Contemporary Australian Gothic Theatre Sound

Miles Henry O’Neil

ORCID ID: 0000-0003-0192-7783

Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

March 2018

Faculty of Victorian College of the Arts & Melbourne Conservatorium of Music

University of Melbourne

Abstract

This practice-based research analyses the significance of sonic dramaturgies in the development and proliferation of contemporary Australian Gothic theatre. Taking an acoustemological approach, I consider the dramaturgical role of sound and argue that it is imperative to the construction and understanding of contemporary Gothic theatre and that academic criticism is emergent in its understanding. By analysing companies and practitioners of contemporary Australian Gothic theatre, I identify and articulate their innovative contributions towards what has been called “the Sonic Turn”. My case studies include Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm and practitioner Tamara Saulwick. I argue that the state of Victoria has a particular place in the development of contemporary Gothic theatre and highlight the importance of the influences of Gothic Rock, rock band aesthetics, Nick Cave, and the Gothic myths and legends and specific landscapes of Victoria. I identify dramaturgical languages that describe the function of sound in the work of these practitioners and the crucial emergence of sound as a dominant affective device and its use in representing imagined landscapes of post-colonial Australia. I also analyse sound in relation to concepts of horror and trauma. I position my practice and my work as co-artistic director of the Suitcase Royale within the Sonic Turn and in relation to other Gothic theatre companies and practitioners. Drawing on theories of spectrality and presence, I formulate a theoretical language of the Sonic Gothic as it relates to contemporary Australian theatre. I contend that contemporary Australian Gothic theatre is culturally unique in its preoccupation with sound and that sonic experiments in the Gothic are creating new understandings of the use of sound in theatre. My creative work, a soundscape for theatre entitled Disappearing into Darkness, is submitted as a high- quality Mp3 file accompanying the written dissertation. It was created as an alternative text and will be used as the foundational material for the development of a new work of Australian Gothic dance theatre.

ii Declaration

I, Miles Henry O’Neil, declare that:

i. this thesis comprises only my original work towards the degree of Doctor of Philosphy,

except where indicated;

ii. due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used;

and iii. the thesis is under the maximum word limit in length, exclusive of bibliographies

and appendices.

Signed:

Miles Henry O’Neil

March 2018

iii Preface

This research has been undertaken with the support of: The Australian Postgraduate Award (2014-2017).

I am extremely grateful for this provision and the research opportunities it has afforded me during my candidature.

iv Acknowledgements

Firstly, I cannot write another word without thanking my principle supervisor Professor

Mary Luckhurst. I would have been lost at sea without Mary, who took it upon herself to guide and teach me through my writing. Mary took a genuine interest in what I was writing about and in doing so, has help shape my capacity to think. For this friendship and guidance, and the many cups of coffee, I am forever grateful. I would also like to say a heartfelt thanks to my co-supervisor A/Prof Alyson Campbell, and past co-supervisors

A/Prof Matthew Delbridge and Richard Murphett, and also to Rinske Ginsberg. Your insights and enthusiasm have been invaluable, and it has been a genuine privilege to work with you all. I would also like to thank the further guidance and kindness I received from

Dr Yoni Prior (DU), Dr Louise Morris (DU). I am so grateful Tamara Saulwick, Peter

Knight, Thomas Henning, Thomas Wright, Liam Barton, and David Franzke for being so generous in with their time and answers during my interviews. This research would not have been possible without you. I would like to give a big thanks to my mates and co- artistic directors of the Suitcase Royale Glen Walton and Joseph O’Farrell for casting anchor and navigating the wild seas of making independent theatre, touring, and playing in a band for the past 15 years, and to Tom Salisbury who jumped aboard along the way and helped keep the wind in the sails. I would like to say thanks to all the friends and family who asked me over dinner or at a party how I was going and then smiled encouragingly and let me rattle on. Your kind eyes, beers, and pats on the back sustained me. I want to deeply and senceirly thank my parents, Peggy and John, and my sisters, Lil and Rosie, for their endless support and encouragement. Finally, to Clancy, who, at the end of this project, pulled me from my desk and led me to the sea.

v Table of Contents

Abstract ii Declaration iii Preface iv Acknowledgements v Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Aims and Background 1 The Sonic Turn 2 Contemporary Australian Gothic Theatre 6 Recent and Current Productions 8 Australian Gothic and Picnic at Hanging Rock 14 The Post-Colonial 16 Picnic at Hanging Rock and the Sonic Turn 22 Independent Gothic Theatre in Victoria 25 Thesis Structure 27 Chapter 2 Black Lung Theatre and Australian Gothic Rock 30 Gothic Rock and Melbourne 37 Shock Aesthetics 42 Transgression and Metatheatrical Tactics 46 Sound and Provocation 49 Conclusion 58 Chapter 3 Tamara Saulwick: Dramaturgies of the Psychic Echo Chamber 60 The Sonic Gothic 61 The Unheimlich 63 Saulwick as Gothic Artist 64 Pin Drop 65 The Sonic Haunted House 68 Darkness 70 Sonic Ghosts 72 The Sonic Grotesque 74 Sustaining Suspense and the Sustained Note of Terror 78 The Psychic Echo Chamber 83 The Multi-Vocal Uncanny 84 Conclusion 89 Chapter 4 Disappearing into Darkness 91 Background: Early Musical influences and the Shipwreck Coast 92 Early Sonic Experiments 96 The Suitcase Royale: Developing a Dramaturgy of Listening 98 The Influence of Australian Gothic Cinema 102 Australian Gothic Cinema Sound: The Proposition 104 Sonic Strategies of Australian Gothic Cinema in the Suitcase Royale 106 My Radio Experiment: Pretty Weird Shit 109 The Beginnings of Disappearing into Darkness: The Performed Ballad 109 Disappearing into Darkness: Composition 111 1. Recorded Environmental Sound 112 A Dramaturgy of Sonic Weird Melancholy 112 Aeolian Recordings 113 Windmills 114 Granular Synthesis: A Dramaturgy of Defamilarisation 116 Gothic Drones: Creating Sonic Entrapment 117 vi Defamilarising the Bush 118 Recording the Ironbark Basin 119 A Dramaturgy of Sonic Pursuit: Getting the Listener Lost 121 Dramaturgies of the Sonic Grotesque: Birds 122 Gothic Rock and the Cockatoo Screech 123 Kookaburras and Crows: Semi-Human Laughter 124 Cockatoo Tritons 124 The Ocean: A Dramaturgy of Sonic Presence 125 2. Voice, Song, and Ballad 127 A Darkness: Ballad One 129 Lost and the Leaving Song: A Dramaturgy of Sonic Exposure 133 3. Musical Compositions 134 A Dramaturgy of Engulfment 135 Future Stagings 139 Conclusion 140 Thesis Conclusion 143 Bibliography 146 Filmography 169

vii Chapter 1 - Introduction

Aims and Background

This practice-based thesis investigates soundscapes in contemporary Australian Gothic theatre, with a particular emphasis on Victoria. I posit that sound is crucial in the construction and reception of the contemporary Gothic in its endeavours to evoke landscapes, environments, and atmospheres of horror, and I argue that contemporary Gothic theatre practitioners are making significant innovations through their engagement with what has been called “the Sonic Turn” (Curtin 2014, 5). I investigate the strategies of constructing Gothicised soundscapes used by three different companies and I explore my own relation to the contemporary Gothic and the Sonic Turn through my creative submission, a soundscape for theatre entitled Disappearing into

Darkness (2018).

I approach this research as a practitioner - a musician and theatre-maker - and as a theorist, with the result that the thesis is undertaken and organised as 50% written dissertation and

50% creative work. I am a Melbourne-based actor, writer, musician, sound designer, and co-artistic director of theatre company/band the Suitcase Royale. Since 2006, I have been creating works of Australian Gothic theatre. My work borrows from rock and folk band aesthetics and the visceral ambience of attending a live band event and melds them with theatrical conventions of narrative, stage acting, and character. My work has always incorporated live songs, recorded soundscapes, and the onstage operation of core sound and lighting equipment. The works have received multiple awards and regularly tour nationally in Australia and internationally across Australasia, North America, and

Europe1. Suitcase Royale formed as a band in 2003 and has included live music in all theatre productions since 2006. Until undertaking this research, I had not considered the

1 https://thesuitcaseroyale.wordpress.com/about/. Accessed February 7, 2018. 1 direct role sound played in the evocation of stage environments, imagined landscape, and atmospheres of horror in my work. Through my early research, I began to appreciate that sound was crucial to my understanding and creation of contemporary Gothic theatre and that sound-led dramaturgies may be key to understanding how Gothic theatre artists are challenging theatrical form. The creative work, Disappearing into Darkness, is a 40- minute soundscape consisting of three contemporary ballads, processed and manipulated field recordings, and instrumental pieces. The soundscape is an endeavour to evoke the traumatic histories and landscapes on the Shipwreck Coast. My case studies informed my practice, as did my work with Suitcase Royale and solo experiments in the writing and broadcasting of a radio play entitled Pretty Weird Shit (2014). Disappearing into

Darkness will be used as an alternative text in the creation of a new work of sound-led

Australian Gothic dance theatre currently planned for performance at Dark Mofo Festival in Tasmania in 2019.

The Sonic Turn

The choice to approach my dissertation through practice-based research in theatre sound and case study was a result of the neglect of the dramaturgy of sound in academia. Sound studies as a discipline is still emergent. There are significant challenges in gathering information regarding the creation of theatre sound design and the creation of theatre through sound-led dramaturgies, hence my incorporation of interview material. I argue that contemporary Gothic theatre makes significant innovations in sonic dramaturgies.

The discipline of theatrical dramaturgy has so far focused on writing, acting, and directing, and has neglected sound. Even progressive dramaturgies such as Eugenio

Barba’s which do not focus on the written word, but on the “actor’s body”, focus only on the “visible” and assumes that sound is an action generated by an actor’s onstage voice, referred to as “sonorous dramaturgy” and “vocal action” (Barba 2010, 23-44). Also

2 focusing mainly on the actor’s voice, Mladen Ovadja’s Dramaturgy of Sound in the

Avant-Garde and Postdramatic Theatre (2013) discusses sound dramaturgies as they relate to avant-garde and contemporary theatre. Ovadja takes a historical approach to his research by tracing the use of voice and sound from the modernist avant-garde through to the early 21st-century. Ovadja suggests that the avant-garde’s preoccupation with sound and voice laid the foundations for a sonic focus in postdramatic theatre which, through the decentralisation of text, allows other stage elements such as sound and lighting to become “independent actor[s]” through which performance can be created (7). My analysis seeks to identify and articulate dramaturgical terminology for describing both the formal aspects of a Gothic soundscape or sound, and for describing the purpose and desired effect of the use of particular sounds. I also analyse why sound is so important to the creation of contemporary Australian Gothic theatre.

Contemporary Gothic theatre practitioners in Australia are obsessed by the invisible and the intangible and are constantly seeking to cultivate an experience in the spectator which is dependent on stretching the imagination to the full and encourages a seeing and hearing that suggests presences and worlds beyond the mere parameters of the stage area or performance environment. This connects with Marvin Carlson’s studies on hauntings

(2001), Jane Goodall’s work on stage presence (2008), and with Mary Luckhurst and

Emilie Morin’s work on theatre and spectrality (2014). I thus draw on spectrality theory, presence, and also on the languages of acoustemology and the emergent dramaturgical theorisations of sound and seek to analyse the complexities of theatre sound practices.

The generation of sound in contemporary Australian Gothic theatre is intimately connected with the evocation of imagined landscape, often specific sites in Australia.

Unlike film, theatre cannot achieve the realistic effects of horror, nor reproduce the variety of realistic landscapes. Gothic theatre practitioners are therefore particularly

3 preoccupied with the task of summoning Australian landscapes and environments with sound and music and with ways of evoking sonic atmosphere and horror narratives. Some practitioners have gone further and attempt to narrate a character’s or actor’s action or emotion through sound, such as a person’s engulfment by a vast desert or rocky terrain, a suicide, or a mental collapse.

“Is it sound’s turn?” asks Patrice Pavis in the preface to Theatre Noise: The Sound of

Performance (2011, x), a collection of essays collated from the 2009 conference Theatre

Noise at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London. This conference was the first of its kind (Kendrick and Roesner 2011, xvi). Adrian Curtin has answered in the affirmative, suggesting theatre (unlike literature) is uniquely equipped to demonstrate sonic ideas and experiences. Curtin established “the Sonic Turn” in his book Avant-Garde

Theatre Sound (2014, 5) noting the increasing interest in the role sound plays in theatre and performance. Although situating the research as part of the contemporary Sonic Turn,

Curtin’s project is historical, focusing his analysis on a frame beginning with Leopold

Lewis’ The Bells (1871) and concluding with Antonin Artaud’s sound design for The

Cenci (1935). Ross Brown provided the first in-depth analysis of the function of sound in theatre in his book Sound: A Reader in Theatre Practice (2009). Before this book, analysis of the role of sound in theatre tended to centre on instructional guides for sound design and how-to books on composition (Bracewell 1993; Kaye and Lebrecht 1992;

Leonard 2001). Brown (2014) advocates for a “new era of aurality in theatre […] an exploratory modelling of new ways of ‘ear’ thinking in theatre scholarship” (105). Lynne

Kendrick, in her book Theatre Aurality (2017), suggests a need for a reexamination of theatre through the ear (rather than the eye). Kendrick argues that a recent surge of interest in theatre sound seeks to trace “a growing movement of sonic aesthetics in theatre” (xx).

Kendrick suggests contemporary theatre audiences are being “reconfigured through

4 sound” and an increasing number of contemporary theatre artists are creating what she terms “sonic-led theatre” (xxiii). Indeed, there has been a recent shift to establish sound as an equally vital element to theatre as the visual. Most recently, along with Kendrick,

Marcus Chye Tan’s Acoustic Interculturalism: Listening to Performance (2009), George

Home-Cook’s Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves (2015), and Curtin and

David Roesner’s Sounds Good (2016), have continued to advocate a focus on the power of sound in theatre and argued for a need to identify and articulate dramaturgies of sound.

There has also been a recent shift to acknowledge various combinations of theatre and live music in what is referred to as “gig theatre” (Williams 2017).

Kendrick (2017) argues that theatre can be created from a sound first approach (xxiii).

Using Complicite’s binaural headphone work The Encounter (2016), Kendrick offers the work as an example of “theatre made through sound” (xvi). Binaural recording refers to a method of audio recording that uses two small microphones placed inside the human ear canals, or the ear canals of a foam replica of a human head to replicate the exact sounds heard by the human ears. Recording with both microphones simultaneously, the effect, when listened to with headphones, is a three-dimensional recreation of the recorded sound. In other words, it seems as if you are in the environment the sound was originally recorded in. Although Complicite is not the first theatre company to use this method of recording in theatre, The Encounter has become the most commercially well- known piece of binaural theatre, having experienced a successful four-month Broadway season between September 2015 and January 2016. The Encounter is an example of contemporary headphone theatre, meaning although it is performed in a standard front- on theatre configuration, each audience member must wear a set of headphones to experience the work. The actor works with a combination of live sound created onstage and prerecorded sound manipulated to sometimes appear as if it is live to create the effect

5 of sonic immersion in the Amazon jungle. As Michael Billington notes in review of the work “shut your eyes at any point and you feel, thanks to McBurney’s expressive range and the ingenuity of the sound design by Gareth Fry and Pete Malkin, that you are in the

Amazonian jungle” (2016). It is an interesting provocation to suggest that the work does not require watching, but in fact, becomes more immersive if the spectator is denied the visual. Kendrick (2017) opines “sound in theatre is going through a fundamental change; it is no longer just a matter of (the oft concealed) effect, it can affect the entire means of its production and reception - it can constitute theatre” (original emphasis, xix). This idea is crucial to my thesis and has led me to examine artists such as Tamara Saulwick, who pursue a sound-led approach. Saulwick has recently theorised her work in her dissertation

Connective Moments - Dramaturgy of Sound in Live Performance (2015). Borrowing from Brandon LaBelle, Saulwick writes, “[sound can] facilitate connective moments within as well as between audiences/listeners. Exploring the notion that the dramaturgy of sound can elicit acts of association, memory and imagination” (2015, 11). I argue

Saulwick’s aural strategies have much to do with the creation of Gothic terror and atmospheres of anxiety in her work. I am interested in the ways that Saulwick and others have harnessed sound and advanced practices of the Sonic Turn as it relates to contemporary Australian Gothic theatre.

Contemporary Australian Gothic Theatre

There can be no question that the link between theatre sound studies and the Gothic has been under-explored. I suggest that a sound-led approach to theatre is particularly useful in the evocation of terror and subversion common to works of contemporary theatre identified as Australian Gothic. This analysis focuses only on contemporary Australian Gothic theatre and is not a study of earlier Romantic or melodramatic genres. The contempoarary Gothic is as Catherine Spooner (2006) suggests “a genre deliberately intended to provoke horror

6 and unease” (8). While the tropes of contemporary Australian Gothic theatre are multifarious, consistencies can be identified. Contemporary Gothic theatre is related closely to the uncanny and allows for narratives of repressed secrets, trauma, the monstrous or ‘other’, violence, and the fears and anxieties of contemporary Australians to be staged.

Contemporary Australian Gothic theatre often explores themes of displacement, the terror- inducing effect of the sheer scale of certain landscapes, the terrors of the natural world, the loss of sanity experienced in the face of natural and man-made adversities, and the framing of the landscapes, technologies and people as as mysterious, malevolent, and threatening.

The mapping of contemporary Australian Gothic theatre is patchy and emergent. The contemporary Australian Gothic is a post-1960s phenomenon, post Second World War, and connected to the rise of an increasingly self-confident nation, freeing itself from old bonds with Europe and concerned with its “new” positionality in the Asia Pacific (Blainey

2016; Varney, et al. 2013). There is a wealth of evidence of the proliferation of Australian

Gothic theatre in numerous theatre productions and reviews, among play publishers, and in performing arts festivals such as the Melbourne Fringe, Melbourne Festival, and Dark

Mofo, however, it has not been mapped in any substance. Carleton has taken steps to rectify this through his article Australian Gothic Drama: Mapping a Nation’s Trauma from

Convicts to the Stolen Generation (2015). Carleton identifies Australian Gothic theatre as having its roots in the convict theatre of the early 19th-century and undertakes a mapping of play-texts through to the early 21st-century. Carleton’s study focuses exclusively on play-texts and does not acknowledge contemporary devised performance or the postmodern. Similarly, Andrew Harmsen’s recent dissertation entitled Performing

(Un)Forgiveness: Recognition and the Return of the Colonial Repressed in 21st-Century

Settler Gothic Drama (2017), an extension and deepening of Carleton’s mapping, focuses on four plays at the expense of the devised. Linda Hassall also focuses exclusively on plays in her dissertation Evoking and Excavating Representations of Landscape: How are

7 experiences of landscape explored in the creation and development of a new dramatic play:

Dawn’s Faded Rose (2012) and also in her recent article, Contemporary Theatrical

Landscapes: The Legacy of Romanticism in two examples of contemporary Australian

Gothic drama (2017). Veronica Kelly has identified the Gothic and the Grotesque in the work of playwright Louis Nowra (1998) and John McCallum has identified a specific genre of Bush Gothic plays through 20th-century Australian theatre (2009). McCallum, Kelly,

Hassall, Harmsen, and Carleton’s shared project is to analyse Gothic plays predominantly in relation to white guilt concerning Indigenous genocide and the repressed cultural trauma of white European settlers as communicated through text and scenography. The Australian

Gothic as a broad genre in fiction and film is closely connected to white post-colonial trauma and intergenerational trauma dating from late 18th-century settlement (Gelder

2012; Turcotte 1998) and this is the subject of much Australian Gothic text-based theatre

(Carleton 2015; Harmsen 2015). I am interested in the ways sound, rather than text can evoke Gothic terror and imagined landscapes both as it relates to white guilt, and also to other contemporary Australian cultural fears such as the simultaneously sublime but lethal nature of Australia’s deserts, coast and bushland, extreme climates, dangerous flora and fauna, and the risk of disappearance and violent death. I trace back theatre practitioners’ use of sonic strategies from Australian Gothic cinema scores of the New Wave period, the

Melbourne Gothic Rock guitar sounds of the late 1970s, and the provocative performance strategies of the cult leader of the Melbourne Gothic Rock scene, Nick Cave.

Recent and Current Productions

I argue that contemporary Australian Gothic theatre is booming and has proliferated in the last decade and that it is Australia-wide. In a 2016 post-show panel discussion, during the Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) season of The Secret River, the host of the panel: performer, artistic director, and Kuku Yalanji woman, Lydia Miller, went as far as to

8 suggest “our national genre is horror Gothic” (Arts Centre Melbourne 2016). The panel, including playwright Andrew Bovell, filmmaker Rolf Der Herr, and Ilbijerri Theatre

Company Artistic Director Rachael Maza concurred. Australia is, of course, fertile soil for the Gothic tentacles of repressed secrets, trauma, and violence to take root. These themes can be seen in Australian Gothic works and are very live in Victoria as evidenced by the Malthouse, MTC, and the independent theatres, and are identified consistently by critics. For example, the Malthouse season of Night on Bald Mountain (2014) was reviewed as “a Gothic parable” (Croggon 2014); the 2016 season of Picnic at Hanging

Rock was reviewed as “Australian Gothic, no doubt” (Gow 2016); the 2016 adaptation of

The Secret River was “classified as Australian Gothic” (Harmsen 2015) and the recent adaptation of Jasper Jones (2016) was reviewed as “a work of Australian Gothic so bewitching you didn’t want it to end” (Woodhead 2016). Malthouse and MTC are also using the Gothic as a marketing device. MTC included an article entitled Gothic Features accompanying the Jasper Jones program in which they align the play-text with Southern

Gothic literature; author Paul Galloway writing “the grotesque and the decayed [of southern Gothic literature] would look just as picturesque in our harsh landscape” (2016).

Malthouse also linked Night on Bald Mountain to Picnic at Hanging Rock in its framing and promoted the season as Australian Gothic.2

The 21st-century adoption of the Gothic is not limited to Melbourne and Victoria but can be traced across Australia. Although a detailed mapping is not the project of this thesis,

Gothic theatre companies and recent key works are nationwide. Queensland and the

Northern Territory, for example, produce a large amount of Gothic theatre. Queensland’s

Playlab, an organisation devoted to fostering new theatre writing in Northern Australia,

2 http://malthousetheatre.com.au/whats-on/night-on-bald-mountain. Accessed February 15, 2018.

9 dedicates a section of their website to Gothic Drama and lists two pages of new plays categorised as such.3 Carleton has argued Northern Australia is responsible for the current

Gothic boom and asserts that Queensland and the Northern Territory have produced more

Gothic plays on their stages than the rest of the nation combined (2012, 57). Carleton includes his play Constance Drinkwater and the Final Days of Somerset (2006) as an example of Northern Gothic drama alongside Angela Betzien’s widely acknowledged

Gothic dramas Children of the Black Skirt (2003) and The Hanging (2015). The Gothic is also taking unique musical forms in the North with the “antipodean cousins of The

Addams Family” the Kransky Sisters (Woodhead 2017) celebrating the Gothic in song.

Critics consistently identify Dead Puppets Society Theatre Company as Australian Gothic

(Mckee 2012; St Clair 2014) and its founders market themselves as practitioners of

Australian Gothic puppet theatre.4 Due to the low population of the Northern Territory

(currently estimated at 211,000), state theatre production is notably lower. However, a new Gothic theatre genre labelled “Territory Gothic” was suggested through the review of Knock-em-Down Theatre’s 2001 production Roadhouse (Spunner 2001-2, 10).

Territory Gothic is perhaps best demonstrated through Angela Betzien’s “slice of vernacular Gothic” (Blake 2012), The Dark Room (2009), set in a Northern Territory motel.

Tasmania, as Jim Davidson has suggested, is home to unique Gothic manifestations

(1989, 307-324). Greg Lehman argues, “Tasmania, of all the states of Australia, should be a place with an unsettling Gothic thrall” (2013). Tasmania has fostered a Gothic identity since Marcus Clarke’s 1874 convict novel For the Term of His Natural Life and is marketed as a specifically Gothic tourist location in its tourist literature, particularly in

3 http://www.playlab.org.au/index.php/publications/shop/gothic-drama. Accessed January 29, 2018. 4 http://deadpuppetsociety.com.au/. Accessed February 8, 2018.

10 relation to its brutal convict history at Port Arthur.5 Opening in 2011, the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), consistently utilises the Gothic in its framing, especially with regard to its winter festival Dark Mofo, described as “Australia’s festival of death and darkness” (Carter 2016). Dark Mofo promotes a sound focused program and a central work of the 2017 festival was Siren Song (2017), a sound art collaboration between sound artist Byron J. Scullin and curatorial team Supple Fox (Tom Supple and Hannah Fox).

The work utilised a helicopter rigged with loudspeakers and 450 similar speakers attached to inner-city buildings to deliver a “eerie” and “spooky” vocal soundscape performed by

Carolyn Connors at dawn and at dusk throughout the festival (Delany 2017). Siren Song used the natural reverberation of the Derwent River and the city buildings to create what

Delany describes as a “sonic assault” (ibid.). MONA has had an effect on the Gothic output of other cultural centres on the island, with The Salamanca Arts Centre presenting

Radio Gothic (2016), by The Radio Gothic Collective and Ten Days on the Island Festival programming Dementia 13 (2015), marketed as Gothic horror6 and Murder (2014) by

Erth Visual and Physical Inc, a puppet work built around Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads

(1995) album. Emily Bullock (2017) has identified the television series The Kettering

Incident (2016) as a “Tasmanian Gothic Fairytale” and suggests the series has “all the hallmarks of the Tasmanian Gothic genre” (43). Bullock defines these hallmarks as “an intense sense of claustrophobic insularity and territorial suspicion towards perceived outsiders” resultant from “Tasmania’s physical isolation and social marginalisation” (44).

These hallmarks are also seen in the recent films: Van Diemen’s Land (2009) and The

Hunter (2011). The fact that the series was the most expensive production ever filmed in the state suggests Tasmania is keen to promote its Gothic associations.7

5 http://www.leatherwoodonline.com/history/2004/pa-pw/. Accessed 30 January 2018. 6 http://tendays.org.au/event/dementia-13/. Accessed January 29, 2018. 7 http://www.themercury.com.au/entertainment/tasweekend-kettering-incident-creator-vicki-madden- channels-tasmanian-gothic/news-story/4fefcf73654dabbc36db3130b319f2f8. Accessed January 29, 2018. 11 In New South Wales, there have been notable experiments in sound; Angus Cerini’s The

Bleeding Tree (2015) was a particularly successful example of New Australian Gothic theatre, premiering at The Griffin Theatre in 2015, the play won three Helpmann Awards including Best Play and was subsequently programmed for a return season at the Sydney

Theatre Company in 2017. The Bleeding Tree was noted for its textual rhythm and marketed as an Australian murder ballad (though there is no singing or ballad style writing in the work) and as Australian Gothic.8 It was also noted for Steve Toulmin’s evocative sound design, which Bec Caton noted: “made it easy to forget [we were] not on a farm in the middle of a dry summer’s day” (2017). Caton suggests that sound was a fundamental element of the performance and was so convincing it had a transporting effect on the critic. It was sound that was responsible for the powerful evocation of the dry Australian setting of the play. More commonly, critics have mainly focused on visuals at the expense of sound. Richard Watts notes that the 2016 Sydney Theatre company season was shrouded in Gothic themes in his annual review claiming, “Colonial guilt and the

Australian Gothic cast their shadow over 2016 STC season” (2016). In this season, Gothic playwright Louis Nowra’s play The Golden Age (1985), Angela Betzein’s The Hanging

(2016) and Andrew Bovell's adaption of The Secret River (2016) were all presented as

Australian Gothic (ibid.). The 2014 Vivid Music Festival program included a night of new Australian music titled: Gothic (2014). The 2018 Sydney Festival promoted their programming of singer-songwriter Aldous Harding as Gothic9 and programmed Jobbine

Standish and Jasmin Tarasin’s Ghost Train with music composed by “Gothic Australian” band HTRK (Curran 2018).

8 https://www.sydneytheatre.com.au/whats-on/productions/2017/the-bleeding-tree. Accessed February 2, 2018. 9 https://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/2018/aldous-harding/?q=Gothic. Accessed February 2, 2018. 12 In Western Australia, Siren Song was recently restaged at the 2018 Perth Festival. Perth

Festival adapted the original work, blending Indigenous singers Kristal Kickett and Karla

Hart with original singer Carolyn Connors and singers Deborah Cheetham, Tanya Tagaq and Tara Tiba (Westwood 2018). This is not by accident, the Gothic lends itself to

Indigenous performers due, in part, to Indigenous traditions of orality. The Gothic is also being deployed by experimental music/art collective Genrefonix. Their music work, The

Ghosts of Fremantle (2018), a multimedia show featuring original horror music and soundscapes performed alongside imagery of Fremantle's Gothic architecture was presented in the Fremantle Prison Theatre.10 Fremantle is often promoted through a

Gothic frame, particularly the Fremantle Lunatic Asylum, which is claimed to be the

“most haunted building in the southern hemisphere” (Morgan cited in Orr 2013). It is interesting to note that in 2018 Perth is home to both Indigenous and colonial sonic Gothic experiments. On the one hand, a Eurocentric colonial Gothic sound experiment marketed towards tourists is taking place in Fremantle, while simultaneously Indigenous song is creating a sonic “insurgence” (Supple cited in Delany 2018) each morning and night, changing Perth’s CBD into an “eerie […] concert hall” (Delany 2018). Both are exemplary of dramaturgies of sound used to frame the man-made landscape of Perth, one of the most isolated cities in the world, as Gothic. In South Australia, the 2018 Adelaide

Festival premiere of Alice Oswald’s Memorial (2018) was marketed as otherworldly and haunting.11 In 2017, Adelaide Festival Centre presented the “Gothic circus cabaret”, The

Carnival of Lost Souls (Black 2017). Adelaide Festival also marketed Manual Cinema’s production Lula Del Ray (2017) as contemporary Gothic12 and Adelaide’s Windmill

Theatre promoted their co-production with the State Theatre Company of South Australia of Pinocchio (2016) as Gothic.13

10 https://fringeworld.com.au/whats_on/the-ghosts-of-fremantle-fw2018. Accessed February 13, 2017. 11 https://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/2018/memorial. Accessed February 7, 2018. 12 https://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/2017/LulaDelRay. Accessed January 27, 2018. 13 https://windmill.org.au/show/pinocchio. Accessed February 13, 2017. 13 Australian Gothic and Picnic at Hanging Rock

The 2018 Malthouse Theatre’s sold-out return season of Tom Wright’s Picnic at Hanging

Rock (2016), promoted as specifically Victorian Gothic theatre (Malthouse 2018), is useful for establishing Australian Gothic tropes. The production is also an example of the

Gothic development from its colonial roots to its current post-colonial and transnational manifestations. The canonical status of Picnic at Hanging Rock is testified by the inclusion of Wright’s Picnic at Hanging Rock in the 2018 Victorian high school VCE syllabus.14 Since premiering in March 2016, this version of Picnic, a co-production with

Black Swan State Theatre Company, adapted for the stage by Tom Wright and directed by Malthouse Theatre Artistic Director Matthew Lutton, has toured internationally to The

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, in January 2017, and returned to the UK in late

February 2018 for a season at the Barbican Centre, London. The success and resonance of Lutton’s Picnic is instructive. Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is widely regarded as one of the most celebrated Australian novels and is often referred to as exemplary of

Australian Gothic fiction. Filmmaker Peter Weir first adapted the novel in 1975. The success of Weir’s adaptation brought both the film and Lindsay’s novel to a wider audience. This popularity has continued into the 21st-century, most notably through the

Malthouse/Black Swan stage adaptation and a Foxtel television adaptation, filmed entirely in western Victoria, slated for international release in mid-2018.15 On February

24 2018, performance company Asking For Trouble, staged a “Picnic at Hanging Rock

Flashmob” to belatedly mark the 50th anniversary of Lindsay’s publication (Webb 2018).

