Headphone Verbatim Theatre: Methods, Histories, Genres, Theories

Abstract

Created in an American rehearsal room, exported to an English workshop, and developed in Australia, among other places, ‘headphone verbatim theatre’ – also called ‘recorded delivery’ – is a truly global genre. In this article Caroline Wake focuses on the work of two pioneering practitioners, Briton Alecky Blythe and Australian Roslyn Oades, in order to trace the form's history as well as its methods, genres, and theories. In doing so, she considers how audio technology has evolved over the past decade and how the display or disguise of headphones has affected both the production and reception of the form. She identifies three dominant genres of headphone verbatim theatre (the social crisis play, the social justice play, and the social portrait play, as well as three main performance modes – the epic, the naturalistic, and the mixed. The epic has been the most successful thus far, but the naturalistic and mixed modes are, in turn, begetting new ones. Finally, she suggests that in the same way that headphones have rejuvenated verbatim theatre, they might also reinvigorate the discourse on it by offering the opportunity to go beyond the politics of voice and visibility and to turn, instead, to listening. Caroline Wake is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia at the University of New South Wales. Her research examines cultural responses to and representations of refugees and asylum-seekers as well as the role of testimony in law, performance, and visual culture. Her work has previously appeared in journals such as Text & Performance Quarterly, Modern Drama, and History & Memory. She is the co-editor, with Bryoni Trezise, of Visions and Revisions: Performance, Memory, Trauma (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013).

¿Qué cambiar en la didáctica de las enseñanzas artísticas en tiempos de pandemia?

“…Como el teatro verbatim, el headphone verbatim se basa en la grabación y posterior transcripción de entrevistas realizadas con personas corrientes, hechas en el contexto de la investigación de un problema o evento (Wake 2013). Los dramaturgos headphone tienen que organizar las grabaciones en forma de obra de teatro, pero no es necesaria la transcripción.…”

The Politics and Poetics of Listening: Attending Headphone Verbatim Theatre in Post-Cronulla Australia

“…34 We also meet a middle-aged couple, whose love is such that he still buys her flowers: 'the other day', he says; 'the other month', she says simultaneously (8). For others, love is less about a person and more about an activity such as surfing -'It's like being in the fallopian tube again I reckon' -or driving (13). One of the young men finds the sound of the bass literally heart-stopping -'It's true!'…”

“…12 These terms hint at how, as I have argued elsewhere, headphone verbatim tends to be interpreted either as an attempt at absolute authenticity or as an alienation effect. 13 However, more nuanced accounts recognize that alienation and authenticity are often working in tandem rather than opposition, meaning that verbatim theatre performs not so much authenticity as an 'aesthetic of authenticity'. 14 Of course, the aesthetics of authenticity vary from show to show, but in most headphone verbatim plays the actors play several characters across several identity categories.…”

Theatre arts in UK city of culture evaluation practices: the case for headphone verbatim

“…The above passage by theatre scholar Derek Paget has been welcomed by academics and practitioners (Anderson and Wilkinson, 2007; Wake, 2010; Taylor, 2011) as one of the earliest working definitions of verbatim theatre as a theatre arts practice. Over time, verbatim theatre has adapted to also include the practices of headphone verbatim (Wake, 2013, p. 321) as a sub-genre. This term describes a method of rehearsal and performance different to the heritage transcribe-and-act version of presentation.…”