Abstract
Reviewed by: Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves by George Home-Cook Peter Wood Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves. By George Home-Cook. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Cloth $99.00, Paper $34.99. 229 pages. In Theatre and Aural Attention, George Home-Cook argues that listening to the sound(s) of theatre is a dynamic activity that demands attention, and that to attend as a listening subject is a fully embodied experience that โrequires effort,โ regardless of oneโs physical stillness (3). Each of his four chapters highlights what he sees as a โcore aural phenomenaโ in the theatre: โnoise, designed sound, silence, and atmosphereโ (3). In particular, Home-Cook draws from and expands upon work done on theatrical sound by Ross Brown; perception, sound, and theatre by Tim Ingold; and P. Sven Arvidsonโs scholarship on attention. His case studies include radio plays by Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter and shows by Robert Lapage, Complicite, Romeo Castellucci, and Sound & Fury. Arriving in the midst of contemporary theatreโs increasing focus on sound design, this book is timely and raises a number of challenges to the way noise, silence, sound, sight, and hearing are often framed as distinct experiences. In chapter 1, โPaying Attention to (Theatre) Noise,โ Home-Cook lays the groundwork for his use of phenomenology and his contention that clarifying what [End Page 134] we mean by โattentionโ is as important as clarifying what we mean by noise or sound (or really any perceptual experience). Arguing against a binary distinction between meaningless or distracting noise and meaningful or designed sound, Home-Cook examines two instances of cell phones interrupting a performance and how, in one case, his attention blended the sound into the attentional theme of the designed sound (while the other was just as distracting as one might expect). In chapter 2, โPaying Attention to Designed Sound,โ Home-Cook explores designed sound in Samuel Beckettโs radio play All that Fall as well as a number of theatre productions that manipulate attention and spatial awareness of sound. Acentral conceit in this chapter is that listening and seeing are not inherently separate processes. By attending to the ways in which visual and aural systems are dynamically experienced, Home-Cook posits that theatre scholars can better understand how we experience theatre as embodied subjects rather than spectators or listeners. Taking up the argument that silence is never simply silent, chapter 3, โSounding Silence,โ explores how silence is always a contextual experience. Here, Home-Cook contends that silence is often more than โmere soundlessness,โ but is instead โmanifestly perceived as a thing in itselfโ (110). Focusing on the listening experience of two radio plays (Samuel Beckettโs Embers and Harold Pinterโs A Slight Ache), as well as a production of Sound & Furyโs Kursk, the author demonstrates how silence can take on an almost material presence and not simply be marked as an absence of sounds. In the closing chapter, โSensing Atmospheres,โ Home-Cook challenges the limitations of soundscape as a metaphor for experiencing complex sets of designed sounds. He argues that the term implies a too-simplistic phenomenological experience and one that is often considered passive, even withโand perhaps because ofโits association with the terms โimmersiveโ and โimmersion.โ Drawing especially on Tim Ingoldโs notion of sound as far more analogous to experiencing weather and wind than the termโs parallel with looking at a landscape, Home-Cook returns to his experiences attending Sound & Furyโs Kursk in order to demonstrate that the atmosphere of a production is not passively experienced but is โgenerated, maintained, and mutated through the intersubjective enactments of embodied attendingโ (163). Throughout the book Home-Cook uses a phenomenological methodology to closely examine his own listening attention to a variety of productions. He admits that this โparticular mode of reception-as-perceptionโ is โunequivocally extra- ordinary,โ and that these different case studies present a kind of assemblage of โdifferent experiences . . . hewn from a range of theatrical events woven together with the same thread in mind, namely the act of listening as attentionโ (19โ20). While such a method has its limitations, Home-Cookโs skillful, evocative, and detailed descriptions of his experiences...
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