So ingrained in Australian culture is the Picnic at Hanging Rock narrative it is understood by Indigenous cultural commentator Stan Grant as “a white dreaming story, an initiation into the land itself” (2017b).

14 http://malthousetheatre.com.au/whats-on/picnic-at-hanging-rock-2018. Accessed February 7, 2018. 15 https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/the-screen-guide/t/picnic-at-hanging-rock-2018/35329/. Accessed February 7, 2018. 14

What makes Picnic at Hanging Rock Australian Gothic? The plot centres around the disappearance of three schoolgirls while on a field trip to Hanging Rock, in Victoria’s

Macedon Ranges. The girls set out on Valentines Day 1900 under the supervision of the headmistress, Mrs. Appleyard. After lunch, four girls climb the monolith. All but one never return. Their vanishing remains unexplained, a fact which reverberates through the community, evoking increasing levels of hysteria and culminating in the suicide of the vanished girl’s friend Sara, forced to remain at school rather than attend the field trip, and

Mrs Appleby, who has been brutally oppressing Sara and who, at the conclusion of the novel, throws herself from the peak of Hanging Rock. It is a work of fiction which draws on what are understood to be Australian Gothic tropes of the horror of colonial displacement, the terror-inducing effect of the sheer scale of the landscape, the lurking terrors of the natural world, the loss of sanity experienced by colonial settlers in the face of natural and man-made adversities, and the framing of the landscape as mysterious, malevolent, and threatening to immigrant European cultures.

Although the narrative is fiction, both Hanging Rock and human disappearance or death in the Australian landscape are real and many believe the Hanging Rock myth to be true.

Hanging Rock is located 50 kilometres northwest of Melbourne. Unexplained disappearance is a reality in Australia due to the vastness and extremities of the country.

The Australian landscape can easily kill, drown, dehydrate, or vanish people and often does (La Canna 2017; Marks 2018). This has created a deep cultural fear of Nature in

Australia, particularly landscapes of the bush, sites of colonial trauma such as prisons, asylums, mining towns, stormy ocean coasts, vast desert plains and ancient rock formations. It has also encouraged a mythologising of white vanishing which is harnessed and exploited by the Gothic (Pierce 1999; Tilley 2012). Australian Gothic narratives

15 promote a reading of the landscape as brooding, engulfing, and malevolent. This Gothic reading of the landscape is an inherited colonial framing of the Australian natural world beginning with the arrival of the First Fleet and the establishment of the first British penal colony in Botany Bay in January 1788. Gerry Turcotte (1998) highlights the colonial positioning of Australia as “the dark subconscious of Britain […] for all intents and purposes, Gothic par excellence, the dungeon of the world” (1). Australian theatre theorists have worked hard to frame contemporary drama within traumatic settler histories. However, the Gothic has progressed along with a contemporary repositioning of Australia in the Asia Pacific and has developed from colonial framings to the post- colonial and more recently, a transnational focus.

The Post-Colonial

Post-colonialism’s connection to Europe was initially established and theorised in The

Empire Wrights Back (1994). Authors Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin asserted that the essential impulse of the post-colonial is both a rewriting and a writing back to empire to “interrogate European discourse and discursive strategies from its position within and between two worlds” (196). In doing so, according to Ashcroft,

Griffiths and Tiffin, post-colonial writing “denies the privilege of English”, rejects the

“metropolitan power of the means of communication” and also captures and remoulds language to new usages, marking “a separation from the site of the colonial privilege”

(38). In their study, Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin suggested that the

post-colonial world is one in which destructive cultural encounter is changing to an acceptance of difference on equal terms. Both literary theorists and cultural historians are beginning to recognise cross-culturality as the potential termination point of an apparently endless human history of conquest and annihilation justified by the myth of group ‘purity’ and as the basis on which the post-colonial world can be creatively stabilised. (36)

16 As the debates on lands rights (DeVries 2001; McNab 2009) and the Australia Day date

(Wahlquist 2018) indicate, Australia is nowhere near this utopian equality. Indeed, there is debate as to whether Australia is even “post” colonisation (Heiss 2003). The Empire

Writes Back is positioned within the early wave of post-colonial studies and assumes that the primary object of investigation in the arts is the writer. This literary approach still tends to dominate the study of post-colonial theatre (as it does Gothic theatre studies) and is in itself contentious because theatre has many elements other than writing and writing is deprivileged by many contemporary Australian theatre makers. In Australia, post- colonial theatre studies has been championed by Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins in their book Post-colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (1996). Recently, Helen

Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo’s Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural

Transactions in Australasia (2007) and Denise Varney, et al.’s Theatre and Performance in The Asia-Pacific: Staging Regional Modernities in the Global Era (2013) have argued for transnationalism and stressed Australia’s position as part of the Asia Pacific, acknowledging a shift towards theatrical collaborations which prioritise forms of performance other than text. This new emphasis on transnationalism and Australia’s new engagement with the Asia Pacific is reflected in the work of other Australian theatre theorists exploring the establishment of culturally specific anxieties and traumas rather than a writing back to Empire from the unfamiliar “dungeon of the world” (Turcotte 1998,

1).

Tompkins’ examination of “the anxieties that emerge from contestations related to spatiality” in Unsettling Space: Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre

(2006) examines colonial repressed trauma and the evocation of landscapes of anxiety

(16). Tompkins interrogates the “settlement” of Australia, referring to European invasion.

Her term “unsettlement” is used to recognise that settlement in Australia “is both

17 profoundly unstable and the cause of cultural anxiety” (6). For Tompkins, unsettlement refers to the “disruptive process by which ‘settlement’ took place” (ibid.). Tompkins aligns unsettlement with Una Chaudhuri’s concept of geopathology (1997), the problem of place and place as problem (55). Referring to a generalised “Ibsen Protagonist”,

Chaudhuri writes “the quintessential Ibsen hero experiences himself geopathically; when he is where he should feel at home, when he is where he is supposedly belongs, then does he sense himself most deeply out of place” (65). Chaudhuri’s concept of geopathology has much in common with the framing of the Australian landscape as Gothically uncanny.

However, for Chaudhuri, alienation is created from within. For Tompkins, alienation is created by a reaction to the enormity and otherness of the landscape. This is an important distinction of the Australian Gothic in contrast to European and American theorisations of the Gothic. For Australian Gothic theatre practitioners, psychic distress is understood to be caused by a disturbing and malevolent environment: a non-Indigenous moral value is placed on the landscape which is constructed as menacing, even evil. As Tompkins notes, “the geopathology that constitutes Australian theatre requires an awareness of what lies beyond the theatre’s site” (4). Geopathology and unsettlement are modern manifestations of Freud’s unheimlich. Freud (1919) writes,

we are reminded that the word ‘heimlich’ is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight [...] everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come into the light. (224)

Freud’s notion of the unheimlich is predicated on recognition of the familiar and of

‘home’; for European settlers, the Australian landscape was neither familiar nor home, thus this concept is problematic. Histories of European settlement focus on alienation and on Australia being “a world of reversals” (Turcotte 1998, 1). This is crucial to the trauma

Gothic practitioners exploit. Australian theatre theorists have been at pains to develop theories of alienation and the uncanny that are specific to Australia. 18

Gelder and Jacob’s theorisation of alienation in their book Uncanny Australia (1998) explores similar terrain to Tompkins’ unsettlement. As Tompkins writes, “Gelder and

Jacobs’ uncanny provides a means of accommodating - metaphorically if not literally - manifestations of spatial anxiety in Australia. Gelder and Jacobs assert an Australian- specific uncanny resultant from the fear and anxiety caused by the repression and silencing of what they term the “Aboriginal sacred” (1). Tompkins suggests that the

Gelder/Jacobs uncanny allows for spatial strategies which may “take place in the connection between the staged world(s) and the ‘real’ world; it may also take place in a gap between what is staged and what audiences know to be true outside the theatre” (12).

Both Tompkins’ unsettlement and the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny are symptomatic of the current post-colonial positionality of Australian theatre, that is, of the cultural majority coming to terms with its colonial history. Gelder and Jacobs argue that in post-colonial

Australia, an Australian specific uncanny, adapted from Freud’s uncanny can be identified and explored. They write,

in this moment of de-colonisation what is ours is also potentially, or even always already their’s; the one is becoming the other, the familiar is becoming strange […] we often imagine a future condition of reconciliation - but the uncanny can remind us of just how irreconcilable this image is within itself […]. It is not simply that Australians will either be reconciled with each other or they will not, rather these two possibilities (reconciliation and the impossibility of reconciliation) co-exist and flow through each other in what is often a productively unstable dynamic. (23-24)

Gelder and Jacobs’ stance is one that Stan Grant, finds resonant. Grant writes “this doesn’t mean we all become Indigenous or that we become homogenous, but we can dwell in this

‘uncanny’” (2017b). This unstable dynamic is harnessed by contemporary Australian

Gothic theatre practitioners to examine 21st-century Australian fears. However, as

Luckhurst has argued, Gothic tropes suggest as much as they suppress (2017, 8). As an inherited European genre being adopted to articulate a colonial experience of Australian landscape as unsettled, the Gothic is in constant danger of silencing the very trauma it

19 may be trying to address. This silencing has been highlighted recently with relation to

Picnic at Hanging Rock by Kathleen Steele (2010) and visual artist Amy Spiers. Spiers started the “Miranda Must Go” campaign16 to highlight the fact that while Picnic at

Hanging Rock promotes a fictionalised white vanishing at the hands of a perceived malevolent landscape, it fails to appreciate the actual vanishing of Indigenous culture in the western Victorian region through massacres, disease, and displacement. Tilley (2012) argues that the “textual and critical focus on absence and estrangement distracts from the reality of white intrusion into, and alteration of, Indigenous space. White vanishing functions, in effect, as sleight of hand. (42). As Spiers notes, the story of Hanging Rock as an important tribal ceremonial meeting place and a significant boundary of the

Wurundjeri, Taungurong, and Dja Dja Wurrung people is given scant attention at the

Hanging Rock visitors centre, which promotes the site through the dominant

“whitewashed” frame of Lindsay’s Gothic tale (Spiers 2017). The continuing popularity of the white vanishing narrative of Picnic at Hanging Rock highlights an inherent problem of the Gothic genre although emergent Indigenous experiments in the Gothic are beginning to address these politics.

Theatre theorists in Australia have not kept pace with the emergence of Indigenous theatre artists adapting the Gothic. While Indigenous Gothic is established as a film and literary genre (Althans 2010; Turcotte 2005), it is emergent in contemporary theatre and largely ignored by the academy. Recent productions include the Melbourne Festival season of

Brown Cabs’ My Lover’s Bones (2014) and the upcoming Sydney Company/Malthouse co-production of Nakkiah Lui’s Blackie Blackie Brown: The Traditional Owner of Death

(2018). These works of contemporary Indigenous Gothic theatre form part of the post- colonial shift in contemporary Indigenous theatre in which the Aboriginal Gothic usurps

16 http://www.mirandamustgo.info/why/. Accessed February 8, 2018. 20 and transforms “the master [European] discourse” (Althans 2010, 10) and are likely to challenge the assumptions and advance the forms of the contemporary Gothic further as demonstrated by the reception of Lui’s past works. Lui is engaged in what she describes as a “decolonizing [of] Australian entertainment” (cited in Chung 2018). The recently premiere of Blackie Blackie Brown, in which Blackie Brown, an archelologist, becomes a blood-thirsty and vengeful Aboriginal superhero after uncovering the ghost of a massacred woman who instructs Brown to murder the descendants of the people who masacred the woman’s ansectors, has already been received as a challenge to cultural narratives and a reclaiming of Indigenous history (Chung 2018; Shand 2018).

While Indigenous theatre artists adapt the Gothic, Australian theatre artists of European heritage continue to represent landscapes as malevolently Gothic due to the guilt of

Indigenous trauma. Grant asserts, “the European presence here is fundamentally haunted by the act of invasion and dispossession. It is unsettled by the myth of "terra nullius", a legal fiction (later overturned by the High Court Mabo ruling) that this was an empty land free for the taking” (2017b). Hassall (2015) agrees, stating “as playwrights, we attempt to come to terms with […] the brutality of our convict and racial history” (34). Similarly,

Kelly (2014) offers “identity, landscape, and memory” as the three elements she feels

“haunt” Australian theatre (89). Carleton (2006) supports Kelly’s assertion, stating that

Australian “history haunts us and the land we live upon. There’s a continuing connection with the nation’s ghosts […] that has managed to survive 220 years of concerted white erasure” (107). Through an analysis of playwright Andrew Bovell’s Holy Day (2001) and

When the Rain Stops Falling (2009), Varney et al. (2013) suggest, “the history of invasion, trauma and the imposed silence [of a repressed Indigenous history] haunts the surface of a seemingly emancipated and progressive present” (31-32). Grant notes that

Australian artists have “long grappled with a sense of place” (2017b). This process, of

21 confronting Australia’s horrific past is undertaken as part of a desire to settle, to achieve a sense of belonging in Australia. It is a part of European culture separating from its old continent, and in doing so, “acknowledging what lies beyond the theatre” (Tompkins

2006, 4). It is no surprise that contemporary theatre artists are obsessed with the Gothic, which allows them to experiment with palettes of horror well suited to addressing 21st- century Australian cultural trauma and fear. However, theatre theorists have consistently focused on text-based analysis, and have not tended to make the crucial investigation into other forms of Gothic theatre which do not prioritise text, particularly devised theatre, dance theatre, sound-led theatre, and immersive theatre. With the Gothic currently booming in Australia across all states, it is vital that non-text-based theatre forms are included in debates on the Australian uncanny.

Picnic at Hanging Rock and the Sonic Turn

It is my contention that contemporary Gothic theatre in Australia is important as a driver of sonic theatre experimentation yet it has been overlooked in the recent increase in theatre sound scholarship. The prioritisation of the soundscape in the recent sold-out return season of the Malthouse’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is a strong example of the way that contemporary Australian Gothic theatre is challenging theatrical practices through the use of sound to evoke the horror of imagined landscapes and the psychological collapse of humans when confronted with those actual landscapes. Despite the Victorian landscape playing a vital role in Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, Wright’s stage adaptation is noted for the absence of the Rock. In direction, Lutton makes no attempt to represent Hanging Rock, the Victorian countryside, or even the impression of a horizon.

Instead, the set is a vast grey walled area, stripped of signification. There appear to be no exits or entrance points. So barren is the space, it is almost a negative space: a vacuum or black hole. The only visual evocation of the natural environment is an ever-present cluster

22 of branches or twisted roots suspended above the stage at the back. Conceived by set designer Zoë Atkinson, these twisted roots and branches are what Lutton describes as the only visual “gesture to landscape” (Malthouse 2016). Other than this hovering cluster, as the program notes, “there is no attempt to manifest the scale of nature in a literal way.

The experience is conjured aurally—primarily through language, music and sound”

(Malthouse 2018, 11).

The innovative and affective qualities of the sound were acknowledged with a 2016

Greenroom Award for Best Music and Sound Design. Composed by Ash Gibson Greig and designed by David Franzke, the soundscape is a combination of environmental sounds recorded by Franzke on and around Hanging Rock and processed in-studio,

Grieg’s double bass compositions, and a dissonant vocal chant composed using samples of the cast members singing single notes which were then combined into dissonant choral chants. These compositional elements were processed and manipulated to form a score which was repeatedly deployed as a strategy for the evocation of terror and the communication of geographical horror, creating what Franzke describes as “a strong sense of space and place” (2016). This sense of space and place was created sonically through Franzke’s immersive architectural speaker placement. Franzke positioned 11.1 separate speaker systems to replicate the movement of sound in the theatre and auditorium

(David Franzke, March 1, 2018, interview with Miles O’Neil).17 To augment the standard in-house “proscenium arch” speakers, these additional sets of speakers were placed far upstage left and right and directly behind the twisted branches. Speaker sets were also placed along the front of the stage floor, in the roof above the audience seating and also surrounding the seating back on all sides, with a further set of subwoofers (bass speakers) below the seating bank. This allowed Franzke, a designer with 20 years experience

17 The additional .1 refers to the inclusion of the subwoofer speakers placed below the audience. 23 designing sound for the Malthouse, to create a deeply immersive sonic experience for the audience. As Franzke explains, “a sound can begin onstage, move around behind the audience, then move across them, capturing their attention and bringing it onstage and to the back […] there were birds and insects doing that, and creaking branches in trees”

(ibid.). The soundscape runs through the entire work, often underscoring spoken word and dialogue with low-frequency rumblings, and designed, as Lutton asserts, to be continually menacing, “to be felt in the gut” (cited in Malthouse 2016). Lutton has described the play as “a conjuring of horror” and speaks of the actors trying to voice inexpressible traumas: what he describes as “the terrifying idea of […] trying to articulate something a word does not exist for” (ibid.). I suggest that these moments where words fail, where the actors lose their power to speak, are moments where Franzke’s soundscape demonstrates that the landscape is infinitely more powerful and legitimate as a presence.

The dissonant choral chants, when combined with Franzke’s recordings of the landscape and low-frequency orchestrations evoke both the denied visual landscape and the unutterable horror the characters are unable to speak. When the actors fail to evoke the landscape through text, the sound design takes over in a dramaturgy of the sonic grotesque, which conjures their psychological distress and the denied visual scenography.

As the horror becomes increasingly unutterable, the sound also amplifies and, along with the complete blackness of the lighting design, eventually swallows the actors and engulfs the audience. For example, at points throughout the play, the theatre space is plunged, not just into darkness, but into complete blackout (Lutton cited in Malthouse 2016). Complete blackout refers to a theatrical technique of covering all exit signs and seating lights to achieve a level of such darkness that the stagehands must wear night vision goggles to see (ibid.). During these moments of utter visual denial, Franzke’s sound design is allowed to irrupt into the darkness, deployed, not only to suggest the terror of the Rock, but also to conjure horror and to communicate the psychological trauma experienced by

24 the disappearance of the girls. The loudest, most discordant sound comes at these moments of complete blackout. Franzke describes these moments as eruptions designed to create a burst of adrenaline in the audience, to deliver frightening moments of theatre through sound (March 1, 2018, Interview with Miles O’Neil).

Despite Franzke’s Greenroom Award, the role of sound and the sound designer is still overlooked and undervalued. Franzke’s sound design is vital to the evocation of imagined landscape, yet, in the filmed interviews provided as part of the Malthouse VCE syllabus support kit, the director, writer, and cast are interviewed, while the composer and sound designer (as well as lighting, costume, and set designers) are not. In denying these artists this space to communicate ideas, they become marginalised as “stagecraft” rather than acknowledged for the crucial role they play. Without Franzke’s sound design, the whole play and performance would not/could not work. An underlying project of this PhD, therefore, is to bring sound to the fore and to render visible sound designers and sound conceptualists as theatre-maker.

Independent Gothic Theatre in Victoria

There is no question that contemporary Gothic plays and performances have found a place on main and independent stages throughout Australia. I also argue for a critically neglected pursuit of the Gothic which has been located in the independent sector for at least a decade and which often promotes an engagement with sound. This is particularly true of theatre practitioners in Victoria, who often work outside the published play-text realm, exploring broader post-colonial cultural terror and contemporary fears and do so through new contemporary performance experiments, yet their work is largely unacknowledged in academia. Companies such as My Darling Patricia, Black Lung

Theatre and Whaling Firm, Suitcase Royale, Sisters Grimm, and practitioners Louise

25 Morris, Zoe Dawson, and Tamara Saulwick are creating Gothic theatre, but the unconventionality of their work means that their significance is rendered more marginal by theatre studies. Sarah French, in Staging Queer Feminisms: Sexuality and Gender in

Australian Performance, 2005-2015 (2017) identifies the Rabble’s Frankenstein (2014) as contemporary Gothic theatre (209) along with Moira Finucane’s Gotharama (2005)

(31). French also highlights Gothic strategies of subversion in relation to nation and national identity and the successful transference of Sisters Grimm from the fringe theatre scene to the main stage while maintaining the ability to provoke mainstream audiences

(115-56). Sisters Grimm have been internationally recognised for their subversive explorations of colonial Gothic themes through a queer lens in their work. For example, the Company’s 2013 Melbourne Theatre Company produced The Sovereign Wife, takes a post-colonial Gothic frame to the Australian epic and in doing so, as French notes,

“challenges mythologies of nation and national identity […] to reveal the racism, misogyny and violence during the period of the nation’s history” (116). The Sovereign

Wife was an epic three-act work of contemporary postcolonial Australian theatre. In

Woodhead’s words, the Sovereign Wife was “radical” and “smells of the future” (ibid.).

The work of Sisters Grimm is a pioneering example of 21st-century Australian Gothic theatre which deploys visual Gothic tropes to acknowledge the horrors of the colonial past and post-colonial present. Sisters Grimm prioritise text and use sound as a more traditional supportive staging element. As theatre critic Alison Croggon has stated,

“Independent theatre is the lifeblood of the Australian stage” (2010). Therefore, it is vital to Australian theatre scholarship that the independent theatre sector is represented in academic discourse and that the work of these important companies is acknowledged.

26 Thesis Structure

With this in mind, I have undertaken case studies on the work of theatre practitioners

Tamara Saulwick, Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm, and reflected on my own work with Suitcase Royale to analyse the sonic strategies used to evoke imagined landscapes as well as anxiety, terror, suspense, and dread. I chose to focus on Saulwick and Black

Lung as their work has been highly influential on my practice and also on contemporary

Australian theatre. Their work, along with my own, both solo and with Suitcase Royale, are examples of a shift in theatre that prioritises the Sonic Turn which I argue is particularly evident in contemporary Victorian Gothic theatre.

This thesis contains three case studies. In Chapter 2, I make the crucial yet overlooked connection between Australian Gothic Rock and the work of the Black Lung Theatre and

Whaling Firm. The phenomenon of Gothic Rock has not been linked to contemporary

Gothic theatre or indeed to theatre at all, however, I argue Gothic Rock strongly informs the Sonic Turn and the making of Gothic theatre. I do so through an analysis of the influence of Melbourne band the Birthday Party, fronted by Gothic icon, Nick Cave. I suggest that Gothic Rock is fundamental to the understanding and development of Black

Lung Theatre who are, in turn, significant to the evolution of contemporary Australian

Gothic theatre. I identify dramaturgies of sabotage, both performative and sonic, borrowed from Gothic Rock, and which Black Lung deploy to create a unique version of visceral theatre. Black Lung’s use of dramaturgies of shock, subversion, and sabotage are deployed to provoke their audiences, and they offer new approaches to the making of contemporary Australian Gothic theatre.

In Chapter 3, I investigate an entirely different example of sound-led Gothic theatre. I analyse the work of acclaimed sound conceptualist and performance maker Tamara

27 Saulwick. I focus on a detailed analysis of her work Pin Drop (2010) and explore it in relation to Van Elfer’s concept of the Sonic Gothic (2012). Sonic Gothic has been applied to film, literature, music, and video games, but has not been theorised in relation to theatre. I argue that the Sonic Gothic is an important tool in understanding the conceptualisation of Saulwick’s approach to sound. Drawing on spectrality theory I demonstrate how Saulwick uses the sonic to evoke ghostly presences. Through an analysis of what I term Saulwick’s “sonic haunted house”, her use of “the multi-vocal uncanny”, and the creation of a metatheatrical sonic grotesque, I argue that Saulwick is conjuring sonic ghosts within Pin Drop and in doing so, is undertaking intricate technological experiments. I establish her use of the sonic grotesque through live audio processing in collaboration with her sound designer Peter Knight and assert that it is designed to create a disjuncture between what is seen onstage and what is heard in the auditorium. I contend that Saulwick’s sound-led experiments are very influential Sonic

Gothic strategies and are significant innovations in sound-led theatre in Australia.

In Chapter 4, I analyse my own Sonic Gothic development, examining the early influence of my childhood spent on Victoria’s Shipwreck Coast and my early exposure to Gothic

Rock. I analyse my development as a musician and my subsequent forming of my band and later, theatre company Suitcase Royale. My work is informed by a complex combination of practitioners and theorists and I analyse the impact of their work on my creative development. I approach my theatre making as a writer, director, musician, sound designer, and performer and my dramaturgies of sound are influenced by these different roles. I detail the specific practical and theoretical influence that Australian Gothic cinema has had on my work with Suitcase Royale, as well as the influence of Tamara Saulwick and Black Lung. I dissect the techniques and strategies that I used in the making of my creative piece, Disappearing into Darkness, and analyse how I created a Gothic

28 soundscape for the Shipwreck Coast. I argue that my methods of sound collection are in themselves part of my methodology and I conceptualise my working practices within frames of compositional analysis, spectrality, and the dramatic structures of sonic dramaturgy.

29

Chapter 2 Black Lung Theatre and Australian Gothic Rock

The phenomenon of Gothic Rock in 1970s and 1980s Australia, and particularly

Melbourne, has not been linked to the development of contemporary Australian theatre by theatre historians. In this chapter, I argue that this is a historical oversight and assert that the phenomenon of Gothic Rock and rock band aesthetics are fundamental to the understanding and development of Black Lung Theatre who are, in turn, significant in the evolution of contemporary Australian Gothic theatre.

Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm, the company’s full title, is an independent

Melbourne contemporary performance company founded in 2006 by co-directors Thomas

Henning and Thomas Wright, musician/sound designer Liam Barton, and a core group of performer/devisors: Mark Winter, Gareth Davies, Sacha Bryning, and Dylan Young.18

Both Henning and Wright share 19th-century European heritage and align the work of

Black Lung with this colonial heritage through the company name. The name of the company tacitly highlights Black Lung’s post-colonial positionality and Australia’s recent past, encoding both lingering and violent death, and the relentless exploitation of

Australian land, ocean, and immigrant workers by colonial rulers. Victoria, notably the

Latrobe Valley, harbours a significant proportion of the world’s brown coal resources at

Hazelwood, Loy Yang, and Yallourn, and produces 98% of Australia’s total brown coal.19

It is also a serious environmental pollutant, not economically viable in the longterm, and has a powerful political resonance with regard to short-term commercial gains, employment statistics, and Aboriginal land rights (Lyons 2016). The term black lung

18 The company expands this team as needed to include other actors, musicians, technicians, lighting designers and filmmakers. However, these members are considered by Henning and Wright to be the original Black Lung team. 19 http://earthresources.vic.gov.au/earth-resources/victorias-earth-resources/coal. Accessed February 27, 2018. 30 references a disease suffered by coal miners, pneumoconiosis, an incurable condition caused by breathing in coal dust that turns the lung black and slowly suffocates its victims.

Black lung disease is, therefore, associated with one of Australia’s most significant industries (valued at 55 billion dollars); the disease was to have been eradicated but has resurfaced in the 21st-century.20 The second allusion in the company’s full title is to the whaling industry: whaling and the export of whale products was one of Australia’s first primary industries in the initial 70 years of the Australian colonies from the 1790s to the

1850s, and one of the drivers behind settlements such as Portland and Port Fairy in

Victoria (Dakin 1938). Commercial whaling in Australia ended in 1978 after colossal over-exploitation and the near extinction of many species, and the new government focus was directed firmly at conservation. Black Lung Theatre knowingly draw on these resonances of colonial entrepreneurship, land and ocean plunder, and commercial exploitation and death in their works: contemporary Australia has been founded on genocidal violence, struggles with landscapes hostile to farming, and intergenerational trauma. The guilt of colonial invasion and exploitation, and its ongoing repercussions, still psychically haunts white Australia and many argue that the genocide continues in the guise of poverty and political neglect (Foley, Howell, and Schaap 2014; Sutton 2009).

Wright has suggested the company name highlights a “strange old world quality” promoted in Black Lung’s work and also refers to the adaptive, filtering nature of a lung

(March 24, 2017, email message to Miles O’Neil). In Wright’s words, “like a lung, things are processed by the company, and come out black” (ibid.).

Black Lung began, as Wright has explained, “out of a desire to stage our own productions because, at least initially, there was a lot of anger and frustration at much of the theatre-

20 http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/black-lung-a-potentially-fatal-disease-that- australia-eradicated-decades-ago-has-reemerged/news-story/2fcc634d0261e88f4c6463d39f6a84aa. Accessed October 10, 2017. 31 making we were seeing” (cited in Usher 2008). Their dissatisfaction was a continuation of Punk and New Wave’s anti-establishment and postcolonial ethos (Wolf 2008) which manifested in an anger-fuelled desire to experiment with more confrontational ways of interacting with audiences. Black Lung perceived mainstream theatre in Australia to be a product of a politically conservative and stagnant set of government policies and a poor mimic of European stages (Meyrick 2017). The mainstream was perceived as experimentally anodyne, experientially bland, and subservient to elite white consumers of high art. Black Lung collectively felt “there was very little of interest going on” in mainstream theatre (Thomas Wright, February 13, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil).

Black Lung borrowed a rough and ready, ‘do-it-yourself’ approach from rock band culture and injected it into their performance aesthetics, using Gothic Rock bands’ politics of defiance in the face of political and artistic norms. Above all, Black Lung wanted to elicit a reaction from audiences and deployed transgressive plot, action, and sonic strategies, Henning arguing that the company was quite prepared for rejection: “people might hate it, but that is preferable to being bored” (cited in Usher 2008). In June 2006,

Black Lung opened a small, independent venue above a bar in Collingwood, an inner

Northern suburb of Melbourne. There, the company staged their premiere work: Avast: a

Musical Without Music.21 In Avast Thomas Wright and Gareth Davies play a pair of nameless feuding brothers, abandoned on an isolated stretch of craggy coastal land and lost in an increasingly furious debate over the inheritance of their recently deceased father. During the one-hour duration of Avast Wright and Davies increase the speed and maniacal delivery of their dialogue. The actors also begin breaking character and often merge the sibling feud of the plot with an apparently real-life feud occurring between

Wright and Davies outside of the theatre. Avast concludes whenever Wright decides to

21 The venue, named The Black Lung Theatre, also hosted two other music driven works of theatre over its short life (June-October 2006): the Suitcase Royale’s Chronicles of a Sleepless Moon (2006) and an independent play: Kissy Kissy (2006). 32 murder Davies (a moveable point in the script which changes with each performance. The title encoded their desire to confront and subvert theatrical form and content: ‘Avast’ is a nautical command to sailors meaning to immediately stop activity, for example, hoisting sails. The circumstances in which it is used can be extreme and dangerous thus the command is often issued in situations of risk. The term is nautically still current and is thought to be a rough translation of a word used by Dutch naval explorers and its antiquated ring suggests the colonial explorers. Black Lung repeatedly interrupted their

‘Musical without music’, interrogating the form of musical theatre and the definition of music itself. For Wright, even before Black Lung incorporated live music on stage, they approached Avast through what he describes as a “musicality of pointless interaction”

(February 13, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil). Wright is referring to the rhythm of the exchange between actors, their aggressive onstage energy, and their loud, fast pace vocal delivery. In performance, Black Lung actors deliver dialogue with such frenetic pace that the words become difficult to follow. This is the point. For Black Lung, words are musical incantations performed in the hope of achieving hysterical transformation.

Black Lung aim to overload their audience and in doing so, to achieve “an altered state” in both performer and spectator (ibid.). Black Lung’s frenzied performances were certainly noticed by the local authorities and the Black Lung Theatre was promptly closed down in November 2006 due to noise complaints, a sign of their sonic impact both literally and metaphorically.

