colloquium, RCSSD, ASD and RNT June 2013.
8
Even though the editors Jane Collins and Andrew Nisbet include sound-related articles in their
publication, in their introduction they define scenography as the “visual composition of
performance” (Collins/Nisbet 2010: 1). In his dictionary article on ‘Scénographie’, Patrice Pavis
speaks of scenography as an art form which is related to primarily visual art like sculpture and
architecture, though his definition as “la science et l’art de l’organisation de la scène et de
l’espcace théâtral” (Pavis 2009: 314) might be employed to include the kind of ‘sound
scenography’ that my text is highlighting.
9
To comprehend the sonic dimension of scenography it is necessary to let go of the importance
of visibility and visuality. In this regard the term ‘effect’ and the metaphor of ‘magic’ are central
in Heiner Wilharm’s and Ralf Bohn’s publication on scenography and its impact (cf.
Bohn/Wilharm 2013: 19-20).
10
Because of the ascription of these qualities, sound was often described by the analogy to an
‘ocean’ in which the listeners are immersed. Cf. Toop 1995. It is a traditional trope within
theories of listening and sound and in my opinion it can be connected to and aligned with the
proposal of further geological analogies in my text.
11
Scenographic elements and processes are perceived in two modes: in the semiotic and the
performative dimension, because they can be understood as signs for something referred to on
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stage (i.e. a social setting) and they possess a specific materiality which can have an affective
impact on the audience (cf. Fischer-Lichte 2001). The same can be said about ‘sonic
scenography’ as the sounds tend to provoke the ascription of a reference (of an ‘earthquake’, for
example), while at the same time through their ‘materiality’ (which is their specific ‘sounding’),
they might have a direct physical effect on the listeners. Both dimensions are only heuristically
separatable, but for the analysis of ‘sonic scenography’ it is important to differentiate them.
The music for Vienne’s Kindertotenlieder is produced live on stage by the collaborative
project KTL, consisting of Stephen O’Malley and Peter Rehberg. For Castellucci’s The Four
Seasons Restaurant, the sound design was created by Scott Gibbons.
12
They also do not fall into the category of ‘aural architecture’ because that term is defined as
primarily referring to the way that architecture manifests itself aurally to the perceivers/listeners,
but not as the manner in which sound itself is used to actually create ‘architectural shapes’ in
space (cf. Blesser/Salter 2007: 2-3).
13
14
These are only a few examples of how sound actually shapes, or rather generates, the space of
the performance. Many other works could be mentioned in this context. Also, I thank Adrian
Curtin for highlighting that the theme of the 2014 IFTR conference was ‚Theatre & Stratification’
and posed the question ‚how is theatre stratified?’ (cf. http://iftr2014warwick.org/theme/). It
emphasizes the relevance of further analysis of the forms and the impact of ‘sonic geology’.
Besides a more metaphoric – historical, dramaturgical or social – employment of the term
‘stratification’, it could be shown that theatre can be concretely stratified sonically insofar as
different ‘layers’ of sound are created and arranged side by side or intertwined in a complex
manner.
15
To draw such a terminological analogy between audible and geological phenomena has its
limits, as the materiality of the denoted phenomena differs in its specific qualities (as a visible
rock is harder than a ‘rock-like’ sound etc.) and because these terms might only be applicable to
a series of particular and highly distinctive theatre sound compositions. Still, in my opinion there
is a lot to gain from this terminological analogy since it becomes possible to highlight the strong,
diverse and complex affective impact some sound designs possess and it permits to go further
than just emphasizing the spatial and material dimensions of sound: it gives us tools to begin to
differentiate certain shapes and forms of various sound spatialities. Even though a visible rock
might be ‘harder’ in the way that we can not pass through it – unlike a rock-like sound, the
experience of touching the rock or being ‘touched’ by a rock-like sound might be similar and
comparable. To employ the geological terms opens up the possibility to emphasize, describe and
classify the affective, physical effect of the audible.
16
This could almost seem like an inversion of the relation of space and sound according to room
acoustics after which the spatial proportions, conditions and the used materials define the
resulting sound. In the mentioned examples, digital audio technology is employed to create
sonically defined shapes and spaces. But instead of an inversion I suggest to assume an
overlayering of different spatialities – the sonic does not erase the visual space, but they enter a
relation of mutual influence and interference.
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17
Regarding the question of methodology, it would be possible and interesting to continue this
exploration in various ways, i.e. through further descriptive-interpretative analyses of listening
experiences by theatre scholars, but also through empirical qualitative research, questioning the
audience about their listening experiences to derive further ideas for adequate terms and further
potential fields of analogy.
18
For some notable exceptions, see Kochhar-Lindgren (2006) and Kendrick (2011).
29
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Weblinks
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http://extant.org.uk/
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http://www.lundahl-seitl.com/
http://www.melaniewilson.org.uk/
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