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The following is excerpted from Dramaturgy of Sound in the Avant-garde and Postdramatic Theatre by Mladen Ovadija.
But what is sound to theatre, or theatre to sound? What would be the motive and the cue for our cry for sound? Whatever the answers to this quasi-Shakespearean question, it holds true that sound has become the subject of renewed interest in recent theatre discourse.
In theatre, as in life, sound is born and dies with action. The transitory life of sound is essentially dramatic. It becomes audible only when a moving mass of gaseous, liquid, or solid matter encounters an obstacle to create whistling, trumpeting, hums, shrills, babbles, gurgles, shrieks, drumbeats, rings, and the like. Sound emanates from the stage in the form of vocal utterances (speech, chanting, and singing), instrumental renditions (music), and the clamour of environmental onstage and offstage events (noise). We perceive it as a sensory attraction caused by a movement of air coming from an animate source (such as a performer) or an inanimate source (perhaps a part of stage setting). We perceive sound directly without necessarily knowing its source or meaning: it simply escapes mere denotative function. Sound, thus, not only reveals dramatic performance: it is perhaps more appropriate to say, sound is performance.
Sound by its very nature contradicts and destabilizes the objectivity, certainty, and distinctiveness of sight on which Cartesian logocentrism relies. It has thus become a part of the weaponry in the struggle of the historical avant-garde against the closure of representation of the dramatic text, which Jacques Derrida analyzes. However, highlighting the role of sound in theatre does not mean that we ought to consider aurality as the preferred sense of performance and reception. Quite the contrary, the spatiotemporal reality of the stage is an area where sight and sound overlap in a complex relationship. David Burrows notes that “at the same time that the viewer in each of us is stepping back from the world and sorting its contents out into discrete entities, the listener in each of us is merging with a range of its activity.” Experiencing theatre (listening/watching/being there) is like stepping across a crevasse without looking down; we hear sound emanating from an “opaque” depth and moving toward a “clear” horizon of meaning. Theatre sound presupposes our emotional and cognitive engagement: our sensual immersion in the event and reflection on its possible meaning. But what appears as a tidy resolution, a dialectic unity of opposites that build the dramatic story, is undone by a series of constantly renewed dichotomies in performance. It is the dichotomies of sound and meaning, speech and language, time and space, body and sense, performance and text, which lie at the core of theatre theory and practice, layered with ancient history and contemporary urgency.
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