Undesigning sound: AdriftPM’sPortable Soundscapes

Abstract

In July 2015, Adrift Performance Makers developed the project Portable Soundscapes: An Acoustic Travelogue, travelling down from Portsmouth, UK, to Thessaloniki, Greece, through Paris, Munich, Zagreb, and Belgrade. Carrying pre-recorded Southsea sound clips in their luggage, they listened out for unexpected voicings, misplaced soundtracks, fleeting sonic passersby. The project was curated as a series of online responses to inadvertent encounters with unfamiliar sonic environments. AdriftPM developed DIY strategies of aural dramaturgy, such as sonic conflations, sonic invitations, impromptu compositions, short poetic responses, and dubious definitions of sound terminology. This project revealed sound design as the enabling condition of a theatre, as the very organizing principle of a performative dramaturgy of listening, therefore effecting a reversal of conventional understandings of theatre sound design, which presuppose theatre as the context and sound as the designed intervention. This article seeks to lend an attentive ear to such unspoken assumptions. What if the complexity of the project posits the listener as both the deviser of the audio project and the spectator of the ongoing process that is the project? What happens when both audience and performance are diffused across a variety of media? What practices of listening, designing and archiving are required when Europe is your stage?

Dramaturging the I-voicer in A Voice Is. A Voice Has. A Voice Does.: Methodologies of autobiophony

“…A key component of the dramaturgy is that not all available episodes are performed every time; depending on the occasion and circumstance, the number, order, and nature of the scenes to be included are determined on the day of the performance. A short selection of such episodes was integrated in scholarly talks and conferences (for example, Thomaidis 2015bThomaidis , 2016 before the first full-length version was used as the introductory lecture for my studio modules at the University of Exeter (Thomaidis 2017a). The piece has also been performed as a guest seminar invited by universities or drama schools (for example, at the Norwegian Theatre Academy in 2018 and the University of Portsmouth in 2019).…”