Black Lung’s use of unconventional, usually cramped, decrepit, dark, and smoke-filled performance spaces continued with the company making use of a damp garage to stage

Pimms (2007); an abandoned warehouse to stage Rubeville (2008), and a rundown share house/shopfront to stage Glasoon (2009). In 2008 the company transitioned to the mainstream fringe, taking up residence for three months in the attic space of Melbourne’s

33 Malthouse Theatre. This residency resulted in the re-staging of Avast and the development of a sequel, which also signalled a colonial invader: Avast II: The Welshman Cometh

(2008). Avast II was set in an unnamed post-appocalyptic frontier town somewhere in the

Australian Outback. The plot concerned the fate of The Welshman and his sidekick Diego who arrive at the town seeking shelter. The Welshman and Diego soon learn that the town is beset by an evil monster looking to destroy the town and its inhabitants. When banished from the town, The Welshman and Diego fight the evil monster and save the town. The plot is then deconstructed by the actors in a high-energy metatheatrical infight between the actors. Avast II marked Black Lung’s commitment to live band music, both onstage and as a dramaturgical tool of creative development. Live music is now a defining feature of Black Lung productions, the scale of which has expanded progressively since Avast II.

Rubeville, Glasoon, and I Feel Awful (2011) all incorporated full bands onstage, as did

Black Lung’s latest work: Doku Rai (You, Dead Man, I Don’t Believe You) (2012), a collaboration between Black Lung and East Timorese rock band Galaxy, critically described as “part theatre, part rock concert” (Dow 2013). The intercultural collaboration with Galaxy was another sign of Black Lung’s interest in exploring violence between coloniser and colonised and Australia’s own fraught relationship with East Timor and its interest in extensive Timorese oil and gas reserves. For Black Lung, white Australians have moved from colonising land in Australia to attempting to colonise assets in other territories.

Wright has been clear that the blurring between theatre and rock band aesthetics has been strategically fostered and promoted: “we want people to feel like they’re going to see a band, more than a theatre show” (February 13, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil). For

Burge, the rock band strategy works to provide a physically anarchic energy, “frequent narrative derailment”, and “meta-theatrical commentary” (2012). Black Lung’s unique

34 musical ethos and their borrowing of Gothic Rock has resulted in their cult theatrical status in Melbourne and Australia, and the creation of a unique version of contemporary

Gothic theatre which promotes the significance of the sonic possibilities of contemporary theatre and the political ramifications of rock band aesthetics in a theatre space. In their book, Theatre and Performance in the Asia Pacific: Regional Modernities in the Global

Era (2013), Varney et al. situate Black Lung as indicative of a set of experiments that have extended beyond Australia and locate their work as an important feature of contemporary theatrical modernity in the Asia Pacific (215). An increasing focus on the

Asian Pacific region has continued since the company’s decision to temporarily pursue solo endeavours since 2013, particularly with Henning’s continued return to East Timor and his creation of zombie horror short films with local Timorese actors (Surbakti 2016).

Although Black Lung has been identified as Gothic since inception, the sonic strategies they have borrowed from Gothic Rock have been consistently overlooked (Croggon

2008; Perkovic 2008; Watts 2008). Critics instead focus on the visual aspects of their experimentation. Even now, the use of the Gothic to describe Black Lung is not specifically related to Gothic Rock and band aesthetics but is generally used as a referent to the alternative performance spaces they initially sought out and to their preference for overwhelming audiences with a visual aesthetic of visceral excess and overload. Director

Chris Kohn has pointed to the risk that Black Lung like to incorporate into their performances and the transgressive relationship they adopt with regard to challenging audience/performer conventions. For Kohn, Black Lung aim to provoke anxiety and terror within the spectator. Of Avast, Kohn wrote,

the actors created an atmosphere of immediacy and real crisis that I have rarely experienced in theatre and, with the help of the best audience-plant work I have ever seen, created a palpable feeling of panic and unease. (2006)

35 Black Lung create theatre which fosters and exploits an inhospitable performance environment to promote visceral engagement with the work. Eckersall describes the same phenomenon as a dramaturgy of precarity, borrowing from Judith Butler’s theorisations

(Romanska 2015, 102). Kohn’s review betrays a lack of adequate critical terminology to describe the experience: he writes of “being there in the room with this thing that we had to deal with” (2006). For Kohn, there was something monstrous about the very encounter with Black Lung's narratival chaos and rock band shock tactics in a theatre context – he cannot describe the piece as a play or a performance but only as a “thing” that the spectator/listener has no alternative but to “deal” with rather than - in the usual theatrical parlance - observe. The suggestion is that a Black Lung theatre performance assaults and overwhelms the body with the aim of alienating audience members to an extreme degree.

Indeed, post-show, Kohn left dazed, as he phrases it, “drunk on theatre”, suggesting the work had invaded his body to the point of intoxication (ibid.). As is unfortunately customary in much theatre criticism, Kohn omits to mention the importance of the music and soundscape composed by Liam Barton and its crucial role in Black Lung’s strategy of creating a grotesque rock band aesthetic.

Peter Eckersall’s summary of the significance of Black Lung’s work in The Routledge

Companion to Dramaturgy (2015) borrows from Brecht to denote their performances as

“theatre/not theatre” (100). Eckersall treats the Gothic as a manifestation of what he terms a “dramaturgy of chaos” exploring “impossible situations and happenstance” (ibid.).

Eckersall identifies this dramaturgy of chaos through Black Lung’s “elliptical form of story that is filled with uncanny moments of seemingly random connection” in environments which promote feelings of claustrophobia and in which events are deliberately deconstructed and audience expectation subverted (100). In reference to

Avast, Eckersall writes: “Black Lung expresses a preference for precarity over certainty

36 that is fostered in their characteristically tense and uncertain dramaturgy” (101). Eckersall emphasises Black Lung’s “aesthetics of amateurism” and their physicality but, like Kohn, makes no mention of the crucial dramaturgy of sound. Interestingly, he recognises that

“Black Lung has an uncanny, non sequitur dramaturgy” that works through a postmodern irony to advertise its “naked immediacy and edgy destructive tendencies”, but he does not consider that the major feature of Black Lung’s version of the uncanny is the intrusive violence of the soundscape (100). Like Kohn, Eckersall rightly identifies immersion and immediacy as important features of their work in relation to environment and spectacle, but I would go further and suggest that Black Lung’s theatre work has created a unique form of visceral theatre, which operates primarily in a sonic realm, and is directly influenced by Melbourne rock bands of the late 1970s. The effect of the sound is to alternately assault, overwhelm, insinuate, and disturb, while the physical style and self- conscious exertion of their performances matches the antics of hyped-up rock artists.

While Brecht’s “not…but” formulation is interesting, Black Lung cannot be analysed through a binary, “not theatre…but rock music”, for example, because their use of distorted sound and the uncanny complicate this idea considerably. They operate through strategies of subversion, distortion, and aesthetics of apparent disorder and these elements are critical to their Gothic identity.

Gothic Rock and Melbourne

Critics struggle to find a language that wholly describes Black Lung’s work and this appears to be due to a reliance on theatrical criticism which does not acknowledge the influence of the rock concert experience that Black Lung has always cultivated: as Black

Lung actor/devisor Mark Winter states: “with Black Lung, we always looked to music gigs” (cited in Spring 2015). Black Lung are propelled by live music, particularly

Australian Gothic Rock progenitors the Birthday Party, whom Wright has cited as a

37 particular influence (February 13, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil). Internationally,

Gothic Rock is a sub-genre of the post-punk style of music regarded to have begun with

British band Bauhaus’s 1979 single Bella Lugosi’s Dead. Its roots go back to 1967 when music critic John Stickney used the term to describe the music of American rock band

The Doors. Stickney identified a violent and dark atmosphere in the stage show of the

Doors which he asserted was at odds with the hippie movement that characterised much late 1960s music (Stickney 1967). The Doors laid the foundations for a music sub-genre symbolised by a doom and gloom aesthetic; for music critic Simon Reynolds in his book

Rip it up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 (2005), the new genre was defined sonically by: “scything guitar patterns, high pitched basslines that often usurped the melodic role [and] beats that were either hypnotically dirge-like or “tribal” African

Polyrhythmic” (423). Progenitors of the form include other American bands of the late

1960s and early 1970s, including The Velvet Underground, The Stooges, and Patti Smith.

David Bowie’s Glam influence as well as the influence of British bands Joy Division, and

Suicide can also be traced as proto-Gothic (Reynolds 2005).

While Gothic Rock has been critically investigated as predominantly British and

American, the international and local importance of Australian Gothic Rock has only gradually become apparent. Reynolds writes of a “fascinating, but deeply underground”

Australian manifestation of the sub-genre between 1979 and 1984 (xv). So underground was the Melbourne scene, it was left out of The Worldwide Compendium of Post-punk and Goth in the 1980s (2009). This is a curious omission considering the Melbourne scene produced what Reynolds identifies as one of three “crucial proto-Goth groups”: the

Birthday Party (2005, 433) fronted by “the grand lord of Gothic lushness”: Nick Cave

(Jones 2013). Cave has become a contemporary Gothic icon and Gothic rockstar (Spooner

2006, 9). Both Cave and his band, the Birthday Party, effectively invented Australian

38 Gothic Rock and are the reason Melbourne is regarded as the epicentre of the sub-genre.

Welbury and Dalziell’s Cultural Seeds: Essays on the Work of Nick Cave (2009) argues that he has significantly shaped alternative culture in music and performance, that his impact on popular culture is immense and that his emphatically postcolonial Australian identity is a key factor in his difference internationally.

It is no coincidence that Melbourne based Black Lung look to music as their main source of inspiration: Melbourne has encouraged cultural engagement with music since the

1950s (McFarlane 2017). In the 1970s Melbourne began to emerge as the music capital of Australia and now, with a current annual gig count of 62,000, is a music capitol of the world (Edwards 2013). In the late 1970s, as historian and key venue manager of the time,

Dolores San Migeul, notes in her book The Ballroom: the Melbourne Punk and Postpunk

Scene (2011), Melbourne offered a rich cultural mix and a growing music scene. She writes: “frustrated with the mediocrity of their home states, musicians from other cities and towns were spilling into Melbourne” (39). In particular, they came to the bohemian bayside suburb of St Kilda: an artistic hotspot and crucible for a generation of new

Australian musicians searching for alternative, politically resistant identities.

Politically, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, Australia was experiencing a shift away from the leftist and youth-oriented politics of the Whitlam Labour Government (1972-

75) and a swing back towards conservatism with The Liberal Party, led by Malcolm

Fraser (1975-83). In retrospect, Fraser is regarded as a soft right Prime Minister and many would argue that by today’s standards he was on the left of many social issues (Clark

2015; Matthewson 2015). However, unlike Whitlam, Fraser was not a friend of the arts.

As Michelle Arrow outlines in her book Friday On Our Minds (2009), Fraser dismantled some of the programs of the Whitlam Government and cut the Ministry of the Media as

39 well as funding to the youth and culture focused Australian Broadcasting Corporation

(ABC) and generally reduced support for the arts in favour of sports and business (see also Meyrick 2017). The Fraser Government began an act of nation building with their

1979 Advance Australia campaign. This campaign encouraged immigration and a diverse country. Australians were to “think Australian, think positively, and accept greater personal responsibility for the advancement of Australia” (Arrow 2009, 145). This “think

Australian” ideology predominantly manifested in a national encouragement of sport and business, with Fraser freeing up businesses investment allowances and tax reductions, commercialising football and rugby, and opening the Australian Institute of Sport in 1981.

Figures such as comedian Paul Hogan and lyricist and singer John Farnham, both of who are counted among Australia’s most popular entertainers but are not political dissenters, championed different aspects of Australian life and each won Australian of the Year in the 1980s. But Nick Cave also pointed out the emergence of “the drinkers” - as opposed to “the thinkers” (cited in Hoskyns 1981). Vikki Riley (1992) describes the drinkers as a

“primevally driven mass of philistinic, reactionary suburbanites”, dubbing them “the Oz

Rockers” (121). These macho larrikins, made famous by Australian comic legend Barry

Humphries in films The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) and Barry McKenzie

Holds His Own (1974) came to define Australia globally during the late 1970s and early

1980s as the beer loving culture out to have a good time and culturally identified as

“ockers” (Chipperfield 2001). Many Australian youths, however, were experiencing high levels of unemployment, lengthening periods of school and post-school qualifications, as well as the reintroduction of university fees, which the Whitlam government had abolished (Arrow 2009, 177). Riley argues that “activism or linkage with social issues

[…] never gained currency in Australia” (1992, 114) but the lack of youth support from the Fraser government did lead to the development of a small, passionate alternative music scene populated by young disaffected people who did not identity with ocker values

40 (Arrow 2009, 125). This phenomenon was known as the Post-Punk or New Wave scene and was influenced by international music magazines such as New Musical Express,

Melody Maker, and Sounds (Reynolds 2005, xxvi). Bands on this scene were inspired by similar youth music scenes in New York, San Francisco, and London and performed in the low lit, smoke filled ballroom of the George Hotel on Fitzroy Street, St Kilda. Dubbed the Crystal Ballroom, between 1978 and 1984, it became, as Miguel has phrased it: “the launching pad for a generation of Australian bands” and the home of Australian Gothic

Rock (2011, 7). The seedy grandeur of the Crystal Ballroom and St Kilda’s reputation as politically alternative was the perfect setting for Cave’s the Boys Next Door and provided the laboratory for the beginnings of Australian Gothic Rock (Riley 1992, 121). Cave made a particularly theatrical impact, not only with the sound of his music, but also with the look of the band and the atmosphere they could generate:

In the early days of New Wave in Australia it was not uncommon to hear interstate people refer to the (then) Boys Next Door/Crystal Ballroom scene in Melbourne as a ‘funeral party’ because of the preponderance of black makeup, black clothes, dim lighting and morose facial expressions (what is now described as ‘gothic’). (116)

After playing to this “funeral party” for four years, in 1980, the Boys Next Door (1976-

1979) changed their name to The Birthday Party (1980-83) and left Melbourne, bound for

London in search of larger audiences and a wider alternative scene. Comprised of Nick

Cave (vocals), Mick Harvey (guitar/drums), Roland S Howard (guitar), Tracey Pew

(bass) and Phil Calvert (drums), upon arrival, the band found the London scene was more establishment than anticipated (Walker 2009, 40). Cave was dumbfounded: “I was really shocked. When we arrived, we saw this package show at the Lyceum, with Echo and the

Bunnymen, A Certain Ratio, Teardrop Explodes and so forth and... well, I’ve never been able to take English music seriously since. It was horrible” (cited in Hoskyns 1981).

Margaret Thatcher, elected British Prime Minister in 1979 had begun her neoliberal reforms. Frustrated by the political and artistic conservatism of bands perceived to be at

41 the forefront of contemporary music, the Birthday Party became increasingly extreme in their music, aesthetic, and performance. They escalated their protest and fury in search of radical experiment and gained a cult following (Reynolds 2005, 429). Cave drew on his

Australian difference and an ironic humour Welberry identifies as his “language of laughter” (2009, 47): a grotesque larrikin Australian humour that lurks in his work. The

Birthday Party also often parodied their Gothic associations while at the same time propelling the Gothic Rock genre. It is this humour that is one of the factors which separates the Birthday Party from international Gothic Rock bands and locates their sound firmly in Australia. Cave also drew on Southern Gothic, William Faulkner and Flannery

O’Connor, and merged them with his own interpretations of life in Australia (Welbury and Dalziell 2009). Cave emphasised an amalgamation of these elements, going further in his visceral performances and shock tactics and played off his performances against his lyrical style. Cave also elaborately courted a deathliness in his music and style as a political comment on the times. All of this was worked into an aesthetic which came to be understood as Gothic and positioned Cave as the Australian Gothic Rock king. In

Australia, many artists across different disciplines continue to be influenced by him, but

Black Lung were among the first in theatre to take his influence specifically onto the theatre stage. The combination of an extreme performance environment which felt as though anything could happen, with instruments that sounded like they were on the verge of collapse, and a use of sarcasm and parody was deployed knowing by the Birthday Party and were adopted by Black Lung. In the work of the Birthday Party and Black Lung, sound and the visual remain in continual dialogue and I undertake an analysis of the various ways both are interlinked.

Shock Aesthetics

42 The appeal of the Birthday Party to Black Lung was their unique approach to Gothic

Rock. Unlike other proto-goth bands such as Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees, the

Birthday Party sound was characterised by extremity and a cultivated and sonic violence and wildness (Reynolds 2005, 7). Cave’s sonic experiments and the extreme performance personas he staged for The Birthday Party shows were expressly designed to shock and disgust and to make events seem unpredictable and turbulent. Band member Mick Harvey has discussed how conventions of what could be expected were deliberately overturned and how “a feeling that anything might happen” was encouraged (cited in Wray 2014).

This volatile version of Gothic Rock, designed to engage audiences through a combination of the unexpected and an anticipation of disaster, led to the Birthday Party becoming known as “one of the most compelling and dangerous live acts ever to besmirch rock history” (Walker 2009, 41). The Birthday Party built their reputation by fostering an aesthetic that built on a sense of their performances’ riskiness, aiming to shock their audiences with the apparently spontaneous.

In the work of the Birthday Party, this unique energy caused critics of the time, struggling to define the sounds produced by Cave’s band to reach for extreme metaphors and descriptions of horror and psychic meltdown (Hoskyns 1982; Robb 1982; Sutherland

1982). For example, of the Birthday Party live experience, critic Neil Norman writes:

Their sound bursts from the tiny stage like a primordial beast shedding the chains of convention - a nightmarish gothic brew of Beefheartian wordplay and nerve- jangling guitars stirred into a bubbling rhythmic broth. There [was] a wildness in the air, a feral psychosis. (1981)

Interestingly, Norman immediately characterised the sound and lyrics as ‘Gothic’. The

“wildness in the air” (1981) that Norman identifies, created through “nerve-jangling” music that “bursts from the tiny stage” (1981) characterised the Birthday Party, a band exploring the limits of the Gothic Rock genre, both sonically and in performance. The

43 Birthday Party harnessed a sense of unpredictability that Harvey articulates as “capable of imploding at almost any point” and which created a manic energy in audiences (cited in Wray 2014). This audience participation, encouraged by Cave, augmented the soundscape being created onstage. It added a mob sound to the score: swearing, heckling and cheering becoming as much a part of the Gothic Rock soundscape as the instrumentation. There was a sense of danger in watching these artists perform, which compelled audiences to react: to add to the score with volatile compositions of fury in reaction to a performance that seemed “on the edge of some kind of violent explosion”

(ibid.). This imminent violent explosion summoned a “nervous energy” and encouraged shock and revulsion throughout their performance (ibid.). Both Black Lung and Birthday

Party adopt an aesthetic of shock in order that the borders between performer and spectator crumble in a Gothic disintegration. Once down, the boundary is crossed, and the line and the line between audience and spectator blurred.

These strategies of apparent disorder and risk have informed both Black Lung theatre and other Australian companies identifying as Gothic. As writer/co-artistic director Thomas

Henning has explained: “it’s about using chaos as a weird brutal tool […] everything falling apart, everything coming down, a complete dismantlement of all believable reality” (April 18, 2016, interview with Miles O’Neil). In Avast, for instance, a large theatre light dropped from the rigging and crashed onto the stage, landing inches away from the audience front row and a seemingly shocked Thomas Wright, who stopped mid- monologue to take stock of the incident. This technical fault, apparently the result of carelessness was in fact, a highly rehearsed moment, occurring each night to create an illusion of edginess and anarchy. Avast was constructed to appear as if it was, in

Henning’s words, “falling apart” (ibid.). For Wright, the effect they desire is as close to

“immediacy” as possible (Feb 13, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil). “We like to keep

44 the audience in a place of uncertainty” (ibid.). Black Lung fosters and exploits an inhospitable performance environment to thrill their audience and promote visceral engagement with the work. As Henning asserts, “when nobody knows what’s happening next, there is the genuine potential for people to freak out, and that’s good” (April 18,

2016, interview with Miles O’Neil). This desire to provoke audiences into losing their emotional composure and a disregard for theatrical conventions of audience restraint is very much inspired by the Cave’s Birthday Party tactics of encouraging extreme audience reaction and violence (Riley 1992; Wray 2014). As Riley notes, “spitting, throwing objects, cursing and heckling” was not uncommon at a Birthday Party gig (161). Frenzy in the audience was satisfying for Cave, who has stated, “in Australia, you really feel you’re turning decent people into monsters” (cited in Hoskyns 1981). For Cave becoming a monster seemed to involve a primal loss of control and self-recognition, the breaking down of the rational self. The aim for Cave was that the music of the Birthday Party should assault audiences to the point of overwhelming and altering both himself and his audience. Wright has expressed desire for a similar transformation to “an altered state” achieved partly through a frenetic delivery of the script designed to overload both performer and audience to the point that words lose their meaning, and through a sustained evocation of visual and sonic chaos designed to shock both audience and performer (Feb 13, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil).

For Black Lung shock tactics are both sonic and visual and often rely on blurring the line between what is intended and apparently unintended action. The company often makes use of cast members planted in the audience: these actors enter the venue with the audience. They sit with them and observe the show until, at a scripted moment, they reveal themselves, to the shock and confusion of the audience. For example, each night in Avast, a male and female couple sitting in the audience would quietly begin fighting. This fight

45 slowly escalated until the woman stood and vomited all over the man. She then ridiculed the show and stormed out of the theatre; her vomit-covered partner chasing after her. Such moments interrogate stage action itself, provoke reflection on what is permissible in theatre, and subvert theatre etiquette. Reviewer Alison Croggon found that such strategies provided the constant thrill of anticipation and were extreme ways of creating visceral suspense: “there really is no way of predicting what will happen in the next moment and, with the help of some remarkable performances, it makes for riveting theatre” (Croggon

2008). For Cameron Woodhead the “full sound and fury” (2006) of Black Lung made for a volatile and lawless theatre space; for Kohn the “artfully arhythmic dialogue” generated

“a sense of abjection and discomfort” (2006). Black Lung did not necessarily give audiences what they wanted or expected but the band culture was accepted in Australia and absorbed as a new aesthetic for theatre. Their uniqueness meant that theatre critics often struggled to define the experience (as critics had with Cave).

Transgression and Metatheatrical Tactics

Strategies of subversion are integral to Black Lung projects and combine plot, visual and sonic effects borrowed from Cave and deployed in a fundamental challenge to theatrical conventions: The Birthday party were acutely aware of the artifice of rock music and live performance. As Hoskyns writes: “a proper Birthday Party concert is a sacrilegious entertainment about entertainment, embarrassing only those who expect some purity of intention on a stage. In the guilty world of modern pop, they appall by revealing in the pain of artifice” (1982). Black Lung reveal in the same “pain of artifice” that Hoskyns ascribes the Birthday Party. Both groups deploy Gothic Rock as a protest towards what they see as the safety and boredom of the mainstream (1982). Hoskyns, writing of a 1981

Birthday Party performance, recalls a particular example of Cave’s transgression: “at several junctures he climbed into the pit of zombies below him” (Hoskyns 1981). Cave

46 often moved into the audience to encourage a more visceral and immediate engagement with the music. Of this same transgressive method used by the Birthday Party, Chris

Bilton writes: “[by] challenging their audiences to engage directly with the performance, and essentially becoming performers themselves, the closeness of a Birthday Party concert was inescapable” (2009, 81). For Cave, audience interaction has always been crucial to the summoning of terror in his audience and also to a sense of transformation for himself. Cave articulates:

There is a kind of psychodrama that goes on between singular people in the front row that becomes very important in the telling of the narratives of the songs. I get a huge amount of energy from picking out singular [people] in the audience and terrifying them. Its that kind of mixture of awe and terror that you can get from one person or a small group of people that gives a huge amount of energy to transform. (Cited in 20,000 Days on Earth 2014).

Bilton’s description of the audience member being forced into the role of performer reminds us of Cave’s assertion that the band’s aim must be to turn civilised members of the public into monsters. The subversions used by Cave and adopted by Black Lung and other companies create what Emma McEvoy has identified as a “gothicised audience”

(2007, 221). McEvoy argues that theatre is unique because, unlike Gothic films and books, which are not live performance, the theatre engulfs its audience in the same time and space as its performers, placing its audience in what McEvoy describes as “the subject position of the Gothic protagonist – scared, assailed, confused but curious” (McEvoy

2016). This allows the staging of transgressive eruptions to occur in which the audience and performer boundary can be deconstructed with the forced participation of the audience. The audience is implicated in the shocking world inhabited by the performers.

Unlike the performers, however, the audience is plunged into the uncertainty of not knowing what is intended and unintended and what is spontaneous and what is scripted – a state that Black Lung want the audience to experience as chaotically nightmarish. In the

Black Lung world, the line between actor and spectator is not just crossed but destroyed.

47 The rational and the irrational cannot be unentangled and at given moments performers seem to have stopped performing and have lost their mantle of character, appearing to be out of control and in breakdown.

Metatheatrical interruptions to action are repeatedly used as strategies in Black Lung shows. As Woodhead has noted, Black Lung shoot “cannonballs through the fourth wall.

The production pirates its way onto the audience's ship” (2006). Although this is entirely metaphorical, Woodhead offers an interesting point through his identification of an unwanted audience invasion achieved by the Black Lung performers. Through forced transgression into the seating, Black Lung performers provoke and assault both visually and sonically. They become Cave’s “monsters” (1981) through transgression. For example, Black lung performers often break character to communicate with the audience

– these are meta-theatrical moments. They also use the seating as part of their performance landscape and sometimes include audience as performers, which occurs towards the end of Avast II when Henning sat with the audience and declared the show unworthy of continuation. He then proceeded to predict the ways in which the actors and audience members would die, performing a curse with what Croggon described as a

“superstitious creepiness” (2008). Henning invited the audience to invent curses to kill off the cast members, crossed the frontier between performer/spectator and became judge and divine being – an ironic comment on the judgment of critics and spectators, the arbiters of taste.

Black Lung break through the fourth wall in order to subvert the trust relationship expected between audience and performers. This trust relationship is often exploited in stand-up comedy through communication and heckling between stand up and audience and is an established trope of comedy and is designed to create a sense of playfulness.

With Black Lung, however, this breaking of trust creates what Kohn describes as “a

48 palpable feeling of panic and unease” (2006). While audience/performer exchange is not new in theatre, like the Birthday Party, Black Lung take this exchange to the extreme in the pursuit of terror. They pursue chaos as a “brutal tool” to encourage audience to “freak out” (Thomas Henning, April 18, 2016, interview with Miles O’Neil). Wright articulates,

“we wanted it to feel like it’s collapsing” (Feb 13, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil).

Through continual transgression and metatheatrical deconstructions, Black Lung demolish the fourth wall, “Gothicise” their audience by forceful inclusion into the chaotic onstage world, and in doing so, leave them vulnerable to attack from Barton’s sonic monsters (McEvoy 2007, 221).

Sound and Provocation

The live electric guitar score, when combined with a transgressive performer/spectator relationship, is crucial to developing feelings of entrapment, tension and nausea and is a principle Australian Gothic Rock trope employed by both Black Lung and Birthday Party.

In this section, I posit the term the sonic monstrous as a means of describing one of the sonic strategies of Black Lung. Sonic tropes of the Gothic rock guitar can be identified: the use of reverb and echo effects, distortion, feedback, and dissonance. Black Lung operates sonically as well as performatively through strategies of subversion, distortion, and aesthetics of apparent disorder and these elements are critical to their Gothic guitar soundscapes. Gothic Rock guitarists consistently deployed these sonic tools. In the

Birthday Party, Roland S. Howard adopted these sounds and made them his own, creating what music critic Randall Roberts describes as an “echoing-creepy guitar” that came to characterise the Birthday Party sound (Roberts 2009). Roberts writes: “[Howard] took them [the band] to new and unheard places, giving the Birthday Party much of their unique sound […] odd tunings and echo-laden sound created a strange tension […] to create their Gothic blues” (ibid.). Cave asserts, “Rowland was Australia’s most unique,

49 gifted and uncompromising guitarist” (2009). When Howard played guitar, he unleashed a sonic monster upon the audience and his fellow performers, producing a grotesque

“nerve jangling” version of the electric guitar that howled and screeched around the room

(Norman 1981).

Barton adopts and modifies these same Gothic Rock guitar tropes and extends them into contemporary theatre sound design in his work with Black Lung. Wright asserts: “Liam is crucial to Black Lung development. He is always in the rehearsal room with his electric guitar from day one” (Feb 13, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil). Barton describes his composition of a Black Lung Gothic soundscape developed in conjunction with the performance through the use of four technical elements: a) feedback, b) distortion, c) reverberation, and d) dissonance. Barton states:

I have no effects pedals, just a Fender Twin with the reverb turned right up. That guitar has a level of natural distortion through those pick-ups, so there’s a certain dissonant drone to it and sitting next to the amp. There’s feedback going on too. (Feb 13, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil)

I analyse each of these elements in turn as they are essential strategies, not just in Barton’s work, but also as sonic ideas in much Gothic opera, theatre, and performance.

The feedback Barton refers in his own playing is the screaming sound an electric guitar amplifier makes when the inbuilt microphones, referred to as pickups, on the electric guitar are held too close to the speaker, creating, in effect, a loop in which the sound produced by the amplifier is being directly picked up by the microphones on the guitar and returned to the amplifier in an uncanny sonic cycle. This sound, often seen as a mistake, can be harnessed by experienced players to create the extended high pitch frequency most commonly associated with loud rock and roll bands in the moments just preceding or following the performance of a live song. Roland Howard began utilised this

50 feedback during the songs of The Birthday Party to augment their already disturbing and unstable sound. Feedback is especially notable in the opening of the 1980 Birthday Party song The Friend Catcher. Barton makes use of feedback in his playing by placing his guitar next to his Fender Twin amplifier, the same model used by Howard, and allowing his guitar to sit on the edge of feeding back, on the edge of collapsing into a sonic wail which, in Howard’s playing, critics Everett True and Jimi Kritzler describe as “nerve jangling shards of feedback” (True 2010) creating a “shrieking and unrelenting clatter”

(Kritzler 2014). While Howard would let his feedback wail out in screams, Barton uses it in a much more restrained technique. Barton keeps his feedback beneath the notes he is playing. Momentarily, throughout his score, the guitar tone sounds as though it is about to feedback, however, Barton suppresses this scream so that it is ever present as a lurking sonic moan beneath the sound we are encouraged to hear. Through this feedback, Barton creates an uneasy feeling in his score; a ghost trapped in his machine wailing to be released. Each time he stops playing the guitar begins to feedback; unresolved and repressed sonic signals returning throughout his score. This is particularly effective in the opening piece of Avast II. As Barton has articulated, he was creating anticipation in his audience through allowing them to hear “a beast” lurking in his score (Feb 13, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil). He was using his role as theatre composer and sound designer to articulate something “tense and uptight”, something being restrained which, in time, would be released on the audience, creating feelings of nervous tension and anticipation (ibid.).

