DOCTORAL THESIS Ear Bodies: Acoustic Ecologies in Site-Contingent Performance Manco, Fabrizio 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: 05. Oct. 2021 Ear Bodies: Acoustic Ecologies in Site-Contingent Performance Fabrizio Manco BA (Hons.), MA, MPhil A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance University of Roehampton, London 2016 Performance research in the Ugento countryside, 2008. Part of Klohi performance research in archaeological and other sites, Salento region, Italy (2005-ongoing).1 Photo: Fausta Muci. 1 Klohi is a Messapian word which purported to mean listen/hear. The Messapii lived in Salento (Puglia) in Italy, between the VIII and VII century B.C.E. The word provides me with an interesting link in my research into the acoustic-archaeological aspect of site, place and identity. The assonance of this word with ‘choclea’ is also worth noting. 1 ABSTRACT In this thesis I offer a philosophy and a performance practice of the ear. It is a theoretical reflection as well as a discussion on my hearing/listening and performance practice, research and workshops. Here is where sound and the body move and perform by relating to the constantly changing acoustic environment. It is an enquiry into and a corporeal experience of sound as the ear body, a bodied experience of sound and listening where the whole body becomes an ear. This is explored through my experience of chronic tinnitus, a criticism of over-determined technology and through a discussion on the trance-dance therapy of Tarantism. With a focus on environmental awareness, this thesis is an ecophenomenological investigation in my theory of site contingency, where I connect my ecophenomenological approach to contingency – contingency intended as a necessary experience of the world – and to acoustic ecology. It offers a methodology for performance-making, also through workshops. They are a ground for shared mutual experience and contribution, with participants from different backgrounds and abilities, and are also a pedagogical instrument, for students and others, in the form of a ‘training’ practice of the ear. This methodology becomes a basis for what I call site-contingent performance, where sound is intended and experienced as relation and as contingency. The kinaesthetics of sound is exemplified in ‘aural choreography,’ a moving by following environmental sounds, and where the experience of contingency is also in the practice of ‘earlines’ drawing; a form of performance and of acoustic documentation. 2 CONTENTS ABSTRACT 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 5 INTRODUCTION 7 Speaking in listening terms: a glossary 40 PORTFOLIO STATEMENT 56 Auditory Performance Art: itinerant listening at a near distance 65 CHAPTER 1: Ear Bodies 74 1.1 Merleau-Ponty for acoustic embodiment 81 1.2 Soundscape as another disembodying technology 89 1.3 Tinnitus: Sussurrus Aurium 103 1.4 Tinnitus: the ghost in the auditory phantom stage 112 1.5 Tinnitus: fluctuations 125 1.6 Noli me tangere (cum sono) 128 1.7 Tarantism: in per sona 132 1.8 Tarantism: tarantula auris 140 1.9 SUPPLEMENT TO CHAPTER 1: Ear Bodies workshops 145 1.9.1 Walking backwards 145 1.9.2 Aerial drawing 145 1.9.3 Auditory proxemics 148 CHAPTER 2: Site-Contingent Performance 151 2.1 We are time: the sound of contingency 156 3 2.2 Ecology and acoustic ecology in site-contingent performance 163 2.3 Ecophenomenology, with repeated cascades of contingency 169 2.4 Site contingency 176 2.5 Tangible acoustic space: something might actually touch 189 2.6 Aural Choreography: “I want to be on time even if I am too late” 193 2.7 Aural Choreography: dissymetry 212 2.8 Aural Choreography: precarious architectures 216 2.9 Aural Choreography: frames of field 236 2.10 SUPPLEMENT TO CHAPTER 2 248 2.10.1 An experiment with Vito Acconci’s Association Area 248 2.10.2 Drawing earlines 251 2.10.3 Earlines drawing: Acoustic Shadow Walking 270 2.10.4 Earlines drawing: white shadow 274 2.10.5 Ear Bodies Workshops: walking drawing 278 CODA: Floored and Cornered 283 TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR ACCOMPANYING PORTFOLIO 291 BIBLIOGRAPHY 292 4 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to warmly thank both of my supervisors P.A. Skantze and Joe Kelleher. P.A. Skantze has been inspiring and generous in her support, backing, understanding of many aspects concerning not only the writing and the discussion of issues relating to my thesis and research, but also for her empathy and friendly advice, warmth and listening. I am grateful to Joe Kelleher who has considerably and consistently and specifically helped me to clarify my research path, facilitated my writing and its structuring, as well as all his general and very useful and practical advice. I also want to offer many thanks to Patrick Curry, for all of his enlightening advice, conversations and his patient and generous help in reading a draft of this thesis. Finally I would like to thank my partner Barry Davis for all his untiring support, encouragement, comprehensive help and patience. 