Austin Mcquinn -Acoustic Creatures

DOCTORAL THESIS Acoustic Creatures Human and animal entanglements in performance McQuinn, Austin Award date: 2016 General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 28. Sep. 2021 Acoustic Creatures: Human and animal entanglements in performance. by Austin McQuinn A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of PhD Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance University of Roehampton 2016 Abstract This thesis questions the phenomenon of human and animal acoustic entanglements in arts and performance practices and proposes that sounding the animal in performance, or ‘becoming-resonant’, secures vital connections to the creatural. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal, Donna Haraway’s definitions of multi-species becoming-with and Mladen Dolar’s ideas of voice-as-object frame this analysis and shape its findings. This thesis begins by tracing coevolutionary chronologies of listening to birdsong in the work of Olivier Messiaen and Celeste Boursier-Mougenot, alongside the development of musical instrumentation, broadcasting, and recording technologies. This trajectory continues in Chapter Two, through my reading of Daniela Cattivelli’s sound works where entanglements of artist, activist, bird-hunter and animal challenge perceptions of birdsong and its meaning in human culture. The acoustics of hunting and its origins in palaeoperformance (Montelle) are connected here through animal voices to Rane Willerslev’s contemporary anthropological investigations of Siberian hunting techniques where deception, concealment, animism and personhood form an acousmatic template. In Chapter Three, the concepts of tactical empathy, perspectivism and neoshamanism (Viveiros de Castro) inform my analysis of Marcus Coates’ live art events where, I argue, he both botches Deleuzeo-Guattarian theories of becoming-animal and complicates the influence of Joseph Beuys’ animal mythologies. Myth also informs animal presences in opera, which in Chapter Four, I claim have been challenged in powerful ways by Raskatov’s A Dog’s Heart and Birtwhistle’s The Minotaur. Raskatov breaks with the traditions of silent dog stereotypes on stage from Shakespeare to contemporary cabaret. Instead violence and ostracism find a voice through these persecuted creatures. Violated bodies and voices are crucial to the primate dramas of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape and Franz Kafka’s A Report to the Academy where, in Chapter Five, I show how the politics of the tongue, language worship, and anthropocentrism overpower human-primate relationships and distort inter-species communication. Counter to the tyranny of human exceptionalism, the creatural acoustics at work in Kathryn Hunter’s empathic becoming-ape, in bass John Tomlinson’s minotaur, in the radical throat-singing of Christian Zehnder and in castrato histories and legacies, push materialities of lung, larynx and muscle into a new ecology of listening, singing and resonating. By invoking vocalic animal bodies and becoming entangled, creatural acoustics send sonic threads through the labyrinths of culture that sustain resonances across species and beyond the limitations of the human. 1 Acknowledgements. My sincere thanks go to my Supervisors, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck (Director of Studies) and Garry Marvin. Both professors crossed boundaries of discipline to create a unique space where my research could flourish and where their careful guidance and encouragement allowed for creative exploration. For their wealth of knowledge so generously shared, as well as their friendship, I will be forever inspired and grateful. The rich response of my examiners Steve Baker and PA Skantze will inform every next step of my research. It was a privilege to receive their serious and enlightening thoughts and suggestions, as well as the time they both gave to reading and responding to this work. Through my parents’ unwavering belief in my abilities and constant support of my practice and research, I have learned how love and commitment can truly change someone’s life and happiness. To my friends whose patience and genuine interest saw me through the most difficult times, and times of celebration, I am full of thanks and will always remember their kindness. Special thanks go to the friends who formed a wall of protection, advice and ballast around me for the long duration of this project – Eoin McQuinn, Charles McCarthy, Marian Fitzgibbon, Dieter Benecke, Patricia Looby, Rita Hickey, Alice Maher, Michael Berine, Michael Murphy, Morgan Doyle and David Cunningham. Thank you for your belief and trust always. To my ally Jean Cullinane, at my side from the very beginning, inspiring, challenging, suggesting and caring about what I was trying to do. For sharing your own glittering scholarship in the last phase of the writing and all your hours of reading and recommending I will always be inspired by your intellectual rigour and grateful for your special friendship. 2 Contents. Abstract. 1 Acknowledgements. 2 Contents 3 Introduction. 4 - 14 Chapter One. Becoming Audible: Listening in between species.. 15 - 48 Chapter Two. Becoming Acoustic: Concealing and revealing sound in hunting and performance intra-action. 49 - 86 Chapter Three. Becoming Botched: Play, tactical empathy and neo-shamanic acoustic legacies in performance. 87 - 127 79 - Chapter Four. Becoming Canine: The scandal of the singing animal body. 128 - 161 Chapter Five. Becoming Lingual: Primate trouble in the Academy of speech. 162 - 195 Chapter Six. Becoming Resonant: Sounding the creatural through performance. 196 - 224 Bibliography 225 – 253 3 Introduction. In this thesis I question the nature and function of animal acoustics in human arts and performance practices, where human and animal identities become entangled in the production of creatural vocal assemblages and becomings. What is the animal voice and body doing in performance? How have creatural acoustics influenced performance histories and legacies? Where are the entanglements of human and animal sound worlds to be found in performance historically and in contemporary practice? This thesis seeks to interrogate the acoustic, living relationships I perceive exist between nonhuman animal culture and human performance practices at the dawn of the Anthropocene. Animal acoustics have been largely treated as behavioural and limited in meaning and intentionality. As I will show, when the animal voice becomes resonant in creative human sound worlds, it is loaded with meaning. Just as the animal body has also proved immensely useful as a trope or symbol or vehicle of human desires, power struggles, subjectivity and more in an endless search for meaning, so too are animal acoustics in performance less to do with the lives of animals and almost exclusively and centrally concerned with human life. Anthropocentric thinking has been challenged in recent years by what scholars refer to as ‘the animal turn’ in philosophy, in literature and critical theory and across disciplines such as archeology and performance studies. The problematizing of ethics through a counter- Cartesian rethinking of animal rights and animal studies late in the last century prompted a radical shifting of proximities between animal and human worlds. In confronting what is at stake ethically for the nonhuman living beings with whom we share an endangered globe, 4 the cultural, social and political hierarchies that have separated species for so long became unsettled as identity, otherness and difference required urgent reconsideration. While animal liberation may not be any closer to its ambitions since Peter Singer wrote its manifesto in the 1970s, human liberation from crushing anthropocentric isolationism has opened the gates of critical thinking to allow the human to become involved in the phenomenon of multispecies worldings - not least creatively and philosophically. In a further renegotiation of the terms that may constitute our future relationships with animals in a post-anthropocentric zootopia, the ban on anthropomorphism has also been scrutinized for its separationist values and found to be lacking in empathy (de Waal, 2001). Where science and philosophy have been threatened with accusations of weak thinking if anthropomorphic methods are detected in research, the opposite has often been the case in creative disciplines and media. I argue that anthropomorphism has, in ways that are often questionable, maintained an animal presence or a consciousness of animality at base, in the human project that is profoundly urban, artificial and mechanocentric. In the trajectory of my thesis, anthropomorphism in arts and performance practices is not always a necessarily uncritical praxis. Where the animal other has been romanticized or made sublime, sentimentalized and even violated

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