Distortion is the effect that perhaps most creates aesthetics of the grotesque. Distortion effects on an electric guitar originated in the mid 1940s, created by guitarists playing through amplifiers turned up so loud that the signal distorts through the incapacity of the speakers to reproduce the sound received (Palmer 1992, 19). Nowadays guitarists often

51 use electric effects to recreate this sound. However, it is still common to rely, as Barton did in Avast II, solely on the natural distortion created by overloading the amplifier. The use of distortion whilst playing dissonant chord progressions with a particular focus on minor notes, or as is the case with Roland S. Howard, one dissonant note played over an extended period of time, works, like feedback, to support Barton’s desire to create an uneasy anticipation within the audience by destabilising the sonic landscape. Distortion destroys the clean sonic signal of the music the guitarist is producing to the point that it breaks apart and no longer sounds like guitar notes but a set of sonic signals roaring and collapsing in on themselves. Barton used this dramaturgy of fragmentation and collapse throughout the Avast II. For example, when the protagonists, a worrier named the

Welshman and his sidekick Diego travelled together, they described a post-apocalyptic landscape. As they spoke about the land, Barton’s score sat quietly beneath and consisted of familiar blues-esque riffing. However, as the Welshman’s story descended into a madman’s ramblings, Barton’s guitar crescendoed and drowned out all dialogue. The guitar score gradually disintegrated, collapsing into an unsettling dirge of disjointed notes, articulating the Welshman’s obvious onstage struggle with his own imploding mind. In this instant, Barton’s “broken melodies” conveyed the Welshman’s alienation both from the landscape and himself (Feb 13, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil). What

Barton seems to be referring to in his broken melodies is this dissonance and distortion, the sound quality of music not working as anticipated and thus giving voice to the psychic collapse and encouraging the monstrous. This monstrous sound is then allowed to carry on long after Barton has stopped playing through his use of the reverb and the natural echoing of the sound ricochetting around the theatre, evoking the haunted landscape which surrounds the Welshman and Diego and, as the lights fade on the scene, the soundscape stands in for all visuals: a landscape of monstrous sonic distortions.

52 Reverb, short for reverberation, according to sound artist and theorist Philip Brophy is

“the sensation of sound occurring outside of itself, of sound leaving a sonic trace of its absence” (1997). It is a device commonly used to denote the Gothic as it is an inherently spectral sound and its effect is to suggest presences and worlds beyond itself. Barton used reverb to create what he calls “ghostly music which haunted the space” (Feb 13, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil). Reverb is an echo effect built into Fender Twin amplifiers that makes the guitar sound linger on after the guitarist has stopped playing, creating a sound similar to the that of a guitar being played in a large hall or church. When used subtly, reverb can strengthen a sound and is often used on vocal microphones to make a singer’s voice sound more full-bodied and “warm”. However, when applied to an extreme, it can create a ghostly effect, not only allowing the music to linger after the guitarist has stopped playing, but creating dissonance (see below) as the notes linger while the guitarist moves into a different, contrasting musical keys. Barton and Howard both utilised reverb, turning the effect on their Fender Twin amplifiers up to 10 (the loudest setting available), which, when combined with distortion, gives the sound of the guitar being played in a large echo chamber and creates multiple sonic spaces which clash with each other and work to unsettle the soundscape and communicate an affective uneasiness in juxtaposition to the visuals. These reverberations might be described as sonic ghosts and are certainly “haunting” as Watts has noted (2008). These spectral sounds haunt Avast

II in the moments Barton stops playing and the guitar sound lingers on apparently of its own accord. The effect is to send shivers down the spine of the audience member and to persuade them that they may be in the presence of supernatural forces.

Dissonance is a device that suggests the uncanny. It refers to a restless interval in music, or, a tension that stems from the clashing of closely spaced frequencies through which the familiar becomes unfamiliar and strange. As Janet K. Halfyard has illuminated, this

53 clash in harmony, and the fact that it is the sixth note away from the tonic note led to it becoming known as the Diabolus in musica, “the devil in music”, and to be banned by the church in the 17th century. It is music that goes against everything that is defined as settled and proper in Western theology and music (Halfyard 2010, 24-27). Of course, this

Diabolus in musica is simply a construct of Western tonal harmony, however, it does work to create dissonance and as Halfyard asserts, is “exceptionally useful to composers who wish to convey the idea of evil” (23). Brophy identifies dissonance as

signifying the Other: the monstrous, the grotesque, the aberrant. Its deviation from diatonic scripture is never slight, always excessive. Like the ultimate death which must befall the movie monster. (1998)

Dissonance can be heard most famously in the John Williams’ theme to the Jaws (1975).

In contemporary Gothic theatre scores such as Franzke’s for Picnic at Hanging Rock, dissonance can be heard in Grieg’s compositions for double bass: long, bowed single notes composed in dissonance with each other to communicate the menacing landscape of Hanging Rock and the psychological collapse of the protagonists. Barton argues that dissonance also creates a sense of moral and emotional darkness and a mood of the grotesque: “I used open tunings and droney dissonant progressions mostly […] trying to discover darkness and weirdness” (Feb 13, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil). Barton’s compositions for Glasoon used dissonance throughout the work to sonically articulate an unearthliness, which he deployed as an alienation device (ibid.). For example, Glasoon began with a Christ figure (Miles Warton-Thomas) bursting into the space dripping blood and collapsing onto the stage floor. He was revived by a Mary figure (Simone Page Jones) who, while offering Christ her breast to suckle, sang an operatic aria in an invented language. Barton supported this operatic vocal delivery on the electric guitar. His composition worked cyclically. It never complemented Mary’s song, instead, through a looping dissonant chordal progression, it created a sonic tension in the space and supported the ominous nature of the onstage action rather than the singing. Barton

54 ratcheted up the sonic tension through an increased application of reverb. Barton’s unearthly playing was augmented by the fact that he dressed as a zombie, one of the undead and a fitting costume for a composer who refused to allow his score to die, and instead encouraged it to mutate and devolve until the scene ended with Christ vomiting breast milk across the stage supported by a dissonant, sonically monstrous wail.

Barton combined these four elements, creating a sonic monstrous guitar sound in Avast

II to shake the very fabric of the theatre itself. As the audience made its way from the foyer, upstairs to the theatre, Barton’s score had already begun and could be not only heard but felt vibrating along the narrow corridor as the audience made their way towards the theatre entrance. Like walking through a pub towards a heavy metal gig, the sound rattled the foundations of the Malthouse building, as if a monster were roaring just beyond the closed theatre doors. Upon entering the tiny black box, the audience was confronted with the discordant wail of distorted electric guitar, drenched in reverb and on the edge of feeding back; a squealing, high-pitched tone lurking beneath the notes. A deep bass drum could also be heard, played by Sacha Bryning, positioned on a small platform raised above the entrance to the theatre. The beat supports Reynolds’ assertion that Gothic Rock is concerned with tumbling tribal sounds (2005, 423). It also created ritualistic associations. Like a heartbeat gone wrong, the bass drum worked against Barton’s fractured guitar. It was a viscerally unpleasant sound, which created a hostile mood. For

Barton the effect was heightened through Bryning’s musical amateurism as a drummer:

“Sacha is not a musician. He couldn’t keep time with the drum, so the show starts discordant and off time” (Feb 13, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil). This deployment of unskilled musicianship is common throughout all post-punk genres including Gothic

Rock, and in theatre Black Lung deployed musical inexperience to lend to an experience of “the real” and the “spontaneous” (ibid.). This was a strategy Barton had learned from

55 The Birthday Party: Mick Harvey took over on drums (not his learned instrument) when the band fired drummer Phil Calvert. Harvey’s drums are often characterised by deep tribal thumps and rudimentary beats.

Barton’s broken melodies were enhanced by the sonic disjuncture between Bryning and

Barton. Visually, both were raised above the audience, looking down like menacing gargoyles, symbols of the terror to come. Croggon, who likened Barton’s electric guitar compositions in Avast II to the work of Nick Cave:

With a touch of Gothic horror, lots of smoke and moody lighting and a brooding Nick Cavean guitar accompaniment…a wild-eyed priest figure shouts incantations into a microphone before raising a cleaver and cutting off the baby's hand in a sacrifice that is intended to protect his frontier community from some dreadful evil that assails it. (2008)

Croggon writes here of the opening scene of the show. After the audience had found its seats, the lights dropped to a single pin spot on a plinth. The Priest (Mark Winter) entered and, holding a microphone in one hand and a meat cleaver in the other, sang a baritone chant which drew heavily on the Gothic Rock trope of “deep-voiced male vocals” such as Cave, Joy Division’s Ian Curtis and Crime and City Solution’s Simon Bonney

(Reynolds 2005, 423; see also McCredden 2009, 178-79). Barton supported this moment with a distorted guitar and the continued, though diminished beat of Bryning’s woeful drumming. This moment built to a crescendo with the preacher bringing the cleaver down and severing the child’s hand. Sonically, Barton’s guitar built in feedback preceding this moment, becoming more and more unpleasant until, when the child’s hand was severed, and the feedback suddenly ceased. This created an uncomfortable disjuncture between the horror of the onstage violence and the relief felt at the sounds cessation. In this way,

Barton’s score worked in the same way as Cave’s claim that he felt as though his music turned people into monsters, functioning to create a feeling of sonic relief and subsequent calm at the sight of horrific onstage violence.

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A Cavean guitar sound is characterised by a sonic combination of the unsettling, feedback driven and heavily distorted dissonant guitar sounds found in the work of Cave’s key guitar playing band members beginning with Howard. Howard created a set of sonic parameters that Cave’s subsequent guitarists have worked by. Band Seeds guitarists Mick

Harvey and Blixa Bargeld and Cave’s later collaboration as “Gothic VU blues” act

Grinderman, with Warren Ellis (Klein 2007), as well as their collaboration composing film and theatre scores (analysed in Chapter 4), all employ electric guitar sounds which have their origins with Howard’s unique Gothic Rock electric guitar sound. These guitarists consistently utilise a very specific set of electric guitar sounds employed first by Howard to create the sonic monstrous, through which they compose sonic worlds suited to supporting the lexical narratives of Cave. This “Cavean guitar” Croggon identifies, is produced through the combination of distortion, feedback and the use of saturated reverb to create loud and at times unpleasant guitar sounds that, through the use of reverb, articulates an absence as it lingers long after the guitarist has stopped playing.

Through the use of distortion and dissonance, the guitarist conveys an aural sense of music fracturing and disintegrating, the notes crumbling as fast as the guitarist creates them.

Through the lingering of past notes, the playing of present notes, and the anticipation of an attack, Barton created a loop that was both sonic and spectral. In doing so, Barton developed his strategies for the sonic monstrous and extended the potential of these effects through his work with Black Lung. In Avast II, Barton used a similar reverberating loop like composition to Howard’s guitar on the Birthday Party track “the Friend Catcher”

(1980) to accompany the protagonists when the Welshman and Diego were forced to spend the night on the outskirts of the settlement. These characters were travellers and

57 immigrants and found themselves in an inhospitable environment, a clear post-colonial resonance. During this moment in the play in which the lights dimmed and the duo sat in anticipation of an attack, Barton used a reverberating loop which, due to the series of disjunct chords and his signature repressed feedback, summoned a feeling of unease. As the anticipation of attack built, Barton used volume to allow the feedback to build while he continued to play. This caused the sound to swell in an unpleasant way and encouraged feelings of approaching menace. When Barton removed his hands from the fretboard of the guitar, the repressed feedback was unleashed and screamed forth from his amplifier, filling the room as the anticipated monster appeared: a cheap skeleton mask poorly dressed with black cloth and suspended from the rigging bar with a coat hanger. Black

Lung revelled in the metatheatricality and humour of this cheap and anticlimactic monster, while simultaneously using Barton’s screaming feedback score to establish the moment as terrifying. The Welshman and Diego fled from the monster into the seating back, crossing the audience/spectator boundary, they began clambering over the seating bank, telling the audience to move and hiding behind them as the pathetic prop monster and Barton’s terrifying sonic monster swept through the shattered fourth wall and out across the performers and the audience.

Conclusion

Gothic Rock and the intrusive, violent sonic experiments of The Birthday Party are foundational to Black Lung theatre’s mission and development. They brought new band aesthetics to theatre stages in Australia and sought to provoke extreme emotional reactions from their audiences. Through the adoption of an aesthetic of implosion, collapse and transgression and the development of a unique version of Gothic guitar sound, Black Lung not only continue the legacy of Gothic Rock in Australia, through the use of dramaturgies of sonic and visual sabotage common in Gothic Rock, they continue

58 to provoke their audience and to explore mainly masculine, post-colonial Australian identities. Eckersall and Kohn’s observation of the immersive quality of Black Lung productions is important, however, as I have suggested, Black Lung draw on a specific quality of immersive performance informed by soundscape and directly influenced by the transgressive nature of the Birthday Party. Black Lung create an experience of theatre which feels more akin to the sonic immersion experiences when watching a loud rock band: a total exposure. Black Lung immerses their audiences in the same overwhelming and transgressive experience promoted by the Birthday Party and revel in the same monstrous transformations encouraged by Cave. This is a unique deployment of Gothic

Rock theatre and has resulted in the company’s success and celebration as an important

Victorian Gothic theatre company. Subsequent theatre artists, such as Tamara Saulwick have taken an entirely different approach to Gothic immersion (as I will argue), however, the brutal Rock aesthetics and monstrous sounds pursued by Black Lung makes them a unique force in contemporary Gothic theatre.

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Chapter 3 Tamara Saulwick: Dramaturgies of the Psychic Echo Chamber

Tamara Saulwick is an interdisciplinary performance-maker based in Melbourne. She has articulated her work as addressing the dramaturgy of sound and how sound can shape the content of performance and its reception (June 3, 2016, interview with Miles O’Neil).

Although Saulwick’s performance career extends back to 1990, in recent years, she has become particularly well known for her evocative sound worlds since creating her solo performance work Pin Drop (2010). With Pin Drop, Saulwick established a reputation as an acclaimed Australian sound conceptualist,22 creating sound-centred works across a variety of mediums: live performance (Pin Drop 2010, PUBLIC 2013, Endings 2015); installation (Alter 2014); and audio walks (The Archives Project 2016), all of which utilise her dramaturgy of sound as a key creative feature both in their development and final production. Saulwick creates environments in which the audience often observes the performance in varying states of darkness and is required to listen attentively to soundscapes in which the line between the real and the imagined is persistently interrogated and blurred. It is through the manifestation of these sonic worlds and the juxtaposition of sound and image that Saulwick creates what she has called “heightened listening states”, “sound worlds” in which she encourages her audience to “dream into the work further” (ibid.).

In this case study, I argue that the sound worlds created by Saulwick and her main collaborator, sound artist and musician, Peter Knight, draw on constructions of Gothic terror that both challenge and advance current critical thinking on the contemporary

Gothic. In particular, I take Isabella van Elferen’s theorisation of the “sonic Gothic”

22 Saulwick was awarded Best New Australian Work at the 2015 Helpmann Awards for Endings. Saulwick has also been nominated for, and received, numerous Green Room Awards. http://tamarasaulwick.com/. Accessed June 13, 2017. 60 (2014) and consider it in relation to Pin Drop, examining the creation of Saulwick’s

Gothic soundscapes. I have chosen to focus this study exclusively on Pin Drop as, in

Saulwick’s words, it’s “about fear” (2015, 40) and is the work that best demonstrates her

Gothic experimentation. Pin Drop is also the work Saulwick has described as “the most resolved work I’ve made” (March 17, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil).

The Sonic Gothic

Van Elferen is crucial to this study in light of her recent critical identifications of sonic and musical functionality within the Gothic. Van Elferen (2012) asserts, “the Gothic uncanny has an emphatically sonic mode of performance throughout its history” (24).

Yet, in comparison with criticism of the visual Gothic (Edwards and Monnet 2012;

Spooner and McEvoy 2007), there is remarkably little academic discourse surrounding the role of sound in Gothic narratives, despite the fact that, as van Elferen has noted, “the

Gothic world resonates with sound and music. A Gothic novel without mysterious sounds ringing through the night is hard to imagine [and] a horror film would not be the same without a terrifying soundtrack” (2014, 429). Van Elferen’s project is to invent a critical vocabulary to identify and describe the characteristics of the sonic Gothic as it relates to film, television, videogames, literature, and contemporary Goth music. She does so through a four-part definition, combining spectrality, hauntology, hauntography and liturgy. In this chapter, I extend Van Elfer’s theorisations to Saulwick’s theatrical experiments.

According to van Elferen (2014), the sonic Gothic is concerned with one or a combination of her four frameworks. She posits that it is located in the spectral through its ability to conjure ghostly presences in the mind of the listener through aural strategies. Referring

61 to spectrality within Gothic fiction, van Elferen writes, “ghosts are eminently audible in the Gothic, often signified through sound before they are seen, if indeed they are seen at all” (429). She goes on to state that “sound, like shadow, can seem to indicate ghostliness because we assume it comes from somewhere, even if that origin is invisible” (430).

However, it is when the source of that sound is not revealed or logically explained that sound suggests spectrality and “spooks” its audiences. According to Van Elferen, “the sonic Gothic exploits sound’s ambivalent relationship with embodiment, pushing the uncanny implications of this relationship to their limits” (430). This concept is particularly interesting to investigate in relation to live performance.

The second dimension of the sonic Gothic is “the haunted void beyond the spectral” (432).

Van Elferen locates this void using Derrida’s theory of hauntology in Spectres of Marx

(1994). Derrida’s concept relates to the dual movement of the spectral past represented in the present as it relates specifically to the fall of communism in Europe. Derrida’s hauntology is concerned with Marx’s assertion in The Communist Manifesto (1848) that

Europe is haunted by the spectre of communism (14). Derrida presents the otological paradox of a ghost appearing in the present, yet being from the past, functioning to create what he calls a “non-present present” (1994, 16). This spectre belongs to a duality of past and present, representing at once the historical person it belongs to and its contemporary manifestation (11). As Derrida asserts, a ghost represents “repetition and first time, but also repetition and last time, since the singularity of any first time makes of it also a last time.” (10). Van Elferen connects this ever-present hauntology with the sonic Gothic. She writes,

hauntology is at the core of Gothic performativity, as the genre’s labyrinthine fictionality, painstakingly unearthing the fears and fantasies of its audience. Behind the repressed anxiety projected onto its facade, each ghost signifies the more profound uncanniness of haunted ontology: the possibility that there is no meaning, no being-in-time. (2014, 432)

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Van Elferen links Derrida’s hauntology to her own neologism of “hauntography”, by which she refers to the void beneath the facade of Gothic signification and the anxiety resultant from the infinite intertextuality exploited through the Gothic. She argues that, in its various manifestations, the Gothic summons and exploits its own tropes to the point that the surface layer of narrative is removed to reveal a dark well of psychological tumult beneath. Through an investigation of the hauntographical nature of dubstep music, van

Elferen asserts that hauntography calls into question the very nature of Heideggerian

Being through a demonstration of the intertextuality of all things (2015, 64-66).

According to van Elferen, “the hauntographical dimension of Gothic music exposes the void of our most beautiful musical dream or our worst musical nightmare” (2014, 436).

Due to its excessive nature, the sonic Gothic destabilises perceptions of reality through its alienating juxtapositions, presenting both the surface and what is below the surface concurrently. Finally, Van Elfer locates the sonic Gothic in the realm of the liturgical.

This leads her to conclude that the sonic Gothic functions to evoke both Freudian and

Heideggerian concepts of the unheimlich which she identifies as distinct yet complementary in their separate manifestations and relation to the sonic Gothic. Sexual and ontological fears are crucial to understanding Saulwick’s work, as I will argue.

The Unheimlich

Freud’s essay The Unheimlich (1919), discussed in Chapter 1, is vital to van Elferen’s

Gothic scholarship as it focuses on anxiety caused by the resurfacing of the repressed.

Freud’s uncanny effect often arises when the boundary between fantasy and reality is rendered uncertain and when we are faced with the reality of something that we have until now considered imaginary; when that symbol takes on the full function and significance of what it symbolises. Heidegger’s unheimlich is located in anxieties caused through the 63 destabilisation of the very nature of Being (Heidegger 2005; Withy 2015, 2). According to Heidegger, as death is certain, human beings are on a singular and stable directional journey: “Being-towards-death” (247), however, when this is made ambivalent though a destabilisation of the reliable directional nature of such a journey, through hauntology, hauntography, spectrality, and liturgy, as identified by Van Elfer, the unheimlich is made manifest and the self becomes alienated from itself and its environment. Given the fear that Saulwick wishes to provoke in her spectators in Pin Drop, and the imaginary visions she wishes to conjure in her audiences, this concept of the unheimlich is especially pertinent.

Saulwick as Gothic Artist

Saulwick’s interest in the Gothic is evident in both form and content. Over the last decade, her works have explored “fear, voyeurism, suspense and death” (June 3, 2016, interview with Miles O’Neil). Although Saulwick does not market herself through the Gothic frame, she explicitly pursues Gothic tropes and references in her work and is critically received as an artist working with Gothic paradigms (Croggon 2010; Hennessy 2015; Praed 2010;

Watts 2010). She has a specific interest in constructing spectral, alienating experiences for spectators by depriving them of conventional dramaturgies of visual and sonic logic and her narrative and structural dissonances are created to heighten anxiety in audiences.

Gothic influences on her work include Janet Cardiff, Alvin Lucier, Margaret Trail, Delia

Derbyshire, and Ben Cobham. 23 Cardiff and Lucier’s contributions to artistic developments of the Gothic in performance are significant and international, specifically regarding their interest, like Saulwick’s, in the psychology of the imagination and the presentation of sonic ambiguities in which the listener’s perception of reality is

23 Cobham is also Saulwick’s main lighting designer and designed the lighting for both Pin Drop and Endings. 64 deliberately skewed (LaBelle 2006, 123). Saulwick seeks to maximise destabilisations between the seen and the unseen, the heard and the unheard, and often creates a ghostly interconnectivity between sound and image. In this chapter, I investigate and map

Saulwick’s postmodern theatrical canvas and its echo chambers using Van Elfer’s theories.

Pin Drop

Pin Drop premiered to rave reviews (Croggon 2011; Peard 2010; Williams 2010) in

Melbourne on 25th August 2010 at Arts House, toured Australia and the UK, and was reimagined as a radio play for Radio National (2013). It was a one-woman work of contemporary performance, created collaboratively by Saulwick and Knight and performed by Saulwick herself, supported sonically by a combined soundtrack of live voice, pre-recorded voices, and live and prerecorded sounds. Saulwick constructed part of the soundscape through the manipulation of objects positioned in close proximity to two microphones and then further manipulated through different sonic processing tools by Knight, who was situated behind the audience at the lighting desk. Pin Drop does not have a linear narrative or conventional plot: its subject is concerned with violence against women: women’s darkest fears of physical attack, sexual assault and rape, both in the home and walking at night. The work reflects a major cultural issue regarding the current high levels of domestic abuse and sexual violence towards women in Australia as investigated by books such as Wendt’s Domestic Violence in Rural Australia (2009),

Ford’s Fight Like a Girl (2016), and Norris’ Look What You Made Me Do: Fathers Who

Kill (2016). According to statistics, every year in Australia, over 300,000 women experience violence - often sexual violence - from someone other than a partner;24 eight

24 http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/mf/4906. Accessed August 6, 2017.

65 out of ten women aged 18 to 24 were harassed on the street in the past year,25 and on average, at least one woman a week is killed by a partner or former partner in Australia.26

While Saulwick has stated the work was gendered in its construction to provide a focus for the material (Kill Your Darlings 2011) she was responding to a major issue of political concern in Australia. Her decision to confront sexual threat and violence against women is also very much part of the Gothic tradition (Uncle Silas 1864; The Mysteries of Udolpho

1794; The Castle of Otranto 1764). At its aural and dramatic core, Pin Drop engaged with a set of 11 audio interviews (conducted with women aged 6 to 92) undertaken by Saulwick during the two years preceding the premiere. The interviews, recorded in the subject’s homes, concern women who live, or have lived in Melbourne, and focused on their fear of pursuit, attack and death; in particular, on the subjects’ recollections of moments when they felt they were, or imagined they were, vulnerable or under physical threat in relation to invasion of their home or walking alone outdoors. These interviews formed the foundations of the soundscapes created in Pin Drop and the material from which Saulwick constructed her performance. The interviews were, at times, presented simply: lifted directly from Saulwick’s recordings and played through the theatre speakers. At other times, they had obviously been modified, processed, and montaged into clips of varying length and clarity; from a single gasp or peal of laughter, to a full phrase often stretched to the point of vocal disintegration. The interviews contained a variety of experiences, often disturbing in nature: a terrified young girl fleeing through the Australian bush from an older, predatory male; a young stripper journeying with a cast of sinister men to more and more isolated strip clubs across suburban, late-night Europe; a middle-aged woman fighting off an intruder in her own home, and a woman ambushed by a string of threatening and sexually explicit phone calls she received one night while at home. These women were never physically represented through onstage characters, they were instead

25 http://www.tai.org.au/content/everyday-sexism. Accessed August 6, 2017. 26 http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/mr/21-40/mr23.html. Accessed August 6, 2017. 66 conjured through the recordings and ghosted through Saulwick’s performance. At times, the interviews were spliced together; cut up into sonic collages of breath, laughter, and snatches of words or phrases. At other times, they were voiced live by Saulwick through a microphone, either solo or accompanied by the audio of the original interview in a synchronised delivery, reinforcing Saulwick or the recorded voice as ghostly doubles of each other. Apart from a few brief flashes of backlight, which momentarily illuminated the space and cast Saulwick’s body into silhouette, the performance space was maintained in extremely low lighting states and spectators were often plunged into complete darkness for extended periods of time. The stage set was uncluttered and non-naturalistic: a microphone, a chair and a light-box the size of a small table with a contact microphone attached to it, a condenser microphone rigged above it, and a collection of everyday objects (meat cleaver, scissors, plastic bag, zip, wind-up toy, cable ties, watermelon, and door locks) placed upon it. On occasion, Saulwick manipulated these objects to create various sounds, which were processed live by Knight often to extremely loud volume and, at times, to the point of such extremity that the sound and the image could not be reconciled. These uncanny noises formed a major component of the soundscape. The sounds, all produced from either Saulwick’s live object manipulation or through a sound design created by Knight’s editing and processing of the ambient sounds of Saulwick’s interview audio, shifted constantly from a delicate drone, gently underlaying the interviews, to a deep bass revolving rumble building in intensity; a sharp frequency or a frantic, high-pitched, scything screech. Ambient sounds, subtle crepitations and tape hiss all served to close in the audience and were produced through multiple speakers placed around and underneath the seating bank. All of these components functioned to create a work that performance critics consistently identified as terror inducing (Croggon 2011;

McGregor 2012; Reck 2010; Watts 2011). These critics describe Pin Drop as a work which created states of heightened attention, calling to mind the saying “you could have

67 heard a pin drop”, which is uttered to express a certain extraordinary and often ominous quality of silence and intense listening. This state of listening was induced to provoke fear and stimulate imaginative associations of terror in audience members in relation to memories of times when their own lives may have been under threat. Saulwick says of her ambitions for Pin Drop: "I want the performance to maintain a long arc of suspense, like a sustained note. I want sound to be central to how the work is manifested, a bit like a concert. I want to tell real people's scary stories. It is about fear” (2015, 40).

The Sonic Haunted House

According to Saulwick, Pin Drop “functions like architecture - a holding place for multiple experiences, voices and points of view” (40). As Pin Drop is, in Saulwick words,

“about fear” (40) the “architecture” of Pin Drop has much in common with that of the

Gothic haunted house. The haunted house is a prolific Gothic symbol (The Fall of the

House of Usher 1839; Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre 1847; The House in House of Leaves

2000) and is associated with inexplicable, spectral and often menacing visual and sonic occurrences. Saulwick and Knight are expert at creating what I shall term the “sonic haunted house”. Immersing their audiences in a complex sonic chamber through multiple speakers surrounding the audience seating bank and a subwoofer (low-frequency speaker) positioned below the seating bank, Saulwick and Knight then fill this chamber with a soundscape of distorted and disembodied sound designed specifically to evoke memories and associations of fear. Saulwick is interested in exploring “how we become engulfed by fear” (40). This speaker placement for Pin Drop created a captive listening space by enveloping the audience, placing them, as Knight articulates, “in sound” (June 20, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil). Here, Saulwick and Knight borrow the concept of the immersive, which usually relates to site-specific enclosed spaces, and reinvent it in relation to the immersive sound world. Gareth White (2012) and Josephine Machon

68 (2013) have both detailed the recent proliferation of immersive theatre and, although this case study is not focused on the wider study of immersive theatre as a form, I am interested in the ways in which Saulwick has adopted and extended experiments in sound utilised by companies such as Punchdrunk, Slung Low, Shunt, Blast Theory, Stalker, and

Underground Cinema. Unlike immersive theatre companies such as Punchdrunk, who are concerned with placing their audience inside a site which is visually dressed or presented as a haunted house, and who summon fear predominantly through visual cues (Lee 2011),

Saulwick’s immersive experiment is mainly driven by sound. In Pin Drop, Saulwick is not interested in the site-specific promenade form often employed in immersive work.

Instead, she uses technology to create a sonic entrapment of the spectator and transforms the theatre space itself into a haunted environment. Terror is not created on the stage through literal enactments but heard and felt somatically in the audience. For example, through Knight’s deployment of a revolving deep bass rumble (consistent with Van

Elfer’s identification of the sonic Gothic’s use of “extremely low-pitched melodies”

(2012,173)), delivered to the audience through the subwoofer speaker positioned below the seating bank, the audiences’ bodies shook with sound. The effect made the theatre building vibrate and this sound vibrated through the spectator’s/listener’s body, forcing the audience member, as Saulwick describes it, “inside the happening” (June 3, 2016, interview with Miles O’Neil). In doing so, it created the listening state Curtin (2014) refers to as “affective hearing”. Curtin writes, “if one hears affectively, one hears in such as way as to be physically moved or disturbed” (143). Affective hearing, in relation to

Pin Drop, is highly Gothic in that it alters the body in relation to the distressing interview material. Knight frequently employed an unpleasant high-pitched frequency, often arriving in short, awful ruptures throughout the work. It was sound impossible to ignore, conjuring associations with the dentist’s drill, mosquitos, and extreme white noise, making the skin crawl and fraying the nerves. Van Elferen has recognised that the sonic

69 Gothic is also often conveyed with extremely high-pitched sounds (2014, 430). In the theatre this is particularly effective as the spectator reacts somatically rather than cognitively to an entrapment in disturbing and at times unbearable sound.27

Darkness

Another strategy of Saulwick’s sonic haunted house is the use of theatrical blackout. This is a well-known device in theme park haunted houses, dark rides, and other performances of terror such as Lutton’s stage production of Picnic at Hanging Rock (2016) and has been well documented (Alston and Welton 2017; Kattelman 2014, 96-113). In Saulwick’s words,

we regularly plunged the audience into long periods of deep darkness, the kind of black where you can’t see your face in front of your hand. As soon as you put people into deep darkness, then their listening just turns up.” (March 17, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil)

Again, Saulwick demonstrates her focus on a dramaturgy of sound. For Saulwick, even her lighting is deployed in order to heighten her soundscape. Darkness in relation to the

Gothic is, as Botting writes, “an absence of the light associated with sense, security and knowledge” (1996, 2). When Saulwick plunges the audience into darkness, she does so to encourage fear. Saulwick refers to this blackout as a “void space” (2015, 50).

Saulwick’s black void encouraged the audience to create their own visuals from the grotesque sonic stimuli provided, a technique Saulwick describes as “painting a sound world with a number of triggers” (March 17, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil). It was with these triggers: the aforementioned bass and high frequencies; short clips of suggestive, mysterious sound: gasps, breath, uneasy laughs, looped noises; sustained and

27 Sound as a torture device has been documented as far back as the Aztecs use of a “Death Whistle”. This Death Whistle emits a high-pitched screeching sound and was used to create psychological discomfort against enemies in battle. Sound as a torture device is still used in the USA today. http://www.medicaldaily.com/torture-methods-sound-how-pure-noise-can-be-used-break-you- psychologically-318638>. Accessed July 1, 2017. 70 elongated notes, and extended moments of silence that Saulwick and Knight provoked the internal nightmare in their spectators. As critic Fiona McGregor has noted:

“Saulwick’s masterstroke is to use as few pointers as possible so the space we inhabit most of all is our own imagination. The objects and anecdotes are triggers and mnemonics into our deepest fears” (2012).

