Sound as performance: from the periphery to performance form

Abstract

In the light of a growing body of work during the last decade created by performance makers that seems to foreground sound within the performance montage, this research has sought to address the emergence of sound as orientation in performance where orientation can be understood as both the performance maker and the audience approaching the work through the “frame” of aurality. In drifting across the work of practitioners making during the twentieth century who engaged with sounds ability to perform, a number of proclivities were identified that would go on to inform work that takes sound as an orientation. Namely, an engagement with audiences as the co-creators of the work, a concern with generative structures, a sense of the hauntological qualities of sound transmission and relationality in it’s political guise. These factors were then seen to be structuring elements at play in I was there… (2010: 2013), the work considered as a case study from this practice based research. It emerged that central to the work of sound as orientation were a series of practices engaging with the nature of an audiences’ encounter with a sound as orientation piece, the way in which such works create a performative subject and the political quality of the sociality they produce