Tuning In/Out: Auditory participation in contemporary music and theatre performances

Abstract

By focusing on contemporary music and theatre, we will analyse whether and how auditory participation within a performance can be conceptualized. We do not define auditory participation as playing music -- as in an ethno-musicological approach -- or as acting as a performer, but as participation through the act of auditory perception, as the feeling of being particularly involved through what is being heard. The analysis will retrace our own participatory experiences in several performances and will emphasise how contemporary music and theatre performances can evoke, or even provoke, strong feelings of participation through the specific auditory modes these performances establish. Regarding Forced Entertainment's And on the Thousandth Night…, Michel Pisaro's space: for audience and Stimuline by Lynn Pook and Julien Clauss, we will consider our experience as spectators, listeners and participants of the performances and point out certain characteristics of auditory participation. The various and exemplary auditory modes will be distinguished and determined in the paper as forms of focused listening, spatially diffused hearing, harking, collective listening and body listening. It becomes clear that there are many possible constellations and intensities in which participation can take place or can be motivated in a performance.

Furthermore, we will question the limits of participatory experience and analyse the connection of certain auditory modes to feelings of isolation and exclusion or immersion. Concluding, we assume that the experience of auditory participation is somehow linked to the potential of choice, sensual withdrawal, mobility and distance, as well as inattention.

Notes

¹ Participant observation, which is based on the notion of participation as taking part in a social or cultural practice – e.g., in the music practice (see Adkinson et al. 2001), is one of the most important methods of recent fieldwork (see Barz et al. 2008).

² In this connection, we separate auditory perception only heuristically from other forms of sensual perception. In fact we consider perception to be a holistic phenomenon, in which the different senses intersperse (see Waldenfels 1999: 54–8).

³ ‘Through their physical presence, perception, and response, the spectators become co-actors that generate the performance by participating in the ‘play’. The rules that govern the performance correspond to the rules of a game, negotiated by all participants – actors and spectators alike; they are followed and broken by all in equal measure’ (Fischer-Lichte 2008: 32).

⁴ It is not a new idea to consider listening in its directed and focused aspects as an activity of the listener. But our evaluation of listening puts a different emphasis on this relation as it accentuates the possibly resulting impression of being intensely involved, even immersed, by the heard content.

⁵ See the Third Thesis (Fischer-Lichte 2004: 18).