Saulwick’s denial of literalised visuals and her evocation of an accompanying sonic world of fearful distortions is a dramaturgy of disjuncture and it deconstructed usual theatrical conventions. In Pin Drop, the audience was held in a sustained state of suspense, ignorant of what would occur or appear next, either unable to see through the darkness at all or deprived of the ability to see clearly. Spectators worked to find coherence from the grotesque unstitching of the usual meanings derived from particular visuals and sounds.

Throughout the duration of the performance, the theatre was repeatedly plunged into “an inky blackness” (Saulwick 2015, 48) and it is into this blackness that Saulwick then conjured what I refer to as her “sonic ghosts”. In McGregor’s words, “you seek as much meaning in the blackness around her [Saulwick], as you do in her face. The lights are frequently so dim that you strain to see in the dark. What was that? My mind playing tricks on itself? Or is it just my imagination?” (2012) Saulwick’s sonic haunted house was a space in which the imagination was susceptible to uneasy speculation and eerie disembodied presences. Joseph LeDoux has researched this triggering of fear through sound in his book The Emotional Brain (1996). Saulwick and Knight rely on cultural and personal emotional memory triggers, such as the sustained notes, silence, and high and low-pitched frequencies used in myriad horror movie soundtracks in attempts to conjure memories of fear in their audience, leaving them more susceptible, as McGregor asserts, to fearful and ghostly speculation.

71 Sonic Ghosts

Theatre, especially Gothic theatre, has a long history with haunting (Carlson 2003;

Goodall 2008; Rayner 2006; Luckhurst and Morin 2014) and historically ghosts have

been conjured onstage through technology. While the theatrical conjuring of ghosts has

been predominantly credited to visual technology, ghostly sounds and soundscapes did

much to encourage dark imaginings in audiences. As Gothic historian Clive Bloom (2010)

identifies in his book Gothic Histories, composers had been experimenting with the

evocation of haunted landscapes and moods through orchestral compositions in low

musical registers in the “inherently Gothic” operas of the early 18th century (136). Bloom

identifies “appropriately dark” orchestral compositions borrowed from earlier works of

opera such as Amadeus Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1791) and Carl Maria Von Weber’s

Der Freischutz (1821) (137). Before the technological revolution theatre sound began in

the late 19th century with the inclusion of the first phonographic sound effects, the sound

effects of early Gothic theatre were evoked manually from the theatre wings. Myriad

storm effects, such as thunder, created by rolling heavy balls down long wooden chutes;

wind, created by cranking a wooden paddle wheel positioned beneath a taut silk sheet;

rain, evoked by tipping a box filled with pebbles, and wooden drums and metal sheets.

These sound effects were common in early Victorian theatres and were operated by a

team of “sound men” until the early 20th century (Booth 1991, 93) and the “the eerie

timbre of the armonica” also known as the glass harmonica and high-pitched string

orchestration often occompanied the visual evocation of onstage ghosts ((Bloom 2010,

138). Before modern technology, ghosts appeared on stage through traps, played by actors

dressed as ghosts. Pepper’s Ghost effect changed the mechanics of onstage ghosts in

1862. The illusion, created by John Pepper, was a visual effect, summoning a

representation of a ghost onstage through the combination of glass, light and reflection,

and was used for ghostly illusions popular in Victorian era theatre (Carlson 2014, 27).

72 Beth Kattelman (2014) has argued that magicians struggling to compete with the invention of cinema carried the continuation of the visual representation of ghosts into the 20th century. These magicians employed various shock tactics during the staging of popular “spook shows” which often preceded horror movies and were usually staged at midnight. According to Kattelman, these shows relied heavily on theatrical blackout and often included luminous fabric flown over the audience (99). In Pin Drop, Saulwick presented a postmodern theatrical haunting, foregoing the visual incarnation of the spectral entirely and instead summoned her ghosts through sound alone. This development in spectral conjuring is noted by McEvoy (2007) who writes, “nowdays there is no attempt to use special effects to conjure up apparitions by means of light and mirrors: however, many productions find other ways to call up ghosts - by experimenting with a sense of physical presence and absence” (221). From out of the deep and prolonged darkness, the revenants of Saulwick’s sonic ghosts began to emerge, first, through a summoning of recorded voices from the past, returning like sonic zombies. The audience, sitting in deep darkness and engulfed in sound, was given no indication of where the voices were coming from or who they belonged to and it was impossible to divine how many voices there were. The voices simply began to echo around the performance space but were broken up into fragmented utterances, phrases, groans, stammers, stutters and gasps. As Saulwick has observed it is possible to people a space without bodies through suggestion of the ghosts of their bodies. She states, “as soon as you plant a breath or a laugh, you're planting a person and a scenario. You built a sound world, now you're bringing a person into that sound world” (March 17, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil).

Although Saulwick was alone on stage for the duration of the performance, the space echoed with other spectral presences, conjured through the sonic ghosting of female voices. As these sonic ghostings extended from guttural noise to words and, in time, narrative, they remained as though floating in the space via the surrounding speaker

73 placement and strategic sound mixing, the audience was surrounded by voices that were ruptured from bodies and yet all-encompassing.

The Sonic Grotesque

Saulwick and Knight often revealed the machinations of their hauntings through a metatheatrical use of the sonic grotesque. Whittington (2014) defines the sonic grotesque as “incongruous elements, which are generally recognisable, but when they are decontextualised, re-mixed, or layered, they provoke revulsion by association” (182).

Saulwick and Knight deployed the sonic grotesque throughout Pin Drop. In Saulwick’s work, the theatre space itself was initially heimlich; the homely and familiar environment, and she defamiliarised this environment through an exploitation of the metatheatrics at work in the production of the performance. In the opening moments of Pin Drop Saulwick presented a collection of familiar objects: scissors, tape, cable ties, a wind-up toy and door locks, which she then manipulated close to two microphones to produce live sound in a similar way to that of a film foley artist (Hoen 2012). She was very deliberate in demonstrating to the spectator the machinations of her sonic destabilisations. Moving like a magician demonstrating there is no trick to be seen, Saulwick revealed the objects to the audience by displaying them on a small vertical table positioned downstage left. She then lowered the table to horizontal before turning on one microphone below the table and moving another large, silver microphone into position above the objects. She then proceeded to manipulate the objects: jiggling the locks, twisting the cable ties, rustling the plastic bag. However, the sounds the audience received through the speakers from these live manipulations were entirely different from the sounds produced naturally by those objects. For example, when she manipulated the sticky tape, instead of the familiar sound of sticky tape being taken from its spool, the audience received the sound at extremely high volume it became a high-pitch tearing sound, seemingly drenched in

74 reverb and feeding back, as if the object was not being manipulated, but tortured until it screamed. As theatre critic Fiona McGregor noted, “the objects became high drama as the ordinary noises, treated with feedback, became signifiers of doom” (2012). In interview Knight has elucidated the mechanics of this technique, stating that,

the signals were being put through Ableton Live, specifically through a couple of Granular Synthesisers, but I think the volume is the thing. When its turned up loud it does the same things your ears do when you get scared, you hear things in a heightened way, you’re more sensitive to sound, you’re amplifying the sound in your head, mimicking that state of listening when you’re scared; you’re at home and you wonder what that noise was. (20 June, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil)

Here Knight demonstrates a further technique for placing the audience inside the sonic haunted house: volume. In increasing the volume, particularly of the door locks, he was forcing the audience to hear things as if they were “at home” (ibid.), listening deeply for anticipated intrusion. Through his sonic processing, he was evoking the uncanny: the familiar locks made unfamiliar and distressing. As such, he was not only recreating the state of heightened listening but, through the use of sonic processing tools such as delay, which made the sounds Saulwick created feedback and continue after she had ceased to manipulate them, he made the familiar grotesque, distorting that listening state until it became threatening. Through the use of Knight’s volume, delay, reverb, and distortion, the sound would not align with the vision. For Saulwick, this is a further strategy to encourage speculation. Saulwick states, “when there is schism, the imagination kicks in”

(June 3, 2016, interview with Miles O’Neil). The schism she refers to is the distortion occurring between the seen and the heard. In other contexts these objects may appear banal and unthreatening; they are everyday objects, however, in Saulwick’s context: a darkened theatre stage containing work about threatening behaviour and sexual violence against women, each object became implicitly menacing and was exploited for its murderous associations: tape and cable ties conjured associations with bodily restraint; scissors and the knife with bloody violence, especially through the cultural memory of

75 home invasion, violence against women and murder by scissors in Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1954), the plastic bag with suffocation, a wind up toy with the horror film fascination with childhood toys such as Child’s Play (1988) and The Conjuring (2013) and locks with Bluebeard’s Castle (1911). In the hands of Saulwick, these objects became

“signifiers of doom” (McGregor 2012), deployed through her “schism” to engage the audience’s imagination in the development of fear. When these objects produced sounds that were unexpected, they created feelings of unease, of that which should have remained hidden, the latent menace present within them was revealed. Saulwick deepened the effect of the unheimlich by first showing the audience the heimlich: the familiar objects onstage, only to manipulate them sonically until they became signifiers of doom. This supports

Freud’s notion that, on the one hand, the heimlich refers to what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight. Freud (1919) writes “everything is un- heimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come into the light”

(224). This observation gives an interesting insight into Saulwick’s actions while simultaneously complicating Van Elferen’s Sonic Gothic. Saulwick takes van Elferen’s uncanny implications of this relationship (2014, 430) not to its limits, as van Elferen’s suggests the sonic Gothic does in film, television and literature, but beyond these limits into a new haunted sonic world possible through the boundary crossings possible live performance. In the relative safety of Gothic’s fictional manifestations of film, television, video games and literature, the uncanny exists in a safe place, separate from the spectator, i.e., the television, the book. However, in live performance, the spectator is present in the same Gothic environment as the performer and can witness both reality and the blurring of this reality simultaneously, creating, I argue, a more visceral engagement with the

Gothic uncanny. Watching the live manipulation of these objects should have functioned to stabilise the experience, the metatheatricality of the manipulation functioning in the same way as a puppet’s strings, alerting the audience to the make-believe at work and

76 thus the safety of the situation, however, it did the opposite. The demonstration of

Saulwick’s schism: a visual reality at odds with the aural unreality, allowed the audience to arrive at the unheimlich state Saulwick desired. As Watts has noted, “these seemingly innocuous sounds – scissors cutting, a zip unzipping, locks unlocking – took on terrifying implications when amplified” (2011).

It is important to note that this sonic distortion of objects by Knight began, as Saulwick identifies, with the manipulation of metal locks. From the very beginning of Pin Drop,

Saulwick and Knight were specifically attacking the heimlich: the home, and the door to their haunted house. In their hands, locks, the ambivalent symbols of security and threat of the home were sonically deconstructed and became unsafe. Pin Drop is located sonically in the moment before the horror is revealed, the moment when time slows before the bomb goes off or the attack occurs. In reference to this aim, Saulwick has spoken of the influence of contemporary performance maker David Pledger’s desire to “allow the catharsis to occur in the audience, not onstage” but, in fact, in Pin Drop, Saulwick refused catharsis, the audience were not permitted to release emotion, instead the tension was repeatedly ratcheted up (March 17, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil). Saulwick held her audience in a sustained state of listening for imminent threat and did not let them go.

The somatic effect on the spectators was that, not only of an extreme, heightened level of listening, but of an attack on the body. Throughout Pin Drop, Saulwick locked the spectator inside the sonic haunted house, encouraging them to maintain a high level of alert, through what Saulwick has theorised as the creation of her theatrical version of a

“suspended note” to maintain the audience in a state of high alert (2015, 39).

77 Sustaining Suspense and the Sustained Note of Terror

Van Elferen’s hauntography suggests a further analysis of the Gothic in Pin Drop through

Saulwick’s continual suspension of narrative and sonic resolution through her adoption of and unique development of sonic techniques consistent with suspense films and ghostly technology. Through the creation of what Saulwick describes as a “suspended note”

(2015, 39), adopted from sonic tropes of suspense in the horror film, a profound sense of anticipation and hyper-attentiveness was built up in spectators. Unlike most horror films however, Saulwick did not permit suspense to resolve in Pin Drop. Instead, the dramaturgy was of looped repeats, echo, delay, and reverberation: and within this repetition are the repeated crescendos of the sustained notes of terror. In Saulwick’s words,

its suspense more than horror, and when we talk about psychological landscapes, the suspense is released when the person knows what’s going on in the situation, that’s when the horror occurs. With Pin Drop, most of the stories were located in that long part when you are inside the happening of it”. (June 3, 2016, interview with Miles O’Neil)

In fact, horror is co-dependent on suspense and Saulwick reveals that she is more interested in creating atmosphere than in literal representation. The sustained note, common in the suspense genre of film, refers to examples such as violin strings utilised commonly by Hitchcock’s sound designer and master of aural suspense Bernard

Herrmann in films such as Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960) (Cooper 2001; Sullivan

2008). Knight used layering and cutting, looping, echoing, and the use of reverb, distortion, and delay, remixing the incidental sounds recorded during interviews to create a similar state of heightened alertness. As Knight articulates, “familiar sounds of footsteps in the apartment above, planes passing, traffic, tape hiss and in particular gasps of laughter were used” to create extended notes of suspense (June 20, 2017, interview with Miles

O’Neil). The use of tape hiss to create a sense of disquiet in the spectator is not a new

78 construction, as Whittington (2014) has identified in relation to early cinema sound:

A gloved hand slipping over a mouth in order to stifle a scream often represented imminent death. The sound of this loss was not meant to reach the filmgoer's ears, but the hiss of the optical track was always the unintended underscoring of such moments. (183)

This history of tape hiss as threatening underscore highlights van Elferen’s Hauntography at work. This use of tape hiss functioned not only to draw attention to the fact that the voices were recordings and thus were coming from the past (and the hiss suggests a distant past), it functioned to highlight the made quality of the sound, gave an impression of dated technology and in doing so, highlighted the void beneath this signification. Technology capturing the past, whether through photographs, footage, or audio recording, as Balmain has argued, creates “a liminal space between life and death” (2013, 409). In Pin Drop,

Knight approached the source material as a sound designer. For him, the authentic sounds of the past such as tape hiss became crucial to the dramaturgy of the ghostly real and he gave these sounds an equal part in constructing suspense as the spoken narrative and manipulated voices. Knight found that “those accidental sounds were a great source of menace. The hiss, the bumping of a cup, things like when somebody inhales, if you cut of the inhalation hard, it sounds like a gasp” (June 20, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil).

The Gothic and technologies of communication have long been linked to ghostly presences and the invention of the telegraph, telephone, radio, and television all gave rise to well-documented recreations of the Gothic (Luckhurst 2002). In the 21st-century

Knight is exploring the capacity of contemporary sophisticated technologies to suggest the Gothic and experiment with the aesthetics of disembodiment, in this case, audio recorders processed through Abelton Live. I argue that, through his use of the familiar made grotesque, Knight is engaging what LeDoux (1996) refers to as the “emotional unconscious” of the audience (55), and in doing so, creating deeper resonances of fear which support van Elferen’s assertion that “each ghost [in this case sonic ghosts] signifies

79 the more profound uncanniness of haunted ontology: the possibility that there is no meaning, no being-in-time” (2014, 432). The suspended note is not limited to object manipulation, but is also created by Saulwick and Knight through Saulwick’s interviews.

Critic Tony Reck has drawn attention to a particularly effective use of a suspended note, created by populating Saulwick’s haunted house with ghosts. Reck writes:

Listening to the elderly woman’s croaky recollections, Saulwick simultaneously relates a tale directly to the audience. Both stories are characterised by a general sense of disquiet. But it remains difficult to ascertain exactly the detail of each, as a circumlocutory speaker system situated below, behind and to the left and right of the audience, dislocates the content of both narratives. When the two tales collide, however, Saulwick’s live delivery splinters the elderly woman’s sonic representation, and the latter’s recorded voice undergoes a sonorous transformation. Tremolo, reverb and other software manipulations reduce the elderly woman’s voice to a singular chant or a sound resembling a repeated monotone emanating from a large gathering. (2010)

Reck’s identification of the sound resembling a chant emanating from a large gathering reflects sonic ghosting in practice and is reflective of van Elferen’s identification of the liturgical nature of the sonic Gothic. Knight’s layering and remixing of one “clean” voice into many distorted ones also deploys the sonic grotesque while Reck’s identification of the “repeated monotone” highlights the creation of a suspended note. Reck writes of the way Saulwick interacted with one of her sonic ghostings while Knight simultaneously fragmented the ghosting into an independent soundbite in which the words “I didn’t scream” are repeated over and over again. This soundbite is then corrupted, functioning, through repetition, in a similar way to feedback which takes an original signal and through both processing and repetition, allowing it to distort, becoming as it does, a singular sound: a suspended note. Van Elferen argues that “throughout the different medial contexts of sonic Gothic, a few returning stylistic elements can be discerned: reverb and distortion” (2012, 173). Knight used this strategy and pushed it to its limits, re-mixing and processing the soundbite until the actual words became unintelligible, distorting and echoing as if they were lost down a very long tunnel and drenched in tape hiss, as if the

80 ghosts in the machine, to use an expression, were being summoned onto the stage: the echoing voices being called forth from technologies, the two seperate and yet joined in a similar manner to Descarte’s mind-body dualism (Koestler, 1967; Ryle 1949). This is fertile ground for van Elferen’s Gothic hauntology to take root for it is through reverb and distortion that the artists create an aural landscape in which the linguistic element remains, at least for a time, haunted by other sound. Watts describes Knight’s score as “a haunting mix of brooding, blasting music, looped voices and echoing footsteps” (2011). Van

Elferen’s hauntology occurs in Pin Drop through both the summoning of spectral presences and the enclosed world of Saulwick’s sonic haunted house in which, through

Knight’s looping, the way out has become obscured and escape is impossible. Van Elferen

(2014) argues: “hauntology is at the core of Gothic performativity, as the genre’s labyrinthine fictionality painstakingly unearths the fears and fantasies of its audience”

(432). Through Knight’s editing techniques, Saulwick’s sonic revenants were conjured time and time again, working to disorient the spectator and force them further into a

Gothic terror as they morphed to become not only the sonic ghostings of women under threat, but the threatening presence of predatory men. This is exemplified by Saulwick’s conceptualisation of the circling footsteps in Pin Drop. In Saulwick’s words,

the sound moved all the more circle-like. There's one point where you hear the sound of footsteps walking, and it goes from the front-left and they walk around behind the audience; actually circling the audience in darkness. (March 17, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil)

In Pin Drop, sound became a protagonist. It mimicked human sounds and unseen movement, becoming a ghost actor. Saulwick’s use of footsteps circling the audience in the darkness is consistent with a common motif of unexplained footsteps in many Gothic narratives. As van Elferen (2012) has written, the sound of disembodied echoing footsteps in the darkness has long been associated with the Gothic and supports Gothic obsession with the disembodied (1). Van Elferen writes,

81 the obtrusive uncanniness of these Gothic sounds is caused by their seeming lack of physical origin. Upon the sound of approaching footsteps we look around us, seeking visual confirmation of the presence suggested by those sounds. If that confirmation cannot be given, a fundamental physical law seems thwarted...and here Gothic terror sets in. (2014, 430)

It is this Gothic terror that Saulwick and Knight were seeking to create through their summoning of an unseen presence circling the audience. When interviewed, Knight has revealed that the footsteps were actually the recorded sounds of watermelon being eaten, a fruit which formed a strong visual and sonic component of Pin Drop (June 20, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil). Saulwick’s desire to create a threatening sonic ghost which circled the audience in darkness is particularly Gothic in the sense that it functioned to trap its audience. As theatre critic Rebecca Harkins-Cross articulated, “Pin Drop lowered its audience into the psychic well of terror” (2015). The likening to a well is a fitting description of this enclosed, circular experience. However, it is her articulation of the experience as being one of descent, of being lowered down into an inescapable psychological terror that is resonant of the Gothic. The Gothic is always interested in going below the surface, be it to the basement, the dungeon, the catacombs or indeed all the way to Hell. All these are also symbolic of the unconscious mind. The Gothic revels in encouraging its audience to excavate repressed memories of fear hidden deep in the mind. It is here that, again, Freud’s unheimlich resides: in the resurfacing of repressed memories. The Gothic summons these ghosts forth from the shadows. As Punter states,

at a more psychological level, I think that they [Gothic narratives] represent the fear of being locked up inside ourselves so that we cannot escape the fortress we’ve made around ourselves and we are doomed to continue to explore that space, even if it means going down to the cellar or the basement...and finding out what lies down there. And that image of going down to the cellar or the basement is an image of going down into the recesses of one’s own mind and finding out what is buried down there. (2015)

Drawing on Freud’s writing, Punter argues that the Gothic is a means of representing our

82 deepest fears. As Saulwick explains: “Alison Croggon called it a psychic echo chamber.

Something gets sparked and that sparks something else and maybe that’s the Gothic thing: allowing your own fears, memories or associations to echo in relation to the material”

(June 3, 2016, interview with Miles O’Neil).

The Psychic Echo Chamber

Croggon writes “smoke, darkness, light and sound powerfully call up your own memories of fear or threat. In Pin Drop, the theatre becomes, quite nakedly, a kind of psychic echo chamber” (2011). Croggon’s startling image of the psychic echo chamber is a useful metaphor for further theorisation of Saulwick’s work. An echo chamber has two distinct yet interrelating definitions: one refers to a large room used for the creation of reverb when recording audio; the other, to a social phenomenon in which opinions are thought not to escape beyond the cultural bubble in which they are created. Croggon’s echo chamber describes an enclosed space of a psychological nature in which memories of fear and threat are not only summoned, but allowed to ricochet, haunting the theatre space through the summoning of psychic revenants. Saulwick’s provocation of terror in her audience occurs through her deployment of cultural and mnemonic triggers which allow new associations of threat to well up in the spectator. As Knight argues,

what Croggon is responding to is what we were trying to do: to create a space for your own thoughts to bounce around in. The show encouraged your own stories to surface. You are for a lot of that piece alone in the dark with your own thoughts. You’re in sound. (June 20, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil)

As Knight articulates, the aim was to allow thoughts not simply to occur, but to bounce: to move around the space, returning to the spectator in a random and unexpected manner.

As Saulwick has argued, “I was trying to engage with and evoke in people that uncertain space where you don’t know if you’re under threat or not, and to evoke those memories”

83 (March 17, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil). Saulwick’s psychic echo chamber functioned as the equivalent of a psychological prison cell in which the spectator was trapped, alone and in the dark with their own panic and terror and in this space were encouraged to populate it with their own fears; their own sonic ghosts. These personal ghosts are imposed on Saulwick’s sonic revenants: her voices and circling footsteps ricochet off one another in a unique manifestation of the sonic Gothic which extends van

Elferen’s theorisations to culturally significant Australian live performance. As performer, Saulwick also allowed herself to be haunted by sonic ghostings. As she theorises, “I function as a conduit. [...] Voices and stories travel through me and out again via receivers and headphones, transmitters and microphone-mediatised stories, via a wired body (2015, 47). Saulwick regularly became a conduit for these revenants, both the threatened and the threatening, and blurred perceptions between what was prerecorded and what was live through a technique I identify as “the multi-vocal uncanny”.

The Multi-Vocal Uncanny

Saulwick describes her role in Pin Drop as “the flesh and nerves through which these stories and voices pass. A multivalent presence, I am the body, the axis, the transmitter, the accompanist, the medium, the victim, the protagonist, the voyeur and the provocateur”

(2015, 46). Saulwick is interested in blurring the lines between the real and the imagined, the seen and unseen, and it is through a combination of the suspended note, the sonic grotesque and her multi-vocal performance technique that she creates an ambiguity, allowing multiple voices to pass through her and to be present within the work at once.

For Saulwick, “what’s pre-recorded and what's live, that's ambiguous. That's actually something that is a thread to all the works I make, this kind of ambiguity” (June 3, 2016, interview with Miles O’Neil). Through a headset microphone, Saulwick often interacts with her sonic ghosts in a duo delivery, mimicking her revenants precisely and becoming

84 a haunted second self. By both embodying and further disembodying the source material, she summons the unfamiliar through the familiar and makes manifest the Gothic double: another home of the unheimlich. With regard to the double, referencing Rank’s essay The

Double: A Psychoanalytic Study (1914), Freud argued that, having been separated from the mother’s womb and unable to return, humans must refuse this original home. Freud states that it is through this refusal of the heimlich that the unheimlich is manifested and through this turning away the double, amongst other things, is created (1919). Freud’s theory is used to articulate Gothic doubles such as the Frankenstein/Monster, Dorian

Gray/Portrait, Jekyll/Hyde, and Batman/Joker (Mishra 2012, 288-307). In Pin Drop

Saulwick takes on the Gothic double from the moment she begins her performance. When

Saulwick enters the performance space, she attaches a microphone headset and a set of in-ear monitors (headphones) to herself, becoming “a wired body” (2015, 47): a double, both herself and her revenants; performer and machine; self and other. By doing so she was receiving and delivering her sonic ghosts, however, the voice that arrived through the speakers when Saulwick spoke was often haunted by the other. As Reck identifies,

“Saulwick simultaneously relates a tale directly to the audience. Both stories are characterised by a general sense of disquiet. But it remains difficult to ascertain exactly the detail of each” (2010). As well as this vocal ambiguity, Knight was distorting the voices. Through the use of a harmonising processing tool, a voice that sounded at one moment as if belonging to an adult woman, suddenly shifted in timbre to sound like the voice of a young girl. As Saulwick (2015) describes: “the prerecorded voices seemingly float into, out of and around the live body” (47). This chilling act of Gothic doubling has been likened by Saulwick, via Pieter Verstraete’s ideas of the theatrical disembodied voice (2011), to a form of ventriloquising (2015, 47). In Pin Drop, it is not only the theatre which became a haunted house but Saulwick herself. With regard to haunted performers,

Luckhurst (2014) argues that the actor is often haunted by the character they play and

85 identifies the actor’s body as location for a haunted house: a location for communicating with an “absent presence” (172). Through Knight’s processing and Saulwick’s performance, Saulwick’s voice box becomes another sonic haunted house in “a kind of duet” (March 17, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil). As Saulwick states: “I think in the audience’s mind, I could be seen to be slipping to and fro between perpetrator, victim, and witness right throughout the work” (ibid.). Saulwick’s vocal dramaturgy is one of dark ambiguity. In Pin Drop, there was no reliable narrator, Saulwick was both performer and conduit for others; consistently destabilised and destabilising throughout the work.

Saulwick was haunted through the conjuring not only of her sonic ghosts, but by the perpetrators and the witnesses of their stories. She became a conduit for the unseen, a body for the disembodied and a voice for her ghosts and their fears in a form of ventriloquising the absent women.

One particular moment of this unheimlich ventriloquising occurs during the playback of an interview with a woman telling a story of a time when, as a child, she was pursued through the Australian bush by an older and sexually threatening man. In this section of

Pin Drop, the voice begins by locating the story near “a house completely surrounded by bush” (Pin Drop performance text 2010). The Australian bush, and particularly lost children within it, have long been associated with the Australian Gothic and have been the subject of a wide range of Australian Gothic cultural productions (Miller 2016;

Scheckter 1981). Lutton’s stage adaption of Picnic at Hanging Rock (2016) and Angela

Betzien's play Children of the Black Skirt (2008) are examples of Australian theatre productions that confront the trope. Films such as Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971) and the well-known Fred McCubbin painting depicting a young girl lost in the bush entitled

Lost (1886) also address the subject. The Australian bush is also the setting for brutal true crimes: the murder of Peter Falconio (Maynard, 2010), the disappearance of Azaria

86 Chamberlain (Schepisi, 1988) and serial killer Ivan Milat’s murders (Small 2014). The

Australian imagination is accustomed to seeing the Australian bush as a landscape in which terrible things occur (Tompkins 2006). Saulwick’s interview concerned a child fleeing from a predatory adult through the bush; this is the narrative of both global fairytale and Australian cultural memory. Saulwick was accessing a deep current of anxiety buried within her audience and through doing this, was creating a truly unique version of contemporary Australian Gothic theatre through sound-led performance. As

Gelder notes, “the Australian Gothic especially relishes the aural effects of the Bush”

(2007, 4). In Pin Drop, Knight evoked the Australian bush aurally through the sound of footsteps running over dry branches and bark. During this sound, Saulwick conjured both victim and predator: voicing both the little girl fleeing and the older male in pursuit. This was a moment when sound often seemed to stand in for dialogue in order to conjure the narrative landscape. When the narrator of the story finally makes it out of the bush and to the secure confines of her veranda and her mother she immediately begins devouring watermelon, looking down the steps of the house at the man lurking on the lawn below.

The text and sound of the final moments of this section is worth attempting to convey on paper:

I remember burying my face in my mother’s skirt and just eating this water-melon and looking and then seeing him looking at me or watching me down from the bottom of the steps. (A reverb-drenched reprise of “I didn’t scream” begins building beneath this text). And I can’t remember how this happened. (The sound of unpleasant high-pitched frequencies mixed with the sound of buzzing, footsteps, birds) Chasing me full pelt. Again, chasing me, and he just kept saying, “honey, honey”. (High pitched frequency ringing). Pin Drop performance text, 2010.

During the delivery of this narration accompanied by disquieting melancholic ambient sounds the sonic grotesque returns in the repeated sound of the footsteps on dry grass. 87 However, another sonic schism occurred and the footsteps through dry branches shifted sonically, becoming wetter in sound until they began to sound strangely like the amplified sound of a mouth slurping and chewing crisp watermelon. This sound of chewing surrounded the audience, functioning now, not to encircle with the sound of footsteps, but to place the spectator aurally inside the mouth. This sonic grotesque is taken further when the child’s story is fragmented into the repetition of a single word: “honey”, is blended with the repetition of a phrase from an earlier story: “I’m gonna lick your pussy and you’re gonna suck my cock” (ibid.). These two phrases were layered and blended with the grotesque slurping of watermelon and ambient sounds sonically resembling a rusted iron gate moving on its hinge. It is grotesque, sexually perverse content that creates a discomforting, claustrophobic experience. Immediately following this moment, Saulwick produced a quartered watermelon and a long knife and placed them on her light box.

