Hearing Difference: The Third Ear in Experimental, Deaf, and Multicultural Theater

Chapter 1. The Third Ear

Chapter 1 The Third Ear H earing Difference is about the connections between hearing and deafness in experimental, Deaf, and multicultural theater. In this work, I focus on how we might articulate a Deaf aesthetic, and more specifically, on how we can understand moments of "deafness" in theater works that do not simply reinscribe a hearing bias back into our analysis. In the already well-archived history of experimental sound arts, physical, and cross-cultural theater, there is a rich exploration of the use of sound and silence in relation to the moving body to critique mainstream modes of representation and to produce new art practices. However, all too often the implications of deafness as part of the theatrical sensorium are omitted, and no comparative study bet\iVeen deaf theaters and these other theaters has yet been done. Listening with the Third Ear These intersections of hearing, deafness, multiculturalism, and performance indicate newly emerging cultural practices. Several scholars-including Lennard Davis, H-Dirksen Bauman, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, Mairian Corker, Owen Wrigley, and Harlan Lane-have laid much of the critical groundwork on the importance of Deafstudies. Much ofthis work charts the cultural and political histories of the Deaf communiry, but it also grapples with epistemological issues about the audist bias built into cultural notions concerning the five senses, voice, and the normal body (issues that have implications for both deaf and hearing people). Davis and Bauman, in particular, have made explicit pleas for the extension of Deaf studies into the areas of art and multiculturalism. HEARING DIFFERENCE My own work-in which I expand the model of what I am calling the "third ear" as a device for a cross-sensory listening across domains of sound, silence, and the moving body in performance-forms a partial response to, and an elaboration of, their wide-ranging labors. My argument, for example, extends their concerns regarding the need for a rigorous unpacking of the embedded sensorial paradigms in the cultural imagination, because deafness as a repressed construct in the critical discourse remains vastly undertheorized, not only in its perceptual complexities but also in its connections to social and political arenas. In relation to the cultural empowerment of the disenfranchised, much has already been written about the need for a nuanced understanding of multiple voices and the right to speak. Less, however, has been written about listening to the other. Not only do we have great difficulty "seeing" the other, but we also have great difficulty "hearing" the other as well. All too often, cultural biases toward Deaf culture and deafness merge with those of multiculturalism, both important sites for thinking "otherness." As we sort out these embedded notions of deafness/hearing, we can better understand the transformative potential of theater for forging emergent and heterogeneous social spaces that lead to more supple listening and, therefore, more supple politics. These moments at the edge of hearing where hearing and deafness meet, whether parts of our everyday lives or on stage, are not only complex and fleeting but are also often left unacknowledged. To begin to map out these sensibilities as they come into contact with each other, I have adopted the notion of the third ear as a method of hybrid listening. "Hearing" across an unfamiliar pastiche of sonic and visual space-or even "hearing" that we cannot in fact literally hear-necessitates a third ear, an improvisational cross-sensory mode of listening. Listening with the third ear shifts our attention from the overt content of the performance to its nuanced forms of expression. We become more involved with the felt sense of the performance as its movements unfold: the silences, the gaps bet\iVeen image and sound, the incongruities bet\iVeen movement and text, the dissonant intercessions of noise and gesture, and the positions ofthe performing bodies that speak to us. The third ear is my THE THIRD EAR attempt to appropriate, and then revise, a term that will encompass both "spectator" and "audience" with their many implications for the vagaries of moving across categories of difference. Hearing Loss I first encountered what I now call the third ear at the age of six, when the signs of diminished hearing started as an insistent static cycling in my ears and turned into a pattern of sudden, sometimes sustained, distorted gaps in the sonic landscape. By seven I had been outfitted with a box hearing aid that hung in a case...