Text—Emotion—Video: The Poetics of Jennifer Crandall’s Documentary Cycle Whitman, Alabama

Abstract

This book explores the orality/aurality of theatre performance and in accord with its subject -- theatrical sound as an intermedial, fluid, and multi-faceted phenomenon -- necessarily adopts a multidisciplinary approach. Making the case that the historical avant-garde initiated a new, hybridized concept of the arts that has become a hallmark of the dramaturgy and performance style of postdramatic theatre, it discusses contemporary theatricality in light of the principles and methods of sound poetry, painting, and music. Its focus is primarily on a specific dramaturgy of sound that, rather than helping to reveal the plot of a literary text, reads/writes another type of text by the temporal and spatial disposition of oral acts and aural objects as elements of performance. These elements include both voice -- not only a carrier of speech but also an emotional, pulsional, gestural expression in excess of it -- and sound in general -- not only supporting music or incidental noise but also an autonomous stage building material. A dramaturgy of sound that tells its own “plot” through its own semiosis has become constitutive of a postdramatic theatre that places more emphasis on performance, mise en scène, and the audio-visual architecture of the stage than it does on dramatic text. Its daring revision of the referentiality of the theatrical sign comes as a consequence of the experiments led by Italian and Russian Futurists, Dadaists, Expressionists, and other avant-gardes. Assessing their works in relation to sound, this book offers abundant evidence of this development and indicates the inevitable emergence of a twofold, oral/aural dramaturgy dealing simultaneously with the corporeal, vocal gesture and incantation in performance (explored by Antonin Artaud, Roland Barthes, and Jean-François Lyotard) and abstract/concrete sound in the “theatre of totality” (explored by Wassily Kandinsky, the Bauhaus theatre, and Robert Wilson). At the same time the book reveals the significance of the conceptual and practical links of our contemporary theatre with historical avant-garde sources, connections that are reflected in the current discourse on “scenic dynamic,” “performative turn,” “musicalization,” and “auditory semiotics.” Key words: the dramaturgy of sound, orality/aurality of theatre, sound poetry, onomatopoeia, iconicity, words-in-freedom (parole in libertà), beyonsense language (zaum), historical avant-garde, Italian Futurism, synthetic theatre, Russian Cubo-Futurism, Dadaism, Expressionism, Bauhaus, musicalization of theatre, performativity, and postdramatic theatre.