Bathed in the low red light from the light-box, she began slowly slicing long slithers of the fruit as the narration shifts from the pursued child to a story of a young stripper journeying with a cast of sinister men to more and more isolated strip clubs across suburban, late-night Europe. During this story, Saulwick laid the pink, flesh-like strips on the top of her table (as if conducting an autopsy) before proceeding to eat the strips, all of which was captured and amplified by the microphone. Here the watermelon stands in for flesh, but, even more disturbingly, the flesh of a child being devoured by the predatory male gaze still lingering in memory from the previous story. Again, Saulwick demonstrated the metatheatrics of her work. Saulwick advances van Elferen’s sonic

Gothic function here by creating a complex rupture between sound and image, a new, culturally specific manifestation of the sonic Gothic taking place: the spectrality of the child’s voice duo-delivering the adult voice, hauntology excavating long lost memories of the Australian bush and of child-like fear of a predatory presence, musical hauntography in the reverb drenched rhythmic reprise earlier voices occurring through

88 the claustrophobic associations of the memory associated with the first manifestation of the story in which a woman found a predatory male hiding in her room; and boundary breaking liturgy that occurs throughout Pin Drop through the immersive use of surround sound. These elements work together to create a sonic uncanny that is specifically

Australian and uniquely performative. It could also be argued that Saulwick was consuming her audience, in the sense of overwhelming their rational responses and stimulating them to construct a scenario of horror, the watermelon standing in for body and not just body, but the consumption of that body. Being consumed is a deep psychological fear, conjuring tropes of fairytales such as Hansel and Gretel and Little

Red Riding Hood. These fears of being pursued and consumed are all tropes the Gothic has adopted to engage psychological fear present within the collective unconscious, however, due to the specificity of the landscape of the story: a house surrounded by the bush, it became a culturally specific collective unconscious that Saulwick and Knight were accessing and exploiting in order to create terror in the spectator. The spectral presence of the young girl pursued through the bush by a sexually threatening man is one of many ghosts that haunt Saulwick’s sonic haunted house. Throughout Pin Drop

Saulwick summons her ghost, both physically and sonically, and allows them to haunt the theatre. As McEvoy (2007) identifies “the theatre experience, unlike any other, has the ability to put its audience into the haunted house, to let it hear its sounds and become lost” (216).

Conclusion

Through the creation of a unique sonic haunted house, Saulwick forces her audience to become lost in a fear-inducing psychological landscape that is uniquely sonic and uniquely Australian. She creates a space in which personal memory and fear are intertwined with cultural fears to create, at least for an hour, a claustrophobic psychic

89 echo chamber. While van Elferen’s theorisation of the sonic Gothic is useful when applied to Saulwick’s dramaturgies, Saulwick extends van Elferen’s assertions, moving beyond the confines of literature, film, television and video games and into the theatre. In doing so, Saulwick creates new manifestations of the sonic Gothic which which, rather than present to the audience, engulf, surround and incarcerate her audience by depriving them of conventional dramaturgies of visual and sonic logic and maintaining them instead in her sonic haunted house. Saulwick presents herself as both puppeteer and puppet, machine and actor, victim and perpetrator and in doing so, distorts reality, adopting the sonic grotesque and the unheimlich to expose her audience to her sonic revenants. For

Saulwick, sound is a dramaturgical tool that blurs lines, between life and death, between self and other, between body and machine and illuminates to the audience a major cultural issue of violence against women through her conjuring of sonic ghosts. As Smith writes:

“ghosts are never just ghosts; they provide us with an insight into what haunts our culture.

[...] Making visible what it is that haunts the ghosts is thus a crucial challenge for contemporary Gothic criticism” (2007, 153). In using sound to blur these lines continually and deeply, Saulwick is creating new Australian Gothic soundscapes which not only provide insight into what haunts Australian culture, but what haunts her audience, surfacing as she does, both cultural and personal ghosts simultaneously.

90 Chapter 4 Disappearing into Darkness

My creative submission, Disappearing into Darkness (2018), involved sonic experimentation in the evocation of spectral landscape and atmospheres and resulted in the development of a 40-minute soundscape composed using a variety of instruments, voice, and processed environmental sounds recorded on the Shipwreck Coast in Victoria.

I undertook periods of studio experimentation influenced by my practical and theoretical research, and by information gathered through my case studies. In this chapter, I lay out my rationale for the decisions I made and argue that my process of working also informs my methodology. I had a number of leading questions in my mind during my practice- based research: What does it mean to produce an Australian Gothic theatre score? How can Australian landscapes be evoked through theatrical Gothic soundscape? How can I evoke spectral moods of the Shipwreck Coast through sound? And how do I distort environmental sounds to create sonic menace and the grotesque? My influences, both practical and theoretical, are multifarious and the dramaturgical structures of

Disappearing into Darkness are complex. It is important to understand my development as a Gothic practitioner, my relationship with Gothic theatre, with the Shipwreck Coast and with cult Gothic music and I detail this first before examining the influence of

Australian Gothic cinema on my work with Suitcase Royale. I then analyse three dramaturgical layers of sound in Disappearing into Darkness: Recorded Environmental

Sound; Voice, Song, and Ballad; and Musical Composition.

It was not my initial intention to focus only on soundscape. I began this period of practical research in early 2013 with the purpose of performing a long-form ballad. However, over the course of my candidature, particularly during my preliminary practice-based research into the composition of Pretty Weird Shit (2014), a radio play for ABC Radio National, I realised I wanted to absent myself visually from the theatre, allowing sound rather than

91 performance to guide my creative process to unexplored places. This return to sound was a return to my roots as a musician and as a theatre artist who emerged from band culture before undertaking a Bachelor of Drama and Film at Deakin University (2002-2005) and my postgraduate study at the Victorian College of the Arts (2013-2018). My research into the sonic dramaturgies of Tamara Saulwick and Black Lung, and the development of

Pretty Weird Shit, deepened my interest in the possibilities of Gothic soundscapes and the creative potential of my role as composer/director rather than musician/performer/devisor. I decided to instigate a piece of theatre through the standalone composition of a soundscape with the intention of using it as alternative text in the creation of a new work of contemporary Australian Gothic music/theatre. Although

I have always used sound in my theatre work, a conscious privileging of the dramaturgy of sound is new to me. In a sense, this PhD has led me full circle to relook at my primary creative influences. Writing this dissertation enables me to look at my days as an emerging musician and to reflect on how significant they were in my evolution as a sound- led theatre artist. In fact, Gothic sound was working on me even earlier, during my early teenage years in the 1990s. My journey began in Torquay, Victoria, on the Shipwreck

Coast, in the lounge room of my childhood home.

Background: Early Musical Influence and The Shipwreck Coast

I grew up listening to what is now understood to be cult Gothic music, though at the time did not know it. My early teenage years were lived to the songs of Nick Cave and the Bad

Seeds and Tom Waits. Their albums: particularly Cave’s Murder Ballads (1995) and

Waits’ Mule Variations (1999), populated as they are with grotesque, often violent characters, inhabiting landscapes of rural and suburban nightmare, were played by my mother almost daily. I found the fantasyland Cave and Waits proposed dangerous and alluring. There was escapism offered through this music in the disjuncture between the

92 fictional landscapes of the songs: dusty, rural towns, frightening carnivals, and old colonial hotels brimming with violence, and the picturesque but lethal Shipwreck Coast on which I grew up. In particular, Nick Cave resonated because, like me, he came from rural Victoria, the small town of Warracknabeal, further to the west and inland, but nonetheless, the imagery and the mood of his murder ballads was something I innately understood. This is perhaps due to my colonial Australian heritage. My family name,

O’Neil, an Anglicisation of the Gaelic Ua Neil, can be traced back to The Great O’Neill region of Northern Ireland. My family traveled to Victoria (from Ireland) in the mid 19th- century (probably as a result of the Irish Potato Famine) and settled in Melbourne. Both my mother and father were raised in Melbourne before settling in Torquay when I was born. Between the ages of 12 and 18, I often returned home from spending mornings surfing somewhere along the Shipwreck Coast to find these songs of murder, menace, love, and loss, screaming forth from the lounge room window. I recall walking down the driveway to hear this music filling the backyard, melding with the cockatoos screeching in the apple trees and the crows leering silently from the brown-brick, smokeless chimney.

Those summer afternoons of my teenage years, awash in salt and sunlight, were set to the soundtrack of savage murder, freaks, horrific acts, and howling electric guitars. In later years, I learned about the paradox of Victoria’s celebrated surf culture and booming tourism and its dark history of shipwrecked sailors and immigrants, Indigenous massacres, and the struggles of the early colonials (Clark 1995; Garden 1984; Henderson

2016; Loney 1991; McHugh 2012). Growing up on the Shipwreck Coast, death was always all around me and I absorbed this without realising its effects, whether it was the macabre television comedy series Round the Twist (1989-2001): a fantasy series set in a lighthouse haunted by the ghosts of sailors and filmed on location on the Shipwreck

Coast; the anchors of fatal shipwrecks erected at picnic grounds and lookouts; houses that incorporated scavenged parts of shipwrecks in their construction; and beaches with names

93 such as Point Danger and Point Impossible. The storms, the turbulent surf and the spectrality of the twisted salt-laden moonah trees permeated me. Even at Torquay Primary

School, the schoolhouses were named after tragic shipwrecks: Charlemont, Bancoora,

Inverloch, and Scammell. Even the seasoned colonial explorer Matthew Flinders was daunted by the Shipwreck Coast, writing: “I have seldom seen a more fearful section of coastline” (cited in Everist 2009, 348). The cultural landscape of the Shipwreck Coast is conveyed through a language of historical misfortune and death on which a vibrant tourist industry is built. It is no coincidence I have developed sonic Gothic interests: in Torquay, the sound of the thunderous surf is inescapable, even in sleep.

In 1995, Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads instantly became an international marker of the contemporary Gothic (McInnes 2006), and at the time, Cave’s ten songs on the album brought about recognition of him as “master of the macabre” (Ali 1996). Loraine Ali has noted Cave’s theatrical inhabitation as a narrator of both killers and victims, his dark psychological innuendo and his uniquely surreal soundscapes. Similarly, Waits’ Mule

Variations, described as “a gothic exploration of rural primitives, freak-show exhibits and back-porch romantics” (Brown 2011, 252), has become a vital work of contemporary

Gothic music. In retrospect, I recognise both albums are the work of iconic Gothic storytellers, the musical equivalents of Edgar Allan Poe. Their songs, linked as they are to my formative years, have much to do with the Gothic preoccupations of my adult life.

Cave’s origins have been persistently underplayed, but the uniqueness of his voice and his work is explained by the fact of his rural Victorian roots. Victoria has its own specific histories, compelling myths, hanging rocks, deserted goldmines, eerie asylums, heritage prisons and legends which are world famous (Elder 2007). Cave explains his uniqueness through his childhood in Warracknabeal, his obsession with Ned Kelly, and the sudden death of his father in a car accident when he was 19. For Cave, the isolated Gothic

94 landscapes of his childhood have been key to his creative development and artistic difference (cited in Donovan 2005).

Waits and Cave have always operated in artistic territories beyond the purely musical and have a deep understanding of the power of the visual in tandem with the sonic (Hanson

2005). Cave is both a performance artist and musician and studied art before making music. Both are storytellers whose lyrics are highly theatrical, and both are obsessed with the creation of character and define character closely with environment. Indeed, for them, landscape, environment, and music are integrally bound together (Kessel 2009). The characters and the songs their characters sing are born of the environment. The stock characters often employed by Cave and Waits are familiar to me through the narratives of missing people, explorers, bushrangers, and sailors, all of which characterise Victorian history (Boxall 1916; Morgan 2016; Pierce 1999). Until undertaking this practice-based research, my theatre work had always been set in a mythic Outback Victorian landscape populated by similar characters: bushrangers, ghosts, monsters lurking by rivers, and by colonial relics and disused buildings suggesting a traumatic past. This research has led me to shift from a broad theatrical exploration of the Victorian Outback, to a focused interrogation of the landscapes of my childhood: the Shipwreck Coast, the area of bushland named the Iron Bark Basin, Whalebone Creek, Point Danger, Red Rocks, and

Point Impossible, framed as they were for me by the howling narratives of Waits and

Cave’s music. The Gothic resonances of ocean swell and death have now been commercially exploited through the numerous ghost tours on the Shipwreck Coast, in particular, Warrnambool's Flagstaff Hill Museum and the multimillion-dollar sound and light installation which memorialises deaths on Shipwreck Coast.28

28 http://www.flagstaffhill.com/sound-and-light-show>. Accessed January 11, 2018. 95 The albums of Cave and Waits compelled me to perform and lay the foundations for my later work with Suitcase Royale. By age 12, I knew all the words to Cave’s song The

Curse of Millhaven, a particularly violent slaughter song from Murder Ballads, and I took great pleasure in being allowed not only to listen to this song but to perform it with a broomstick acting as a microphone. I felt as though I had been let in on some dark musical secret when I sang the lyrics,

You must have heard about The Curse of Millhaven How last Christmas Bill Blake's little boy didn't come home They found him next week in One Mile Creek His head bashed in and his pockets full of stones Well, just imagine all the wailing and moaning La la la la La la la lie Even little Billy Blake's boy, he had to die. (Cave 1995)

These were terrifying lyrics for a child to hear, let alone sing. Yet, for some reason, it was allowed, and I became hooked. These songs did not receive the same censorship that films did, and I understand now that the narratives and images conjured by Cave and the embodied experience of growing up on the Shipwreck Coast have had an abiding effect on me.

Early Sonic Experiments

I began learning to play guitar when I was 15 and these early influences remained with me, when, as 17-year-old, I started my first punk band (which remained nameless). My early punk experiments expanded my Gothic preoccupation through the band’s setlist, which, in retrospect, I see was composed mainly of songs of Cave, Waits and proto-

Gothic Rock groups such as Iggy Pop and the Stooges, The Doors, The Velvet

Underground and of course Cave’s early band The Birthday Party. The primitive electric guitar driven music of these bands, paired with their often-disturbing lyrical content, continued to develop my sonic palette. Though my music in this early band in no way did

96 justice to the work of these influences, it did function to deepen my Gothic preoccupation through practice. Trying to copy these artists, I composed murder ballads and dark punk anthems too embarrassing to revisit in any detail here. I can recall sitting in a cigarette smoke filled band rehearsal room in Geelong, not far from the notorious old gaol and its ghosts, trying and failing to make my electric guitar sound as grinding and savage as the

Birthday Party bass player, Tracey Pew. The fact that I was playing through a small, valveless practice amp certainly helped produce a distorted quality, however, I could only ever manage what I would describe as a “nagging” sound when compared to Pew’s roaring dirge. I was trying, and although failing, I was learning the tools of sonic menace.

I left that nameless teenage punk experiment behind when I turned 18 and moved to

Melbourne to study acting and filmmaking at Deakin University. At Deakin, I met my new bandmates (and later theatre company mates) guitarist and bass player Glen Walton and drummer Joseph O’Farrell. In my second year, while rehearsing a collection of

Samuel Beckett’s short works, we started a band together. After rehearsal, we would return to my house in St Kilda for our band experiments. These experiments had theatrical leanings and I was again influenced by Cave and Waits, particularly Wait’s growling singing style. I’m obviously not the first to look to Waits’ combining of music and theatre for ideas. Robert Wilson’s collaborations with Waits on The Black Rider (1990), Alice

(1992) and Woyzeck (2000) were also obvious reference points. Wilson’s theatrical experiments were not Gothic as such, but the visuals were often surreal, arresting, and unthinkable without Waits’ music (Brecht 1994; Holberg 1998; Shevtsova 2007). Walton and O’Farrell did not share my fondness for Waits, unable to move past his growling vocals and penchant for what they saw as circus music, they would not allow us to play any of his songs in our early sets. This rejection forced me to move beyond my early imitation of Waits and to discover my own voice. It has always been important to me to

97 sing in my Australian accent and not adopt an American phrasing - this is unusual and even today, casting agents in Australia still privilege the ability to mimic an American accent. Even in these early band days, when imitating Waits’ rough growl, I was set on singing in my natural Australian accent. Cave was the direct influence: he has also identified his desire to “retain a distinct Australian voice” (cited in Donovan 2005) and carries with him the self-confident politics of a post 1960s, post-colonial Australia.

I did not recognise at the time that my choice to live in St Kilda, the early haunt of Cave and other seminal Gothic musical influences, was very significant. We played our early gigs in venues in and around St Kilda and Fitzroy. The days of the Crystal Ballroom (the celebrated birth-place of Australian Gothic Rock) were very much in living memory. We played our gigs in many of the venues that Cave had frequented, and I particularly remember a venue called The Prince of Wales in Fitzroy Street where we played a lot of these early shows (San Miguel 2012; Walker 2009). We had yet to realise that live music and theatre could go together in the way they would in our later works, however, this early band work established some of the sonic dramaturgy and performance style we would soon employ in the creation of our theatre work.

The Suitcase Royale: Developing A Dramaturgy of Listening

We went on to form our band/theatre company the Suitcase Royale in 2004 and made our first work Felix Listens to the World (2004). Although this work did not incorporate live music, Walton, O’Farrell and I created the sound design: a combination of folk songs and environmental recordings of both the city and the sea and promoted a dramaturgy of listening both through the title and much of the onstage action. For example, Felix began with a prolonged period of darkness after the house lights were dimmed. During this period of approximately 2 minutes, the sound of crickets, recorded in my garden and

98 played through the theatre speakers, slowly increased in volume. Walton, O’Farrell and I then entered the space and, after settling into position drinking tea, we raised the teacups, not to our mouths, but to our ears, listening into them as if they were seashells. The sound of a distant ocean swell slowly built in intensity through the speakers before the theatre was again darkened. Through moments such as these, I was encouraging the audience to listen and to imagine a coastal landscape beyond the theatre’s site. The plot of Felix concerns a man’s search for the ghost of his wife. Although he seems to travel the world in search of her, the narrative is a constructed fantasy of the protagonist. Felix never leaves his apartment, remaining in the confined space haunted by the ghost of his wife.

Felix was influenced by Beckett and the widely acknowledged spectrality of his short works (Fadem 2015; Luckhurst and Morin 2014; Tubridy 2010). My training in ensemble devising from both Simon Fisher and my guest tutor for one module on devised theatre,

Tamara Saulwick, was also significant. As I have demonstrated, Saulwick has a strong penchant for the ghostly and was highly influential on the development of my early devising techniques. Her method of a confrontation of materials, learnt from our shared tutor Simon Fisher,29 was, and remains, particularly useful. A confrontation of materials refers to a process of confrontation: ideas for performance are generated through improvised play with materials. The function of those materials are not assumed, for example, a plate is not assumed to be a plate for eating from, but is simply an object for play. Saulwick uses this process to create her sound-led works and considers her sound and recorded interviews as material, which through confrontation can lead to the generation of performance (Tamara Saulwick, June 3, 2016, interview with Miles

O’Neil). This is one method I used to develop sonic ideas in Disappearing into Darkness.

Saulwick took an interest in my early development and encouraged me to attend a performance of Chamber Made Opera’s Phobia (2003), a darkly comic deconstruction of

29 Saulwick studied the same Deakin University Drama degree as I did. She was a student from 1986-89. 99 the soundscape of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), performed by an ensemble of musicians/physical theatre performers. This work was a blending of live music, the staging of sound recording, film score composition, and performance. I was drawn to their prioritisation of sound in the work. The performers not only played live music onstage, they operated sound equipment such as microphones and amplifiers and presented the recording of foley sound and live score as theatre. It was theatre being created through a confrontation with a film score and an exploration of the ways this score could be used to create performance. Being a musician, I found a kinship with this approach to making theatre with sound, and, although it would be two years before I would incorporate live music into the theatre work of Suitcase Royale, I was influenced by the staging of sound- led dramaturgies and took this into the development of Felix Listens to the World. Felix both prioritised the act of listening and was created through a dramaturgy of listening and a foregrounding of sound devices and technology. As musicians, we were so used to operating instruments and amplifiers onstage, it seemed obvious to operate and sound- check our technical equipment onstage and perform the act of listening and attention to sound. This was also highlighted through the positioning of a gramophone at the front of the stage and using it to score many moments of the work. In the scene following the teacup listening scene, Joseph O’Farrell manually cranked the gramaphone, placed a record on the turntable, lowered the stylus and listened to the American Blues artist

Leadbelly’s version of Goodnight Irene (1933). The song is a melancholy folk song about the suicidal fantasy of the singer’s desire to drown in a river. It was this song, found in a second-hand shop, which informed the macabre, spectral nature of Felix. The analogue operation and function of the gramophone, and its position at the front of stage, promoted a visual prioritisation of sound: spectators were watching sound being produced as a crucial dramaturgical tool of the work. The gramophone is later puppeteered, manually animated by me to become a guiding character, which speaks directly to Felix, imploring

100 him to listen to the ocean. The prioritisation of sound and the staging of listening also revealed a compositional tool: rhythm. Although I was yet to bring live music into my acting world, I gravitated towards this compositional control. Rhythm has always been crucial to theatre making for me, and this approach instigated a dramaturgy similar to the band approach we took to making music. We created the material, built the set, composed the score, and performed the work in a style that combined technical operation of all lighting and sound as part of the performance. We also developed the work in the same way a band does, meeting and jamming on ideas and material until we were satisfied with the work.

The singular metatheatricality of the sound dramaturgy secured Felix Listens to the World the Best Production award in the 2004 Melbourne Fringe Festival. It was subsequently programmed in the 2005 Melbourne International Arts Festival, before touring nationally and internationally to Europe and extensively across North America in 2005, 2006 and

2008. I was understandably pleased with this result. However, the more I toured the work abroad, the more I came to realise that, aside from our accents, there was very little that was identifiably Australian about Felix Listens to the World. This troubled me because I was conscious that we must have censored our creativity and perhaps been subject to a cultural cringe (Henderson 2010; Phillips 2006). Performing in foreign countries so far from Australia, I wanted to celebrate my difference, and to show work that was particular to where I came from. I felt a need to create theatre which expressed stories unique to my home. I had never considered what my vision of Australian theatre might be until this moment, and when I did, walking through the streets of downtown Montreal, I fell back on the haunted and haunting Victorian landscapes of my childhood set to those Gothic songs of Waits and Cave. I realised that, like the sonic worlds of Cave and Waits, my

Australian theatre was violent, bloody, and full of ghosts and monsters. Also, like Cave

101 and Waits, it would have a grotesque larrikin humour and be, at times, deeply romantic.

I realised I wanted stories to be told through a combination of live music, acting, and the operation and manipulation of antiquated audio, lighting and and scenographic materials, as if everything onstage was found at the local garbage dump. So, while in the middle of a North American tour, I started to develop a new work of theatre with Walton and

O’Farrell. We agreed on two stipulations from the beginning: it had to have live music and it had to be Australian Gothic. I missed playing live music, as did Walton and

O’Farrell, and, as music and the Gothic have always been linked for me, it made sense that the new work would be both driven by live music, and Gothic in style. When we spoke of Australian Gothic, we were not referring to theatre but to our fascination with

Gothic Rock and Australian Gothic cinema. During our tour across America, we had been shopping in thrift stores and had been surprised to find many Australian horror movies from the New Wave period on VHS. These films had been released in the USA during the 1970s and 1980s, many receiving much wider recognition than they did in Australia and were common in second hand shops (Shelley 2012). We purchased as many as we could find and watched them in motel rooms on that tour.

The Influence of Australian Gothic Cinema

I was particularly influenced by Australian Gothic films such as Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in

Fright (1971), in which a British schoolteacher becomes trapped in the fictional Outback town of Bundanyabba in an endless loop of gambling, guns, beer and rape. Russell

Mulcahy’s Razorback (1984) in which a giant wild boar terrorises and kills the inhabitants of a small, fictitious Outback town also left its mark on me. Film critics Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka first identified these films as Australian Gothic along with

Homesdale (Weir 1971), Shirley Thompson versus the Aliens (Sharman 1972), The Night the Prowler (Sharman 1978), and The Plumber (Weir 1979), in their book The Screening

102 of Australia (1988). Dermody and Jacka identified common threads present in Australian

New Wave “art films” in which the “normal is revealed as having a stubborn bias towards the perverse, the grotesque, [and] the malevolent” (51). This broad definition has been strengthened more recently through Jonathan Rayner’s retrospective mapping (2011).

Rayner asserts stronger connections to Gothic literature and identifies a “varied and hybridised” style (91) in which the Australian landscape is “inhospitable” and imbued with “latent menace” (92), and rural towns are “corrupt and corrupting […], perverted, violent, and secretive” (93). Rayner defines Australian Gothic film as a genre that incorporates horror, western, and thriller genres in an expanded genre that “encompasses a set of common perspectives, themes, and styles, and centres on the problematisation of

Australian identity” (97). Recent films such as Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014), and

Jocelyn Morehouse’s The Dressmaker (2015) were immediately recognised as works of

Australian Gothic cinema (Lodge 2017; MacInnes 2014; Wilson 2015).

The early work of filmmaker Peter Weir was particularly influential on my Australian

Gothic theatre development. Weir’s The Cars that Ate Paris (1974), again, set in a fictional rural town, this time named Paris, whose inhabitants cause passing holidaymakers to have road accidents before using their cadavers for medical experiments; and Weir's follow up screen adaptation of Joanne Lindsay’s novel Picnic at

Hanging Rock (1975), guided my creation of menacing characters and evocations of

Victorian landscapes which were malevolent and sinister. Weir is celebrated as “the most obvious originator of Australian Gothic” (Thatcher n.d.). In The Last Wave (1977) he famously explored interactions between Indigenous and European cultures. Weir prompted a unique genre of its own and his evocations of both Outback towns and large urban centres have spawned enthusiastic imitators. Weir’s films portray Australians as violent, haunted and malevolent, but his landscapes also have an active malevolence

103 (Bliss 2000; Rayner 2003; Stratton 1980). Ross Gibson (1992) argues that Australian landscapes are not just a backdrop but:

a leitmotif and a ubiquitous character […] By featuring the land so emphatically in the stories, all these films stake out something more significant than decorative pictorialism. Knowing or unknowing, there are all-engaging with the dominant mythology of white Australia. They are all partaking of the landscape tradition, which, for two hundred years, has been used by white Australians to promote a sense of the significance of European society in the ‘antipodes’. (63-64)

I unconsciously absorbed that landscape tradition but Gothic theatre has allowed me to interrogate it, especially sonically. And through my experiments I realised I have also been interrogating theatre making processes and their assumed hierarchies.

Australian Gothic Cinema Sound: The Proposition

While the aforementioned films have been situated firmly as Gothic through the visual and thematic, little attention has been given to the role of the film score. Indeed, there has been limited research into the soundscapes in Australian cinema at all (Ford 2010, 9), even less into the soundscapes of Australian Gothic cinema (Milner 2013, 94). This is odd as there is no question that sound is vital to the conjuring of menacing atmospheres and malevolent framings of landscapes and human nature in horror films (Lerner 2010).

Milner’s investigation of the soundscape of Australian Gothic western The Proposition

(2005) has been crucial to my analysis of Australian Gothic cinema sound and has enabled me to better understand my creative choices with Suitcase Royale and my practice-based research. Written by Nick Cave, The Proposition is a landmark in Gothic film score. The soundscape, also composed by Cave in collaboration with Warren Ellis, won the 2005

AFI award for Best Original Score. Ellis is best known as a member of the renowned instrumental trio The Dirty Three and as a member of Nick Cave’s band The Bad Seeds.

Ellis was raised in the western Victorian town of Ballarat, a town of rich gold mining heritage, and trained as a classical violinist. He scored theatre work and “furnished the distinctive sound of Australian bands from the Blackeyed Susans to Kim Salmon and the

104 Surrealists in Melbourne before joining Cave in the Bad Seeds in 1995 (Badham 2016).

Milner opines that Cave and Ellis’ “soundtrack plays a key role in realising the Gothic tone” of the narrative and exemplifies “aural tropes of the Australian Gothic” (95). Milner identifies and articulates the elements of Australian Gothic cinema sound and suggests that the soundtrack of The Proposition has led to certain sonic trends and compositional traits in contemporary Australian Gothic cinema (95). He highlights Cave and Ellis’

“manipulation of song, text, and instrumentation, [and] discordant musical motifs” (95) in the framing and support of a Gothic Australian landscape. Through examining the score of The Proposition, Milner identifies a combination of Cave’s voice and Ellis’ violin, exaggerated, “intense and ever-present” (97) environmental sounds: flies buzzing and cockatoos shrieking raised to a volume pitch at which that they become oppressively loud and uncomfortable to the viewer. Milner identifies “blistering gales” which blow through eucalyptus trees, causing these trees to moan and snap. He also identifies metal constructed environments: corrugated iron sheds which crackle in the heat and wind and rain causing materials such as fences and chains to produce high-metallic frequencies which “fluctuate at haunting resonances” (97). These sounds produce a uniquely resonant environment and help to create a menacing score, particularly when combined with Cave and Ellis’ music pieces. Their music: a combination of violin, piano, electronic loops, and

Cave’s soft moanings and whispered baritone vocals, when combined with recorded environmental sounds effects, creates soundscapes that are particular to Australia and do much to signify the Australian-ness of Cave’s “Gothic Western” (Prior 2005). Milner’s research has helped me in identifying compositional strategies used in Australian Gothic cinema scores that have subconsciously influenced me.

105 Sonic Strategies of Australian Gothic Cinema in the Suitcase Royale

Inspired by Australian Gothic cinema, I went on to make Chronicles of a Sleepless Moon

(2006) with Suitcase Royale. Chronicles premiered at The Black Lung Theatre alongside

Black Lung’s first work Avast (2006). Chronicles was a music/theatre work set in the small, fictional rural Victorian town of Roogs Hill told through a combination of acting, the performance of live song and score, and pre-recorded soundscapes. It had a supernatural narrative concerning a machine built with and running entirely on the corpses of cows. The characters sang murder ballads and killed each other and themselves while lost underground in the trapdoor-rigged, blood-splattered machine burrowing below a set of miniature buildings and the skeletal shadows of dead eucalypts. Inspired by Weir’s malevolent landscapes, this time driven underground and contained within the walls of a bloody machine, I turned the sinister quality of the landscape into a symbol of extreme evil. The inhospitable and claustrophobic subterranean setting of Chronicles operated as a microcosm of colonial hell. Theatre critic Alison Croggon described

Chronicles of a Sleepless Moon as “Wake in Fright on acid” (2006). She aligned the company with Australian Gothic cinema through the identification of shared “Australian cliches: the Outback pub, the hard-bitten newsman, the homoerotic relationships of lonely men” (ibid.). Croggon does not reference musical influences and misses the use of sound in the conjuration of the surreal and eerie Outback landscapes and haunted rural settlements in which the play is set. This is important because I was more inspired by the soundtrack of Wake in Fright than by its visuals. John Scott’s score for Wake in Fright has been especially influential on me. Filmed predominantly in Broken Hill, an isolated mining town in New South Wales, and the first Australian city to be included on the

National heritage List in 2015 New South Wales, Wake in Fright is widely regarded as a seminal work of Australian Gothic cinema (Demody 1988; Rayner 2000; Watts, 2014).

Originally a novel by Kenneth Cook (1961), Cook’s story has been adapted for film, stage

106 (2012), and television (2017). The film exemplifies Rayner’s identification of the

“perverted, violent, and secretive” nature of Australian remote desert towns. The score of

Wake in Fright is vital to the creation of the atmosphere of menace, entrapment and alienation. It opens with an extreme wide shot of the classic Outback red landscape associated with the Australian desert. The shot, which pans a full 360 degrees, reveals an interminable stretch of red desert and in doing so, the film relays the sheer scale and immensity of the Outback in a way that is visually impossible in theatre. Accompanying this shot is the eerie quality of Scott’s use of a theremin. The theremin, an electronic instrument which produces a trembling sound “halfway between a whale song and human voice”, has been linked to the Gothic through its use in film scores such as the noir- thrillers: Spellbound (Hitchcock 1947), The Red House (Daves 1947), and The Spiral

Staircase (Siodmak 1946), and Sci-Fi films: Rocketship X-M (Neumann 1950), The Day the Earth Stood Still (Wise 1951), and The Thing (From Another Planet) (Nyby 1951),

(Stump 1997: 18). The theremin became associated with 1950s science fiction movies and its eerie trembling effect has become codified to mean alien, unknown and menacing.

I adopted the theremin to evoke a similar alien quality. In my mind Chronicles of a

Sleepless Moon is set in the Little Desert, in Victoria. 500 kilometres south of Broken

Hill, Little Desert is an uninhabitable place with a unique combination of sands and soil, which makes farming impossible, but hosts a singular eco-system of flora and fauna. In place of Scott's theremin, I used an electric guitar, processed with a tremolo pedal. The tremolo pedal works by quickly and repeatedly shifting the volume of a clean audio signal, creating an oscillating wave signal that rises and falls in volume in fast repetition.