5 To my father Vitantonio Manco (11.01.1931 - 24.12.2015) and my mother Antonia D’Aprile, passing her time in the sole company of an empty resounding cistern. 6 INTRODUCTION Some people love to divide and classify, while others are bridge-makers weaving relations that turn a divide into a living contrast, one whose power is to affect, to produce thinking and feeling. But bridge-making is a situated practice. Isabelle Stengers2 Our bodies are already in tune with acoustic space as a result of the act of listening, no matter what our level of acoustic awareness. It is this awareness which I seek to investigate, which is of a sonic and constantly auditory dynamic nature. I write from the position of an artist and lecturer/facilitator, seeing my discoveries of tools for sound and listening in performance practice as a correction of both one-dimensional sound studies and a way to address unawakened ears in performance. In my articulation about the experiencing of sound, I discuss the relation to the distinctiveness of location, and particular structures of relation, those of sound and architectural spaces, a relation between hearers in a shared space, and relations between a particular hearer and one’s own auditory experience. I argue that performance, which is always theatre – in the sense of being a ‘watching place’ (or a ‘place for watching’) from its Greek etymology theatron – is a hearing/listening place (or a place for hearing/listening), and is about many ‘auditory glances’: they are listening glances, where one also is surrounded by sound which is ‘staring’ at you.3 I open myself to the life of a theatre which began, begins, continues and ends with sound, constantly resounding in, through and with us. More than being interested in sound, it is the resounding of the many spatial, visual, social, somatic, 2 Stengers (2012), “Reclaiming,” p. 1. 3 Specifically, this brings us to a later discussion in this thesis on panpsychism in relation to sound and listening. 7 performative, environmental relationships through sound which I explore. It is through sound that I am interested in finding, uncovering and realising the visual medium and performance. It is in my consideration of sound in its ecologies in performance that I realise a constant embodied relation to it, never separated from the body as site and site as body. My body’s daily performing with the performance of sound, makes me realise my attempt to frame its overwhelming experience, in an economy of a receiving (as an openness) and a useful insight for a performance art. I argue against a still unarticulated and under-explored corporeal basis and corporeal thinking about audition, and I make aware this in movement and performance practice. My methodology works towards an interrogation of sound and listening within a corporeal understanding of site and sound in performance art and live art. Unfolding through explorations of corporeal thinking and of corporeal experience of sound, my questioning is present where the body thinks, space thinks and sound thinks. Audition is always corporeal, a far more complex and sophisticated experience than any innovative form and application of technology. I introduce technology as an integral part in the problematics of relationality, in order to complicate a current over-reliant relationship to it, which, in my view, it is frequently seen as salvific panacea to the problems of interaction in art. Specifically, in the various and contemporary interpretations of sensorial investment with location and to sonic experience in general, the desire to encapsulate and to reduce sound to either a technological (mediated) or purist (un-mediated) conception betrays a residual dualistic legacy. It is in this specific, critical and non-dualistic respect that I position an interdisciplinary and personal corporeal move to sound within performance studies – and with a particular focus on performance/live art – where I explore this complexity in and for performance.