Editorial comment: hearing theatre

The human ear offers not just another hole in the body, but a hole in the head.

--Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead¹

Los Angeles, 1986:

The second half of Ishmael Houston-Jones's improvisatory performance at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) begins in complete darkness. We hear the shaking of a can, followed by what sounds like marbles bouncing across the floor. Houston-Jones's voice joins in with a soft "Here, mothy-mothy, din-din."² The curious cycle of rattling can, scattering objects, and human invocation continues, each growing in intensity until still in the dark we gradually pick up the distinctive scent of naphthalene. As Houston-Jones asks in his program notes, can an audience "see" his dance?

Buenos Aires, 2005:

I place my hands on the guide's shoulders, and my friends hold on to me. We're led into a pitch-black performance space at the Kónex Foundation. My hands are passed off to another guide and then to another. When directed, I sit down but still cannot see a thing. For the next seventy minutes we thirty-two audience members remain in complete darkness while the Grupo Ojcuro Teatro Ciego performs Argentinean Roberto Arlt's 1937 play about worker alienation, The Desert Isle. We're swept away on the office employees' escapist mass hallucination through an intricate sound design, distinct smells, special tactile effects, voices, and the touch of actors' bodies whirling all around us. It is only at the curtain call, when the lights come up barely enough for us to make out our surroundings, that I discover I'm in a rehearsal room maybe one-third the size of the performance space I had imagined, that sixteen of us are seated in a row facing another row of sixteen barely ten feet away, and that nine actors (some seeing, some blind) had produced what I'd perceived as a swarming throng.

These two experiences bracket my own conscious engagement with multisensorial theatrical performances, and during this twenty-year period I've become increasingly intrigued with the idea of de-privileging the visual in theatre through a consideration of specific instances of aurality in performance. Thus it is with great pleasure that I introduce this special issue on "hearing theatre." I must admit, however, that the actual editing experience'notwithstanding the breadth and quality of the essays contained within this issue's pages'has brought home to me just how far theatre studies has yet to go in critically engaging with the non-visual in performance. As Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead quite bluntly state, "Although aural notions of silence, noise, groove, transmission, and the universal parasite of interference have all received widespread currency inside the various domains of contemporary theory, they are most typically employed like migrant workers, obliged to cultivate somebody else's juicy literary analogies before being trucked off to the next field."³

In my own work on aurality in performance, I have turned to recent theories of avant-garde radiophonic art. Theatrical performance and radiophonics are not nearly as divorced as one might expect, given the typical presumed reliance of the former on the present body in contrast to the latter's bodily absence. Contrary to the image we may have of radio airwaves as exclusively extracorporeal signals, for scholars such as Allen S. Weiss, Kahn, and Whitehead, the mediating term in radiophonic signification is the human body itself. Joe Milutis asserts, "[T]he body is source, substance, and medium of radio. [ . . . ] The radio artist is both producer and consumer, audience and performer, of his own electroacoustical surroundings."⁴ Radiophonic works, to cadge Weiss's term, "recorporealize" the human voice,⁵ and radiophonic theorists seek to account for radio's splitting and multiplying of the body: "In radio, not only is the voice separated from the body, and not only does it return to the speaker as a disembodied presence'it is, furthermore, thrust into the public arena to mix its sonic destiny with that of other voices."⁶ When theorized as such, the physical radiophonic experience is not necessarily as solitary as the reader might...