Tremolo has a long association with Gothic sound through its use with violins and organs, linked to Gothic and horror film sound since the silent film era and often used to score these films live in theatres (Brown 2009, 13). Tremolo, as the name suggests, creates a tremble in the audio signal; a sound, which, through varying volumes, is no longer steady,

107 but shuddering. This shuddering sound has a quality which heightens feelings of uncertainty and exacerbates anxiety in the listener and therefore is useful to evoke the sinister qualities of a landscape or character. I replaced the theremin with the electric guitar because of the influence of Cave and Waits and because I wanted to evade the cliche of the science fiction films, the tinny early Space Patrol (1950) soundscapes, and to create a contemporary equivalence in effect. I aimed to convey the darkening hostility and otherworldliness of the landscape.

I first used this effect in the opening of Chronicles. The Newsman (Joseph O’Farrell), lost, and slumped against some rocks (a wardrobe with a rumpled brown sheet draped over it) tries desperately to make contact with civilisation through his radio. He holds the receiver aloft into the blackness surrounding him, yet, instead of the hoped-for human connection, he receives a distorted electric guitar, processed with a tremolo effect and playing sustained single notes in the key of A minor. Using the quavering tremolo and the inherent distortion of the electric guitar, amplified through the small speaker of the

Newsman’s radio, my score heightened the tenuous intermittency of the signal, the character’s complete isolation, and listeners had to strain to hear its nuances. Unlike

Scott’s theremin, which supports the film footage, my tremolo driven electric guitar, used in a black box theatre had to evoke the spatiality of Chronicles of a Sleepless Moon.

Through sound alone, I had to conjure the surreal and remote bleakness and scale of the

Little Desert, and the fact that the Newsman was in the middle of nowhere. Modernist theorists have noted the obsession with sound devices and communications in Gothic fiction Luckhurst 2001), but its usage in contemporary Gothic performance has not been mapped.

108 My Radio Experiment: Pretty Weird Shit.

I continued to investigate the sonic evocation of landscapes and the psychological effect of isolation in combination with storytelling through voice and soundscape in my development of Pretty Weird Shit (2014), a radio play for ABC Radio National. I decided to explore radio after hearing Saulwick’s reimagining of Pin Drop (2010) for radio

(2013). Saulwick’s sound designer Peter Knight has stated that Pin Drop had to be reimagined for radio and new sonic strategies developed to compensate for the lack of visual material. (June 20, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil). I was interested in the new sonic strategies needed to compensate for the absence of my visual representation. Pretty

Weird Shit was based on a fictional character’s journey to Tea-Tree, a town in the

Northern Territory, to interview people about ghosts. The narrative concerns the mysterious disappearance of a farmer’s workers from his fields and the narrator’s increasing sense of doom that he may suffer the same fate. The narrator is finally threatened by an inescapable darkness he sees moving towards him. There was a need to evoke malevolent darkness and the Outback location through sound. However, Radio

National chose to use their in-house sound designer and, much to my frustration, I was unable to design the score myself. My voice and electric guitar were my contribution to the sound design. Although I was satisfied with the final outcome, I was left wanting to continue my sound-led experiment and decided to use my PhD to further my research in soundscape and the evocation of landscapes through sound, concentrating on theatre, not radio as I wanted full control of the composition.

The Beginnings of Disappearing into Darkness: The Performed Ballad

Initially, I set out to write and perform an extended ballad accompanied by an orchestra.

This ballad was to be set on the Shipwreck Coast in Victoria and through it, I planned to experiment with the evocation of the Shipwreck Coast through orchestral compositions

109 and ballads. My ballad was influenced by the coastal setting and exploration of post- genocidal guilt and curses in Louis Esson’s play Shipwreck (1924), and also by Samuel

Coleridge’s long form ballad The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) as well as the work of British composer Benjamin Britten, particularly his opera Peter Grimes (1945)30 which is set in a coastal village and concerns drowned sailors. I was particularly drawn to

Britten’s orchestral evocations of the ocean. My script contained both spoken sections and songs and the narrative was inspired by the Convincing Ground Massacre of 1833-

34 which occurred in Portland Bay (Boyce 2008; Pascoe 2005). Thought to have arisen from a dispute between local whalers and Gunditjmara tribespeople concerning a beached whale, historians estimate that approximately 60 Indigenous people were murdered during the massacre (Clark 2005, 81). I researched the Indigenous history of the Portland area (Broome 2005; Clarke 2005; Corris 1968; Crichett 1990) and the settler history

(Cannon 1976; Henty 1996; Turner 2011) and I undertook multiple field trips along the length of the Shipwreck Coast, during which I conducted field recordings of various soundscapes. During these field trips, I also visited the Portland Maritime Museum, the

Portland Historical Society, and the Glenelg Library.

Influenced by Coleridge’s narrator, driven by guilt and cursed to walk the earth repeating his story, early versions of my ballad concerned a white man cursed to return night after night to the deserted streets of Portland to relive the guilt and trauma he had experienced as a result of his involvement in the Convincing Ground Massacre. But I became increasingly unhappy with the project and realised there was a problem with the form and genre of the story. I was uncomfortable that the only voice was a white male voice and I felt that I was, in a sense, recolonising history. I also found my archival work was too

30 Ballads and operas have been combined into ballad operas since The Beggars Opera (1728). Ballad operas often concern criminals and lower class characters and are regarded as a reaction to the high moral values of the Italian opera (Winton 2004, 131). 110 present and that the work felt research heavy and pedantic. It seemed wrong to explore a colonial perpetrator at a time in history when we need to listen to Indigenous historians and hear stories from Indigenous perspectives. As a white Australian man with a 19th- century Irish heritage, I felt that a solo show also continued what has been called the Great

Australian Silence (Grant 2017a; Reynolds 1999; Stanner 1968). I also found myself increasingly suspicious of words, given the histories of the time I was reading were mainly by white settlers and explorers (Clark 1995; Flinders 1814; Henty 1996) and ignored oral Indigenous accounts and histories. I decided to concentrate predominantly on soundscape, as I was finding words a burden, both morally and artistically. I wanted to investigate what pure sound would reveal and see where it would take me as a theatre maker. I also found that the orchestral aspect, inspired by Britten’s compositions, was leading me towards a European musicality and away from my band origins, which became increasingly problematic. My title Disappearing into Darkness is more than a metaphor, it also hints at a journey of artistic difficulty. I turned to voice and sound as they appeared to give me a greater political and artistic freedom. It also allowed me to create an alternative text that I could use to explore a more culturally sensitive approach to my future staging, leaving me with options to cast diversely.

Disappearing into Darkness: Composition

I have become aware that my methods of work also speak to a methodology for producing

Gothic sound and soundscapes and this chapter interweaves these discourses by examining three dramaturgical layers: Recorded Environmental Sound; Voice, Song and

Ballad; and Instrumental Composition

111 1. Recorded Environmental Sound

A Dramaturgy of Sonic Weird Melancholy

One of my questions: what does it mean to create a Gothic score led, me to consider sound consider Marcus Clarke’s concept of “weird melancholy” in relation to the experience of

Victorian landscapes:

The savage winds shout among the rock clefts. From the melancholy gums, strips of white bark hang and rustle. The very animal life of these frowning hills is either grotesque or ghostly. Great grey kangaroos hop noiselessly over the coarse grass. Flights of white cockatoos stream out, shrieking like evil souls. The sun suddenly sinks, and the mopokes burst out into horrible peals of semi-human laughter. (Clarke 1876, 645-6)

As Gelder has noted, “Australian Gothic relishes the aural effects of the bush” (2007, 4).

For Clarke, the wind “shouts”, the bark “rustles”, the kangaroos hop “noiselessly”, cockatoos “shriek”, and mopokes burst into “horrible peals of semi-human laughter”.

Clarke gothicises the Australian landscape through a reliance on sonic triggers. Clarke argued that “weird melancholy” conceptualised similarities between atmospheres of the

Australian bush and the atmospheres evoked in the works of Edgar Allan Poe (1876, 647).

I took Clarke’s “weird melancholy” and experimented with both natural and man-made sounds from the Shipwreck Coast and its bushland. I wanted to investigate and analyse the ways a settler visioning of the Shipwreck Coast as terrifying and malevolent might be explored through the manipulation of recorded natural sounds and how a post-colonial interpretation of Clarke’s weird melancholy might be explored through imported

European sounds. To do so, I spent two weeks conducting environmental recordings along the Shipwreck Coast, from the beaches, the ocean, the bush, and the farmland between Torquay and Portland. I recorded these sounds with a Shure MV88 stereo condenser microphone and a contact microphone. A condenser microphone (known as a capacitor microphone in Europe) receives audio signal through vibration between a metal plate and a diaphragm. A contact microphone receives its vibratory input through direct

112 contact with the surface of a recordable source, rather than receiving recordable vibrations through the air as is the case with condenser/capacitor, ribbon, and cardioid microphones.

Contact microphones are often used to amplify musical instruments by receiving vibrations, such as occurs in the wood of a violin or acoustic guitar when it is played.

However, they can be used unconventionally to record environmental resonators such as fences, bridges, and in my case, windmills.

Aeolian Recording

The sounds caused by movement of air through natural and man-made structures are known as aeolian sounds. Australian sound artist and scientist Alan Lamb developed early recordings of Australian environmental aeolian sounds using contact microphones. Lamb placed contact microphones at intervals along wire fences and telegraph wires to record vibrations made by the wind. For Lamb, these wires produce a “choir-like” sound quality, as if the wires were haunted by “numerous voices” (cited in Bandt 2001, 31). Sound artists and sculptors have practiced harnessing the wind through man-made structures in

Australia from as early as 1970. At Emu Point, Queensland, a collaborative sculpture by

Peggy West-Moreland, Steve Kele, George Cain and David Thomas named the Singing

Ship (1970) was constructed overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It marks the place where

Captain Cook first sighted Australia and, built from slotted pipes in the shape of a boat, it acts as a resonator creating drones that sing when the wind moves through the pipes.

This method of harnessing the vibrations of wind through instruments is thought to have been practiced in Australia for at least 40,000 years through Indigenous ceremonial practices using Bull reeds (Bandt 2003, 195). Melbourne-based sound designer Francois

Tetaz realised the Gothic potential of Lamb’s aeolian recordings and included them as part of his score to the Australian Gothic horror film Wolf Creek (2005). Using these recordings, Tetaz created a “textured evolving sound world” for the film (cited in Holder

113 2006, 51). Tetaz describes this approach as “scoring the landscape rather than the characters” (cited in Frank 2014). For Tetaz, the use of ethereal, droning aeolian recordings is an important means of evoking the winds that cross the Australian landscapes.

Windmills

One of the first sounds I recorded was the unpredictable resonances wind blowing through broken Southern Cross Windmills. There are an estimated 200,000 Southern Cross

Windmills in Australia: they are ubiquitous in rural landscapes right across the continent.

The rudimentary style of this windmill has been used since the mid-19th century to draw water from wells and bores. These windmills are prevalent across the farmland of the

Shipwreck Coast, where the fields often roll down as far as the roaring ocean. I wanted to record windmills, as they are a visual symbol of European settlement, and, like fences, and telegraph wires, are prolific across South Western Victoria. While still standing strong in the rural and desert environments, along the Shipwreck Coast they are rusted and broken by constant exposure to the salty southern wind so present on the Shipwreck

Coast. They are scattered through farmers’ fields that meet the sandstone cliffs and seem like broken colonial giants, reminders of traumas suffered and inflicted on others. They are tombstones to the colonial past and symbolic of an attempt to conquer the land. I wanted to use the sounds the strong southern wind conjures from these broken windmills to create a soundscape in response to Clarke’s colonial visioning of the Australian natural environment as unfamiliar and menacing and explore methods of summoning the Sonic

Gothic through grotesque distortions of man-made structures.

I took my recordings of windmills: creaking and clanging metal sheering against itself, metallic shrieks, and low pump-like beats into my studio and, combining them with sound

114 library recordings of industrial windmills, experimented with various processing techniques. One of my first processing techniques, the reverse/playback/reverse method, was influenced by the sound-led film experiments of filmmaker David Lynch. Lynch is regarded as a stalwart of American Gothic film, television, and music, and often approaches his visual projects from a sonic perspective (Chion 2005; Nochimson 2012; van Elferen 2012b). Lynch observes, “people call me a director, but I think of myself more as a sound man” (cited in Chion 2005, 159). This observation of Lynch’s was very significant in guiding my practice: that a director so aligned with their visual Gothic output would, in fact, approach their work through sound. Lynch often incorporates the sound of wind through trees and wires in his film scores, particularly in Twin Peaks

(1991-2017), in which he often uses the sound of wind whistling through tall Douglas Fir

Pine trees to highlight the isolated location of the town and the increasing menace of the

Twin Peaks forest as a site of mysterious secrets and death. In Twin Peaks an uncanny sound effect was achieved in the Red Room scenes by recording the actors speaking, reversing that audio track, then recording the actors speaking the lines backwards. A strong reverb effect was then added, and the track was again reversed so that it played the correct way, however, the reverb works in reverse, creating a spectral and uncanny effect of an echo of the familiar words occurring before the actual words are spoken. Through the use of this technique, Lynch achieves uncanny Gothic doubles of his characters located in a strange dream space. I used this method on a composition of windmills to create a similar sense of uncanny: the echo of the clangs, screams, and groans occurring before the original sounds and creating a sonic haunting: the echoes of the windmills arising before the actual and more familiar sounds of the windmill rotors and pumps. This caused the windmill sounds to change from recognisable sounds to strange and melancholic moaning sounds haunted by familiar sounds of windmills and metal resonances.

115 Granular Synthesis: A Dramaturgy of Defamilarisation

In pursuit of further sonic defamilarisation, I then deconstructed and combined both the original windmill sounds and my new moaning windmills through the use of a granular synthesiser, Gothically named the “Spectral Drone” synthesiser. Described briefly, a granular synthesiser is a digital processing tool which functions on the same principles as sampling: it takes a piece of audio referred to as a ‘sample’ and plays it back. However, as opposed to sampling, granular synthesis allows sonic signals to be broken down into

‘grains’. These tiny fragments of audio can then be moulded in infinite combinations. For example, the sounds can be layered, stretched, torn, and played back at variable speeds, volumes, phases, and frequencies. By shifting the spatial positioning and density of these grains, an infinite variety of sounds can be produced. Both David Franzke in his score for

Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Peter Knight in his score for Pin Drop often used granular synthesisers to defamilarise sound and evoke sonic menace (David Franzke March 1,

2018, interview with Miles O’Neil; Peter Knight, June 20, 2017, interview with Miles

O’Neil). As Franzke states, “I process a lot of sounds quite heavily. So I might start with real world recordings, then [using a granular synthesiser] I might shuffle that at high speed, pitch it three octaves down, and slow it down so it becomes different. […] I get quite aggressive and brutal with sound. I don’t treat it with respect […] for me, sound is like plasticine” (ibid.). As Franzke argues, granular synthesisers allow sound to become infinitely malleable and can be used to sculpt landscapes, architectures and shapes. I used the Spectral Drone Granular Synthesiser to experiment with defamilarising my windmill recordings and I was able to change the sound significantly. For example, one windmill could sound like ten. These ten windmills could then be slowed down, deconstructed and pitch shifted to the edge of sonic recognition, each original signal haunted by the droning signal of the other, slowly collapsing in on each other until the sound crumbled into a new

116 and entirely changed Gothic drone as can be heard at the 31:35-minute mark of

Disappearing into Darkness.

Gothic Drones: Creating Sonic Entrapment

Writing of the work of seminal horror film director and composer John Carpenter, who often used drone music to score his work, film sound theorist Kevin Donnelley (2010) asserts that drone music “functions to induce instant tension […] effects of disquiet, or extreme anxiety” (161). Drones evoke sonic claustrophobia. They do not adhere to any melody, musical familiarity, nor do they alert the listener to patterns or a sense of logic.

Drones do not follow common western musical pattern and have no predictable end.

Therefore, when they are composed using dissonance, distortion and atonality, they plunge the listener into a state of unpleasant sonic uncertainty, evoke the unfamiliar, and stimulate an experience of sonic entrapment. Through my use of the granulation effect, the clanging windmill sounds began creating new and unnatural resonances. I then treated half of these frequencies with feedback loops, working in the way Liam Barton had, to create the sensation that there was a presence lurking beneath the looping sounds. The windmill sounds responded very well to sonic manipulation, becoming, as Franzke describes, “like plasticine” (March 1, 2018, interview with Miles O’Neil). As they are atonal, meaning there is no root musical note, and thus no musical scale to conform to, there is no problem with regard to the musicality of the work: the piece functions as one mutating, lawless sonic whole. While drones are very effective in framing visuals such as stage sets or actors as menacing, when presented as a stand-alone soundscape, as is the case with Disappearing into Darkness, I was concerned that the drone music would lose dynamic structure and its dramaturgical point. Thus, I slowly inserted recordings of

Australian crickets into the drone at the 34:12-minute mark. This was done to reintroduce

117 a sense of location into the score and to begin to return the listener to the natural environment of the Shipwreck Coast.

Defamilarising the Bush

With a sense of melancholy and the uncanny evoked through man-made structures, I turned to my recordings of bush sounds. In filmmaking, there is a particular interest in the authenticity of sound (Zeilinski 2010). A recent example of this can be seen in

Indigenous filmmaker Warwick Thornton’s choice to forego instrumental score in his film Sweet Country (2018) and to score the film instead using recorded environmental sounds. For Thornton, recorded environmental sounds achieve a “truthfulness” in the film

(cited in “Sam Neill, Bryan Brown and Warwick” 2018). Thornton explains in an interview with Angela Bishop: “suddenly we’re starting to listen to the desert, we’re listening to the cicadas, we’re listening to the sand between our toes, we’re listening to the wind”. Bishop suggests: “the soundtrack to Australia?” Thornton agrees: “exactly”

(ibid.). This exchange highlights the usefulness of environmental sounds in evoking

Australian landscapes as directly as possible and is consistent with the desire of film sound recordist and sound designers in capturing environmental sounds as purely as possible (Zeilinski 2010, 155). James Currie, a highly regarded Australian film sound engineer, has spoken about about his desire to faithfully record Australian landscape sounds for Australian Gothic filmmaker Rolf de Heer (Wilson 2003). For Currie, sound is vital to the authentic communication of landscape, while at the same time possessing the ability to “take an audience to a place where they might never have expected to be”

(148). Whist the capture of environmental sounds is important to me, like Franzke, and

Saulwick and Knight, I am not interested in the faithful recreation of these sounds onstage but in unleashing their Sonic Gothic potential. Rather than evoking an accurate representation of the natural environment, I am interested in rendering that environment

118 uncanny and in framing landscapes as grotesque and terrifying through subversions of the familiar. As Franzke demonstrated through his sound design for Lutton’s staging of

Picnic at Hanging Rock, Australian Gothic theatre sound designers and sound conceptualists tasked with evoking malevolent imagined landscapes through sound can use recorded environmental sounds to do so. I argue that when these sounds are processed and manipulated, distorted to reveal the sonic monstrous, they create distorted and grotesque imagined landscapes, evoking what Franzke refers to as “visceral atmospherics” (March 1, 2018, interview with Miles O’Neil) and what I describe as Sonic

Gothic scenography.

Recording the Ironbark Basin

To locate and record my environmental sounds of the bush, I went to the Ironbark Basin, a unique area of the Greater Otway National Park, located on the Shipwreck Coast between Torquay and Anglesea. It is named after the Ironbark eucalyptus trees in the basin; rather than shed bark, as most eucalyptus trees do, Ironbarks retain their dead bark.

Over the years, this dark bark accumulates on the tree trunks, forming twisted furrows the colour of dark iron. These furrows are laced with kino, a dark red tree sap exuded by the tree, making the branches and trunk appear as if they are continuously bleeding. As a child, I found the Ironbark Basin, filled with these gnarled trees seemingly part machine, part bleeding body, to be particularly ghostly. They seemed to be alive, spreading through the Ironbark Basin like sentient twisted beings. This visually sinister imagery was a crucial reason I chose this particular location on the Shipwreck Coast to record. It has frightened me since childhood and, due to my emotional connection to this landscape, I felt I would be better able to evoke menace within sounds from this particular area. I took a high-quality field-recording microphone and walked into the Ironbark Basin. Knowing the area well, I left the walking path that winds through the basin. I wanted to get away

119 from the incongruous sounds of cars and tourist buses to capture sound from deep in the bush. I walked for half an hour until the traffic faded and I was surrounded by ironbarks.

There I set up my recording equipment. Using a Shure MV88 stereo condenser microphone running into an iPad, I set the microphone to “Raw Mid-Size Capture” to capture as much of the environmental sounds as possible. I turned on the microphone and put my headphones on. The soundscape was immediately terrifying. I had forgotten to lower the headphone volume on the recording device and so the sound was pumped into my ears at an extremely loud volume. Bush flies roared around my head, the gentle southern breeze suddenly seemed to blow like a gale through the ironbark branches above me, sulphur crested cockatoos and kookaburras screamed from the branches. The kookaburras, as Marcus Clarke wrote, “burst into horrible peals of semi-human laughter”

(Clarke 1876, 645-6). It was full-scale horror. I felt I had verified Knight’s identification of volume as a key to evoking menace (July 12, 2017 interview with Miles O’Neil). I realised at this moment that Clarke’s notion of melancholy did not suit my purpose.

Melancholy is one mood and suggests Romantic associations and low, sustained notes and single volumes. I am interested in producing a wide spectrum of volumes, and in creating grotesque sounds and and visceral atmospheres. As explored in my chapter on

Saulwick, Knight argues that when the volume of a menacing or suspenseful soundscape is increased during audio playback, it recreates the way someone hears when they are listening for a threat. As Knight states, volume is key, however, it is not necessary to increase the volume to a deafening roar. The listening state Knight has spoken of is as much about the creation of states of silence, of what Saulwick refers to as “deep listening”, as a state of loud volume (March 17, 2017 interview with Miles O’Neil). When a foreboding silence is established, even a slight increase in sound can become menacing.

I certainly felt seized with terror as I was sitting in the bush, listening to the soundscape around me. By increasing in volume, I felt my nervous system suddenly awaken, my heart

120 rate increase, and I could feel my blood pumping faster. I noticed my imagination was engaged in throughts and narratives of fear and threat. When a small branch suddenly fell from the canopy and landed behind me, I jumped in fright, thinking someone (or something) was approaching from behind. When I saw the source of the sound, I believed

Knight’s assertion: when we turn up the volume, either through volume or the creation of deep listening, our listening is turned up and ordinary sounds, forced upon us at increased and sudden volume can “become a great source of menace” (ibid.). I set my equipment to record and captured environmental sounds for the afternoon and into the evening.

A Dramaturgy of Sonic Pursuit: Getting the Listener Lost

I also undertook an experiment inspired by filmmaker Rolf de Heer. When creating the soundscape for his Australian Gothic horror film Bad Boy Bubby (1994), de Heer experimented with attaching a lapel microphone (a small microphone attached to clothing, commonly used by television presenters) to his hat and walking up and down streets and into buildings. For de Heer, it was crucial the audience heard what the protagonist heard as he was moving through the environment and he went to great lengths to achieve a faithful recording of this (Currie, cited in Zielinski 2010,149). Again, I was not interested in presenting faithful recordings. I was interested to experiment with the recreation of fearful sounds, particularly running and breathing heavily. Using a lapel microphone, I began recording the sounds of my footsteps walking through the dry undergrowth. I then recorded the sound of myself running across the dead ironbark branches and dried leaves. I ran for twenty minutes, until I was puffing and recorded my deep breathing. Franzke also used this method in his sound design for Picnic at Hanging

Rock. Adopting a film foley recording technique, Franzke recorded footsteps on the dry ground of the Hanging Rock area and, using playback on an iPad of filmed footage of

Picnic rehearsals, he was able to sync his footstep recordings in perfect timing with the

121 actors’ footsteps. This footstep sound was used in Picnic to create the sonic effect of the actor suddenly walking in the Hanging Rock bush (David Franzke, March 1, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil). I used this effect in Disappearing into Darkness at the

14:19 minute mark. However, rather than pursuing accuracy, I wanted to evoke feelings of defamilarisation and panic. To do so, I processed the recording through delay. Delay refers to an audio processing effect that takes a short sample of audio and plays it back in a decaying loop. The delay refers to the amount of time between loops. Electric guitarists often use a short delay to achieve a “slap-back” common to rockabilly and rock guitar sounds, however, if the delay time is increased, the guitar notes, or in this case, footsteps, return at overlapping intervals, multiplying and dying away with each played note.

Adding delay effects to the sounds of running on dry ground and breathing heavily gave the breath a sound of short sharp breaths, the delay cutting off the last breath and recreating the sound of someone experiencing a panic attack. The delay worked on the footsteps to overlay an increasing number of footsteps, creating a sonic effect of looping and evoking feelings of running in panicked circles. This sense of panic and defamiliarisation was then exploited through experiments in the creation of grotesque bush sounds through various sonic manipulation techniques.

Dramaturgies of the Sonic Grotesque: Birds

Using the iconic screech of the sulphur crested cockatoos as material, I experimented with duplicating and distorting bird sounds, an obvious reference to the menace by numbers

Alfred Hitchcock achieves in The Birds (1964). Sulphur-crested cockatoos flock in numbers of hundreds and can often be seen on the streets and in the parks of the towns along the Shipwreck Coast in numbers not dissimilar to those seen in The Birds. As I write this there are 13 cockatoos in the apple tree by my window. Cockatoos are very common on the Shipwreck Coast and stories abound of their numbers and cheeky

122 behaviour. The frames or many of my parent’s windows are rutted with the beak marks of cockatoos trying to enter the house in pursuit of food. While it is not uncommon for sulphur crested cockatoos to flock and roost in large numbers, thus creating a cacophonous screeching sound, once delay and echo effects were added, these cacophonous sounds took on a menacing quality, uncannily familiar and yet also disturbingly unfamiliar.

Gothic Rock and the Cockatoo Screech

I also experimented with a Gothic Rock strategy heard in Roland S. Howard’s technique of sonically overloading his guitar amplifier. I recorded a sample of the cockatoo shriek and played it through a Fender Twin Reverb guitar amplifier. This is the same model favoured by Howard, who would often play with every control dial turned up to 10 (the loudest setting) (Hawkins n.d.). I did the same and the cockatoo shriek became a feedback drenched sustained note almost impossible to listen to due to the unbearable layer of distortion to the cockatoo screech. Franzke has argued for the importance of distortion in his scores for Australian Gothic theatre, using it throughout Picnic, and in his score for

Night of Bald Mountain (2014). Franzke states “when you play back [clean recorded sound] through guitar amps at massive volumes, it makes the speakers distort and it becomes a screaming, horrible sound. Distortion is the essence of what adrenalises us and puts us in fight or flight mode” (March 1, 2018, interview with Miles O’Neil). Franzke uses a combination of volume and distortion to engage the spectator viscerally. I trace a link here to the same sonic strategy used by Howard in the Birthday Party and am reminded of Norman’s description of this sound as “nerve-jangling” (1982) and argue this is an identifiable Sonic Gothic Rock strategy. Through the use of distortion, Gothic sound artists shock their audiences’ nervous system in unpleasant ways in order to create feelings of visceral anxiety and terror. I used this distortion as a sustained note early in

123 the soundscape at the 2:00 minute mark to alert the listener that this soundscape may not be a pleasant listening place, but is designed to exploit the menacing, the spectral, and the grotesque.

Kookaburras and Crows: Semi-Human Laughter

At the 13:50 minute mark, I took a different approach to the Australian Kookaburra to conjure grotesque laugher from the accurate recordings I had. While in the Ironbark

Basin, I had recorded kookaburras laughing. Using these recordings, I experimented with shifting pitch. I found the kookaburra laughter became more menacing when I lowered the pitch. This laughter of the kookaburras suddenly sounded strange, more akin to a man’s laughter than a bird. To further this experiment, I slowed the sound by 50%. This caused the pitch of the laughter to become more apparent and sustained. I used this same method on crickets, crows, cicadas, and also experimented with panning the tracks to extremes, creating oscillating effects in which the crickets move aurally from extreme left to extreme right unpredictably. This created further disorienting sounds, which was useful in evoking the aural effect of becoming lost in and engulfed by the bush.

Cockatoo Tritones

I took another sample of my recording of a sulphur crested cockatoo screech. A sample refers to the selecting of a short section of music or sound and assigning that sound to a key on an electronic keyboard. Once assigned, the sound can be played in the same manner as a piano, shifting the pitch of the original sound by playing the lower or higher notes on the keyboard. I used this sample of a cockatoo screaming and composed a soundscape experimenting with cockatoo tritones. Tritones (also known as an augmented fourth or a diminished fifth) refer to a musical chord that does not work in sonic harmony with the system of Western music. As Janet K. Halfyard has discussed, this clash in

124 harmony: the fact that it is the sixth note away from the tonic note, led it to become known as the Diabolus in musica, the devil in music and to be banned by the Church in the 17th century. It is a chord that is at odds with everything that is harmonious in Western theology and music and therefore appears to convey malevolence. The tritone falls on the sixth semitone on the circle of fifths away from the tonic note (Halfyard 2010, 24-27). Of course, this Diabolus in musica is simply a construct of Western tonal harmony, however, it does work to create dissonance and as Halfyard asserts, is “exceptionally useful to composers who wish to convey the idea of evil” (23). This cockatoo tritone experiment led me to the composition of an instrumental piece of music that I placed in the windmill section as opposed to the bush section and can be heard at the 31:23-minute mark.

The Ocean: A Dramaturgy of Sonic Presence

Ironically, I found the most difficult sounds to capture accurately were the sounds of waves crashing on the shores of the Shipwreck Coast. Before beginning this creative development, I had assumed that the low frequency sonic booms of waves crashing would be a great source of menace and would feature heavily in my final submission. I was wrong. Over the period of a month, I recorded waves along the Shipwreck Coast in a spectrum of weathers and swells size. However, in my studio I struggled to transfer the epic visual power of waves to sound alone. With no visual reference, my recordings of wild ocean waves tended to resemble television static. I could not get the sonic booms waves seem to create upon impact with the shore to translate in recording. While I found many sounds near the shore which transfer well in recording: wind in trees, windmills, boat mooring rope twisting, various birds and insects, I could not sonically harness waves, one of the most iconic visual aspects of the Shipwreck Coast. I was reminded of film foley artists and how often the most savage visual moments in film are evoked sonically through unexpected methods, such as twisting celery to make the sound of bones cracking

125 and slapping cabbages to create the sound of violent fist punches (Mott 1989). This realisation led me to searched for foley sounds which evoked the violent crashing of waves and I ended up finding objects which, when combined with my ocean recordings, helped me to evoke to elusive sounds of the savage Southern Ocean. However, nothing sounded like the familiar sound of the sea. In this struggle I was reminded of a method

Peter Weir used in the score to Picnic at Hanging Rock. In the score to Weir’s Picnic at

Hanging Rock, composed by Bruce Smeaton and Weir, the infrasonic rumbling sounds of earthquakes are incorporated into the underscore during sections of the film in which the landscape is framed as eerie. Mixed at frequencies around 20Hz, these infrasonic sounds are not obvious in the score, yet Weir hoped they would add a sense of disquiet, functioning at a subconscious level to evoke feelings of danger and unease (cited in Ford

2010, 170). Weir uses this sound particularly effectively in the moment when the schoolgirls wake from their slumber and walk into the rocks, disappearing forever. As they do, sub-bass tracks of wind and earthquake sounds build. He uses low frequency birdcalls, which sound strange and distorted, to wake the girls from sleep. The girls then walk, as if in a trance, disappearing into the rocks as the sound builds to an increasingly loud volume, disappearing into another menacing sound world. I took this method and adapted it to my score. I created looping recordings of waves crashing. I then lowed the pitch of these recordings to 50Hz, a barely audible frequency. This method created a sub- sonic rumbling which, although it sounded suddenly nothing like the sea, reminded me of the way the ocean sounds at night sometimes when it is far away. Distance removes high frequencies of the waves crashing and leaves the booming sub-bass frequencies below 60Hz. This sound is ever present on the Shipwreck Coast and was now in my score.

Once added, the score suddenly sounded closer to the violent and booming waves of the

Southern Ocean. Since conducting this research, I have learnt that hydrophones

(underwater microphones) can be used to successfully record waves and that these waves

126 do not need to be large. For example, David Franzke, in his score to the play Away (2017), used hydrophones to record small waves breaking in rock pools and amplified the sound

(David Franzke, March 1, 2017, interview with Miles O’Neil). This is a technique I will use to gather further wave recordings along the Shipwreck Coast before undertaking the stage development of Disappearing into Darkness.

2. Voice, Song, and Ballad

There are three songs in Disappearing into Darkness. These songs draw on the influence of the Australian bush ballad. These songs are contemporary interpretations of the traditional ballad form. Ballads were first recorded in the 14th century and thrived in

Britain in oral and published forms from the 16th century (Newman 2007). Ballads are sung narratives told simply in rhyming four-line verse - usually iambic and anapaestic quatrains in a rising rhythm (Child 1882). Ballads began morphing in the 20th century when they came into contact with blues and folk music as heard through ethnomusicologists Al Lloyd and Alex Lomax’s field recordings conducted in the 1940s and popular with blues and folk musicians during the 1960s folk revival (Arthur 2012,

Lomax 1941, Szwed 2012)31. These recordings of early British, Irish and American songs influenced musicians of the 1960s folk scene and this influence can be heard through the folk infused songs of artists such as Led Zeppelin and Bob Dylan. For example, Dylan’s

Ballad of a Thin Man (1965) is not technically a ballad (Groom 2013, 81).

Australian ballads of all subject matter are understood culturally through the umbrella term: “bush ballad”. Bush ballads are Australian poems, songs, and folk compositions that depict the colonial experience of Australian life (Warren 2010). Often reworking of traditional British and Irish ballads, these songs were adapted to articulate the harsh

31 https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2012/03/28/148915022/alan-lomaxs-massive-archive-goes- online>. Accessed January 15, 2018. 127 experience of the convict life and as celebrations of bushranger heroes, sailors, and stockmen. So ingrained in the Australian identity are some ballads, that the ballad

Waltzing Matilda, has come to be understood as the unofficial national anthem of

Australia (Ward 2014). Australia’s most famous balladeers are Banjo Patterson and

Henry Lawson. Although neither sang their ballads, they were prolific in their production and their exploration of the colonial Australian experience through the ballad form is widely acknowledged (Knight 2015; Semmler 1993). As Clement Semmler (1993) opines, “most Australians accept that Paterson is their national folk poet” (10). However,

Paterson was from the Binalong region region of rural NSW and rarely turned his focus to the Australian coastal experience. Victorian folk musicians Danny Spooner, the

Southern Ocean Sea Band, and the Tin Shed Singers, prioritise coastal Ballads. Folk music festivals such as The Queenscliff Music Festival and Port Fairy Folk Festival occur annually on and around the Shipwreck Coast and host sea shanty and whaling song concerts each year.32 I was programmed as a Feature Artist in the 2016 Lorne Festival of

Performing Arts on the Shipwreck Coast, and used my performances during the festival to try out ballads I was considering for inclusion in my soundscape. While traditional ballads are still celebrated, the ballad form has continued to evolve into the 21st-century and in now widely used to describe many blues, rock, folk, and country songs, which, while not set in strict refrains and rhyme, do focus on narrative and are slow in tempo.

(Newman 2007). While Nick Cave and Tom Waits do not write ballads in the traditional form, they are considered consummate modern balladeers (Barnett 2011; Groom 2013).

The songs on Cave’s album Murder Ballads are contemporary interpretations of the murder ballad and do not adhere strictly to the iambic and anapaestic quatrains of the ballad form. As Nick Cave states, “I like the way the simple, almost naive traditional murder ballad has gradually become a vehicle that can happily accommodate the most

32 http://www.portfairyfolkfestival.com/the-southern-ocean-sea-band/ and http://www.portfairyfolkfestival.com/shanties-at-the-wharf/. Accessed February 23, 2018. 128 twisted acts of deranged machismo” (cited in White 1996, 83). Cave is drawn to melancholy music in juxtaposition with extreme, brutal content and through Murder

Ballads, developed the form to include barbaric and contemporary violent exploits and modern references. I refer to my songs in Disappearing into Darkness as ballads, as, like

Cave’s murder ballads, they are contemporary interpretations of the form. They are influenced by European ballads, whaling songs, and bush ballads which would have been sung on the Shipwreck Coast by settlers and whalers and they suggest the colonial past in their use of antiquated language.

A Darkness: The First Ballad.

The original version of A Darkness was written during the composition of my long-form ballad to convey Portland as a haunted town. It referenced brutal cliffs, she-oak trees, and crows and incorporated a detailed description of Portland. After moving away from my long-form ballad, I rewrote the lyrics to the song to evoke a fictionalised town on the

Shipwreck Coast rather than remain specific to Portland. I wanted the song to evoke any of the towns between Torquay and the western end of the Shipwreck Coast at

Warrnambool, and in doing so, allow the song to speak for the region. The song is placed at the 2:16 minute mark and the lyrics are as follows:

Out here in the darkness Amidst the fog filled air There roars the Southern Ocean And a haunting hiding there. And if you stay to linger long And patiently you stare In shallows at the water’s edge You’ll see the ghosts float there.

For here there is a darkness in the night Black as the crows caught high in flight Many the cursed lay down beside The ships in the water All lost neath the water

129 Atop brutal cliffs, a town it sits With secrets so to keep Of love and death and murdering That haunt the fog-filled streets. Crows high in the she-oaks Red-eyed children from their doors Leer and hear the howling wind That keeps this town forlorn

For there is a darkness in the night Black as a whale washed in moonlight Many the ghosts floating beside The ships in the water All lost neath the water

Come sink down slow To the depths below Where the black waves rolls Stay by me close, stay by me close.

I use references to archaic language because, in my mind, the narrator of this ballad is a long dead sailor from the early 19the-century. He is a ghost and is calling to the listener to come and join him below the water with all the other dead sailors. I was inspired by van Elferen’s theory on Cave’s musical ghosts. Van Elferen (2013) has written that,

Cave’s ballads are “imbued with spectrality and over-stylisation. His lyrical ghosts acquire an audible voice, a voice that is as threatening or seductive as the singer decides to make it” (179). Van Elferen goes on to argue that “musical ghosts are much more effectively uncanny than literary ones, not only because auditive perception has a more direct effect than textual, but more importantly because tempo and rhythm, melody and harmony, vocal and instrumental timbre underline and intensify what is being expressed”

(ibid.). Cave is particularly adept at conjuring the dead through song, and his conjuring was influential on this songwriting experiment. I was acutely aware of van Elferen’s assertion and also of Cave’s shifting between threat and seduction when I was writing and recording A Darkness. As the narrator of the song has the responsibility of establishing the location of the soundscape, I wanted the quality of the singing to strike a balance between threat and seduction. I was attempting to both invite the listener into the

130 sonic world, while at the same time warn them that there is a treacherous danger to accepting this invitation. I want the narrator to be able to move through the landscape and observe and describe what they see to the listener. The narrator is informed by my interest in Samuel Beckett and my early songwriting developments, which occurred in parallel with my rehearsal of the short works of Beckett. This Beckettian narrator is caught in purgatory, caught in a world of shadows and is attempting to lure the listener towards this darkened place (Levy 2014, 98).

My main strategy for inviting the listener to join the narrator was through encouraging them to imagine the landscape of the ballad. In doing so, they engage with rather than observe, the narrative. It was a challenge to find a balance between evoking a landscape specific to the Shipwreck Coast and maintaining enough lyrical ambiguity to allow space for the listener to conjure their own images of coastal storms, whales, and eerie seaside towns. Early drafts of the lyrics were too literal and did not encourage the listener to imagine a fictitious town, but to think of Portland. I wanted to reference defining features of the area such as the howling wind, the she-oak trees, and the whales without the work becoming over-exacting. The Shipwreck Coast, particularly the western towns of

Portland, Warrnambool, and Port Fairy, has a long history of whaling in the initial 70 years of the Australian colonies from the 1790s to the 1850s (Dakin 1938) and whales are a defining feature of the area. Commercial whaling in Australia ended in 1978 after colossal over-exploitation and the near extinction of many species, and the new government focus was directed firmly at conservation (Turner 2011). Crows are associated with death, superstition and with evil portent. They are not typical coastal birds so their presence in the lyrics is unsettling. The crows, along with the red-eyed children watching, are further strategies to encourage listeners to bring to mind an imagined place where evil exists the atmosphere is brooding and ghostly. I located the ghosts in and

131 beside the ocean to establish the many lives lost on and off the shores of the Shipwreck

Coast.

I was conscious of creating a sense of spatialisation in the music. I composed and recorded this song on 1964 Harmony acoustic guitar, which has a thin, almost toy guitar sound quality, which is in grotesque contrast to the portentous lyrics. I initially believed a large band would be more effective in conveying the wild natural environment of the

Shipwreck Coast. I recorded two versions that incorporated a full band, consisting of drums, electric bass, and organ. During these versions, I experimented with playing distorted electric guitars and banjo. I wanted to reference my Gothic Rock influences and use a shrieking and distorted electric guitar similar to Roland S. Howard and Liam

Barton’s to convey environmental features of the Shipwreck Coast: the crashing storms, the southern gales so forceful they cause the shoreline trees to grow sideways, and giant rolling waves which carve the sandstone cliffs to form unique rock features such as Loch

Ard Gorge (named after the wreck of the clipper named Loch Ard), London Bridge, and the 12 Apostles. I assumed that a loud electric band would help to convey the savagery of the weather and ocean of the Shipwreck Coast, but in fact, the opposite was true. My compositions drew too much attention to the instrumentation and, rather than evoke the coast of shipwrecks and storms, distracted from haunted landscape I was trying to evoke lyrically. The song was more effective if space was allowed for the grotesque disjuncture between the foreshadowing lyrics and the simple toy acoustic guitar sound was highlighted. These loud band versions seemed to disempower, rather than support the lyrical content. In the end, it was a rendition closer to my original demo recording that supported the lyrics and thus most effectively conveyed the desired portentous invitation.

This song is placed at the beginning of the soundscape as a warning to the listener that the sonic world they are engaging with is not a safe one.

132

For reassurance in my choice for sonic economy, I returned to Cave and Ellis’ soundtrack to The Proposition and found Cave and Ellis often observed a rigorous economy in their compositions. For example, during the The Rider #2, the music supports Cave’s lyrics with a single E flat note, sustained through Ellis’ looping violin composition. In doing so,

Cave and Ellis compose a song which, rather than becoming the central focus of the film, acts as a support to the accompanying visuals. Although I had no visuals to support, I was conscious that my soundscape was being designed to accompany visuals in future staging experiments and so I took this idea into my work on A Darkness. Once it was clear that the full band was too much, I worked with the simpler acoustic guitar composition in the hope that this sparse composition would allow space for the listener to imagine their version of a haunted seaside town. I supported this acoustic arrangement with simple electric bass and violin. I found if I recorded one note at a time and lowered the pitch through digital processing, I could compose simple refrains which conveyed menace.

When pitch-shifted, the strings began to groan and sounded as if they were collapsing, and in doing so, created a similar sound to the marine rope which is used to secure boats to the Portland pier and can be heard twisting and creaking with tension. These instruments: acoustic guitar, violin, and bass helped to support the lyrics and to create a score that was both simple and evocative of the eerie atmospheres I desired.

Lost and The Leaving Song: A Dramaturgy of Sonic Exposure

Lost and The Leaving Song, located in the score at the 18:30 and 36:48-minute mark respectively, are the two other songs which feature in the soundscape. These songs are similar to A Darkness regarding the musicality and the ghost balladeer character that sings them. What is different is the way the two songs were composed. As opposed to A

Darkness, which was written before I had undertaken soundscape development, Lost and

133 The Leaving Song were written after I had undertaken environmental recordings and soundscape developments. Both songs were composed as a response to the processed material. I chose to approach the songs from the perspective of the ghost balladeer, however, I did not feel the responsibility to invite the listener into the world, as I had with

A Darkness. This liberated my compositional approach and allowed me to experiment with lyrical and musical developments in a freeform improvisational manner. I approached the writing of Lost through a sonic immersion in my defamiliarised environmental sounds. I was interested in exploring what lyrics and chord progressions would emerge through exposure to a soundscape I had designed to evoke fear and menace.

Although I had designed this soundscape, and thus, they lacked a sense of surprise to me,

I was sure it would still shape the direction of my songwriting experiments to a degree.

To achieve this aim, I set up a condenser microphone to record my guitar and singing improvisations. I then played my soundscapes through a set of noise-cancelling headphones to create a degree of separation between the sounds of my improvisations and the soundscape. I improvised songs while listening to the soundscape and imagining myself in the role of the ghostly balladeer. I then used these rough improvisations to develop finished songs, much in the way a painter would use a rough sketch to develop a finished painting. I wrote three songs in this manner. Lost was the song I decided to retain as I felt it was the best example of a violent and grotesque narrative.

3. Musical Composition.

When redrafting Lost, I decided to record a version using the banjo rather than the guitar.

I wanted to use the banjo for its folk and colonial associations. Originating in Africa and coming to America through the slave trade, Banjos have been played by white people since the late 18th century and would have arrived in Victoria during the mid 19th century after becoming popular in Britain in the 1840s (Winans 2010). This colonial

134 instrumentation led me to support the banjo in my recording with simple tuba and marching drums. Although the tuba and marching drums do not add a particular sinister quality, their inclusion is important to give the song, and the soundscape as a whole, further colonial and military associations and also a simple shift in energy. Lost is positioned in the middle of the score and I felt it needed to deliver a change in tone in order to refresh the listeners ears. The banjo is celebrated in Victoria in the Goldfield

District town of Guildford annually through the Guildford Banjo Jamboree33. They are associated with ballads, blues, and folk music and have a sound that evokes a pre-digital era. The same approach can be seen in Cave and Ellis’ use of Happy Land (performed on a mandolin, an instrument with similar folk associations to the banjo) to score the most violent moments of the Proposition. They create an emotional rupture through the evocation of violence and horror through sonic beauty and in doing so encourage uncanny experiences. I wanted to achieve the same approach, however, without visuals to score, my soundscape had to function as the horror. This created a sonic complication for me. I had a grotesque soundscape and I was trying to lay a beautiful song over it. In this case, without the visuals, the experiment failed. I decided instead to support the soundscape through the writing of a violent ballad, as this was the subject that emerged through my improvisations. I developed a narrative in which the ghost balladeer finds a young woman who has just slaughtered a group of men. This violent ballad, more akin to the narrative of Cave’s murder ballads, felt more fitting into the particular moment in the soundscape.

A Dramaturgy of Engulfment

The final song The Leaving Song positioned as it is at the closing of the soundscape, was written to carry the listener away from the Shipwreck Coast. I wanted, not to return them to equilibrium, but to move them below the water, and slowly engulf them in the natural

33 http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/intothemusic/the-musical-misfit-a-story-of-the-5-string- banjo/3589684>. Accessed December 15, 2017. 135 environmental sounds. To do achieve this desire, I hired a cabin on the shore on the

Shipwreck Coast. The constant direct exposure to the ocean of the Shipwreck Coast also helped to evoke moods in me that I then transferred to song, writing the Leaving Song in one sitting. I then took this song back to my studio and, similarly to my approach to A

Darkness, I experimented with full band recordings. Again, these recordings did not evoke the landscape for me and I returned to a simple, stripped back acoustic guitar composition, which allowed the lyrics to evoke the landscape. I recorded an organ part to accompany the melody. I chose the organ due to its Gothic and horror film associations through the scoring of early horror movies (Brown 2009, 1). I also recorded a high- pitched backing vocal part. I then processed this vocal track with tremolo to create the aforementioned otherworldly effect of the theremin, while at the same time drawing on the history of mermaid siren songs, used in mythology to lure sailors to their doom. The mermaid is a trope of sea-shanties and shipwreck narratives and has a presence on the

Shipwreck Coast in the naming of large rock pools at Torquay and Aireys Inlet as

Mermaid Pools. As I was recording this part, I tried to stay at one remove from the received European idea of how a siren song might sound, and instead to create an original sound. Due to my natural baritone voice struggling to sing in a high pitch, my siren song was disturbing, however, it was not particularly Australian in sound. It was at this point I was reminded of folk singer Judy Collins’ version of the traditional whaling song

Farewell to Tarwathie. The song is a farewell to the narrator’s lover and tells the story of a whaler’s departure to Greenland to undertake years of whaling. In Collins’ version, she performs a cappella (with no instrumental support) with her support in the form of recorded whale songs.34 Although I was trying to avoid the imperialist nature of many colonial whaling ballads, I was influenced by Collins incorporation of the whale as a mysterious and beautiful singer rather than monster to be caught and killed. I

34 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV29xK2xyZ4. Accessed January 16, 2018. 136 experimented with this approach and sourced recordings of Southern Right Whales that migrate along the Shipwreck Coast annually and used these sounds to support my narrative. I wanted to carry the listener out over the deep waters of the Southern Ocean and these whale songs, the “monsters of the deep” calling the listener into the ocean and echoing the desire of the opening songs, were a more natural and uniquely Australian siren song to call the listener down into the ocean’s depths. Rather than ending the song musically, I decided to engulf the song with recordings of the natural environment: the ocean and whales. The whale songs, my uncanny siren songs, overpowered and drowned out the words. Words fail through a dramaturgy of sonic engulfment and much like the colonial sailors, my words sink to the dark depths of the Southern Ocean.

Unlike the three songs, which are clearly isolated in the soundscape, the musical compositions occur throughout the score. I used musical instruments as a predominantly supportive compositional tool rather than attempting to evoke soundscape through musical instruments alone. For example, I often experimented with violin to augment and develop my aeolian recordings. The central challenge of my work with the windmills came in my desire to create a score that shifted in dynamics. The windmill sounds were very menacing, yet they offered no respite. I found if there was no shift in the dynamics of this sound, it quickly began to lose its menacing power. I also wanted to allow the sound to settle at times, to articulate a break in the waves to calm the listener before creating a shock in the returning violent sound. Franzke has reffered to a dramaturgy of sudden stops and starts to create shock effect (1 March, 2017, interview with Miles

O’Neil). To do this, the primary technique I used was a sonic combination of windmills and violin. It was no coincidence I looked to the violin. The violin has been linked to

Gothic soundscapes since the beginning of Gothic melodrama (James 1981, 10). It is also the main instrument of Nick Cave’s composing partner Warren Ellis. Ellis’ playing style,

137 particularly on his 1997 album Ocean Songs with his Melbourne band the Dirty Three was a strong reference for me. Ellis is known for using electric guitar effects on his violin to create a more distorted sound. I purchased a violin and learned to play simple sounds on it. Tom Waits inspired the compositional method of using unfamiliar instruments.

Waits often composes songs on instruments he does not know how to play to trick himself into finding new ways into songwriting (Waits 2015). I used my unfamiliarity with the violin to augment the high-pitched windmill sounds and found Waits’ approach to be useful. While I was unable to produce any ‘well played’ compositions, I found an approach to playing the instrument which complimented the random sounds of the windmills and allowed me to achieve the sounds I was pursuing. I played singular, long notes and then added a delay effect to these notes. I found this delay effect gave an immediate spectral quality to the violin. The delay created the effect of many violins disappearing down a long and echoing sonic hall, not unlike Saulwick’s sonic echo chamber.

A crucial scoring tool I used was the bowed electric bass. Through my research, I had noted a consistent use of the bowed double bass in scoring Australian Gothic theatre. Glen

Walton has used this sound since 2006 in the score to the Suitcase Royale’s Chronicles of a Sleepless Moon and in most scores since. I am reminded of a meta-theatrical moment in Suitcase Royale’s work Zombatland (2011) in which Darren (Joseph O’Farrell), while making his way across the stage and talking to his brother via walkie-talkie says, “I don’t know if I should go on, I’m hearing some pretty ominous double bass out here”

(Zombatland performance text). This moment, played for laughs in Zombatland, highlights a consistent Australian Gothic sonic tool. The double bass was used as the only instrument to score the Malthouse production of Night on Bald Mountain (2014) and was the primary instrument used in the score to Picnic at Hanging Rock (2016). In all

138 examples, the sonorous rumblings of the bowed instrument are processed to distort the sound further, often through the use of delay, reverb and distortion. The compositions are often atonal in style, representing a lack of melodic structure and familiarity. I wanted to combine this Australian Gothic theatre sound trope with my research into the Australian

Gothic Rock sound of the Birthday Party. To do this, I chose to use an electric bass rather than a double bass. While the double bass is commonly played with a bow, this is an unconventional approach to the electric bass, which is always plucked with fingers or a plastic guitar pick. I recorded a collection of atonal bowed electric bass compositions and found them to be a great source of menace in the score, particularly when processed with delay. As explored in my Black Lung case study, delay creates a decaying sonic loop in which the sound continues after the musician has stopped playing and can be used to create dissonant compositions which sound unsettling and malevolent due to their lack of harmony and melody. I used these compositions at multiple points throughout the score and am interested to revisit them in future developments and the ways they might be staged.

Future Staging

I am currently in conversation with producers of Dark Mofo Festival, the Museum of Old and New Art winter festival regarding potential stagings of Disappearing into Darkness in the 2019 festival. This festival is an appealing environment to premiere the work due to a program described as “Gothic. Morbid. Strange” and aligned with the work of David

Lynch (Delaney 2017). The program’s music/performance art programming choices, focusing as it does on death, winter solstice rituals, and links between darkness and light, humans and nature suit Disappearing into Darkness. I was programmed as a solo performer in the festival in 2014 and have been interested in returning with a large-scale work. While I am creatively satisfied with my soundscape and am pleased with my choice

139 to focus purely on soundscape, I see this work as a blueprint for a piece of visual theatre which will incorporate film projection and dance. I am interested in collaborating with a filmmaker, perhaps an Indigenous filmmaker from the South West Victorian region, to film the Shipwreck Coast from a boat and to explore ways this footage might be distorted both in post-production and through unconventional projection methods. I want to investigate the possibilities of bringing deformed windmills into the theatre and manipulating them, playing with the broken metal as part of an eclectic, junkyard orchestra. I am also interested in collaborating with a choreographer and a small group of dancers who may be of ethic origin. I would like to use this soundscape as a text with which to create an exchange between artists working in fields I am yet to explore such as film, sound-art, and dance. I am interested in presenting at a festival which has drawn strongly on the recognised brand of Tasmanian Gothic and which has had much to do with the development of Tasmania as an Uber Gothic state similar to Victoria, yet with its unique ghosts, myths and repressed colonial trauma. It is interesting to note my development as a Gothic theatre artist matched a commercial development in the Gothic promoted by both the state government of Tasmania and Victoria through the tourist marketing of its old gaols, asylums, quarantine stations, gold fields, bush rangers,

Hanging Rock and the maritime history of the Shipwreck Coast (Osborne 2018). I am corious to see if the work will be branded as Victorian Gothic and if my sonic evocations of the Shipwreck Coast will survive the journey across Bass Strait.

Conclusion

My influences have been multiple, the main ones being Gothic Rock and band aesthetics,

Nick Cave, and Australian Gothic cinema and radio. I have certainly also been in dialogue as a Gothic practitioner with David Franzke, Black Lung, Sisters Grimm, and Tamara

Saulwick. In this piece, I set a very specific task around landscape which neither Saulwick

140 nor the Black Lung have pursued. In a sense my dilemma has been how to evoke the

Australian Landscapes and atmospheres I have so admired in Australian Gothic cinema.

I return here to one of my leading questions: How can Australian landscapes be evoked through theatrical Gothic soundscape? Through practical research, it has become apparent that when I talk about evoking landscape through soundscape, it is not the precise landscape of the Shipwreck Coast that I am hoping to evoke, but a set of moods related to the uncanny which I experience when I am on the Shipwreck Coast, and which I have come to understand through my research are a result of both my experience of growing up on the Shipwreck Coast and my developing understanding of the spectral and traumatic history of the area. These factors have informed Disappearing into Darkness and led me to create a spectrum of fear laden moods, from mild unease to horror, in order to provoke a set of imaginings located somewhere on the shore of a savage Australian ocean.

Through my practice-based research, I have become aware that unless the specific landscape I am attempting to evoke is stated in song or as a marketing or framing tool in a theatre program, it is impossible to reliably evoke visual landscapes through sound alone. However, it is possible to record specific sounds and evoke moods of certain landscapes. Like the film and theatre sound designers I have researched, I found the recording and manipulation of environmental sounds gave rise to the most innovative and effective compositional moments in Disappearing into Darkness. I have not achieved the precise evocation of the Shipwreck Coast, but I have created an unmistakably Gothic

Australian coastal score. Through processing tools, specifically the use of distortion, delay, reverb, dissonant drones, and different juxtapositions of silence and volume, I was able to create a sense of haunted space and a haunted narrator.

I have outlined my methods and my methodology of production of the Sonic Gothic and sort to articulate a dramaturgical terminology that endeavours to disorient and unnerve

141 the listener. Like other Gothic works I have referred to, the voice of the narrator and the words are engulfed by the sounds of the natural environment. However, I still am drawn to lyrics in songs, particularly their usefulness in the direct communication of narratives and characters. In future developments, I am interested in experimenting with the ways a reincorporation of the body and of visual narratives might offer me narrational alternatives, different gender possibilities, diverse casting, and possibly allow me to move away from words entirely. I am aware that I may be part of an independent theatre movement in Melbourne and part of a generation that distrusts text-based theatre. I think this is because playwrights such Joanna Murray-Smith and David Williamson seem to represent something of the English well-made play and are conservative in their modes of narration and staging. Through my research, I have discovered that sound is a powerful conjuror of landscapes and environments and can suggest space and its architectures. My prioritisation of sound offers me new ways of thinking about spatiality in my contemporary theatre making and I look forward to conducting further sound-led experiments in combination with the visual in the future development of Disappearing into Darkness. The task that now lays ahead of me is the realisation of this soundscape, of its haunted sonic space and ghostly narrator, on the stage. At this juncture, as I come to the end of my dissertation and confront the possibilities of the future development of

Disappearing into Darkness, I am able to consider the results of my enquiry into soundscapes of contemporary Australian Gothic theatre in my own practice and the practice of other Australian Gothic sound-led theatre artists. My combined theoretical and practical research has allowed me to theorise contemporary Gothic theatre as a potent yet neglected locus of sonic innovation.

142 Thesis Conclusion

This thesis has suggested that text alone is not adequate for expressing the transnational fears, anxieties and preoccupations of 21st-century Australians and that experiements in sound-led Gothic theatre offer new ways of both creating and anaylising contemporary

Australian theatre. While this thesis has acknowledged the important contribution text- based analyses of Australian Gothic theatre has made to Australian Gothic theatre scholarship, it has argued that this literalist focus has been limiting and has neglected some of the most innovative practitioners of contemporary Australian Gothic theatre.

Through a combined theoretical and practical approach, I have identified a set of unique sonic dramaturgies occurring in the works of non-text-based theatre-makers. I have argued that sound can evoke imaginary landscapes and in doing so, escape the literalist conventions of representation that have encaged realism. Sound is also an increasingly important tool in the provocation of emotion, particularly horror, which is critical to the creation of the contemporary Gothic.

In my chapter on Black Lung, I historicised contemporary Australian Gothic theatre in relation to the Melbourne Rock scene of the 1970s. This scene, particularly the subversive and shocking sonic and performance strategies of Nick Cave and the Birthday Party, had a lasting influence on contemporary Australian Gothic theatre as revealed through the work of Black Lung. I have demonstrated that the company’s dramaturgies of shock, subversion, and sabotage have been consistently developed and deployed to provoke their audiences and encourage more visceral engagement with their theatre. Black Lung have nurtured and promoted a band aesthetic and attempted to create in their theatre the same experience as attending a loud Rock concert: total immersion. It is this immersive strategy, brutal and primitive as it is in Black Lung shows, that offers the most identifiable

143 commonality in other contemporary sound-led Australian Gothic theatre practitioners such as David Franzke and Tamara Saulwick.

In my chapter on Tamara Saulwick, I traced the influence of modernist theatre aesthetics on Saulwick’s theory and practice of a sound-led theatre. The immersive strategies of

Black Lung and Saulwick are entirely different though the commitment to exploring a theatre of sound is shared. While Black Lung advocate sonic assault, Saulwick pursued a more nuanced approach through her desire for sonic entrapment. Saulwick approaches her Gothic theatrical experiments through dramaturgy of a sonic haunted house to encourage a psychic echo chamber both in the theatre and in the minds of her audience.

Saulwick’s sonic experiments revel in an uncanny metatheatricality in which she demonstrates the conjuring of her sonic ghosts. Drawing on spectrality theory and van

Elferen’s concept of the Sonic Gothic, I have pursued Saulwick’s sonic dramaturgies and in doing so, termed the “sonic haunted house” and the “the multi-vocal uncanny” and identified the creation of a metatheatrical sonic grotesque. It is through combinations of these dramaturgies that Saulwick has demonstrated significant innovation in both the

Sonic Gothic and sound-led theatre in Australia. Sound-led Gothic theatre practitioners immerse their audiences in sound to encourage feelings of fear, terror, unease, defamiliarisation, shock, suspense and horror. For example, with regard to the stage adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock, David Franzke was obsessed with the idea of constructing and architecture of speakers and sound technologies to “bring the audience onto the stage” (David Franzke, March 1, 2018, interview with Miles O’Neil). For

Franzke, it was not enough that the audience observe the play occurring before them, he needed to immerse the audience into the same world the characters were experiencing, a menacing and malevolent natural environment and, like Saulwick and Black Lung before him, turned up the volume rather than turned to text. Interestingly, my work, both solo

144 and with Suitcase Royale has been engaged less with immersion and more with strategies for evoking imagined landscapes, specifically the Shipwreck Coast.

Through my combined theoretical and practical research, I have discovered that sound offers theatre-makers unique strategies for the evocation of imagined landscapes and moods and is particularly well suited to immersive contemporary Gothic theatrical experimentation. This thesis contends that contemporary Australian Gothic theatre is a crucible for some of the most innovative examples of the Sonic Turn. All the practitioners

I have referenced pursue sound as the principal tool for engaging and engulfing audiences.

This is a significant development, the privileging of sound in theatre and offers new contemporary strategies and approaches to theatre-making. A fuller acknowledgement, not only of the soundscapes of contemporary Australian Gothic theatre but broadly of the role of the composer, the sound designer and the sound-led theatre artist and the oft- neglected role sound can play in the evocation of imagined Australian Landscapes and moods can only result in further development of a more thorough and multi-faceted theoretical and practical engagement with theatre.

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169

Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne

Author/s: O'Neil, Miles Henry

Title: Contemporary Australian Gothic theatre sound

Date: 2018

Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/213334

File Description: Thesis

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