Tuning In/Out: Auditory participation in contemporary music and theatre performances

Abstract

By focusing on contemporary music and theatre, we will analyse whether and how auditory participation within a performance can be conceptualized. We do not define auditory participation as playing music -- as in an ethno-musicological approach -- or as acting as a performer, but as participation through the act of auditory perception, as the feeling of being particularly involved through what is being heard. The analysis will retrace our own participatory experiences in several performances and will emphasise how contemporary music and theatre performances can evoke, or even provoke, strong feelings of participation through the specific auditory modes these performances establish. Regarding Forced Entertainment's And on the Thousandth Night…, Michel Pisaro's space: for audience and Stimuline by Lynn Pook and Julien Clauss, we will consider our experience as spectators, listeners and participants of the performances and point out certain characteristics of auditory participation. The various and exemplary auditory modes will be distinguished and determined in the paper as forms of focused listening, spatially diffused hearing, harking, collective listening and body listening. It becomes clear that there are many possible constellations and intensities in which participation can take place or can be motivated in a performance. Furthermore, we will question the limits of participatory experience and analyse the connection of certain auditory modes to feelings of isolation and exclusion or immersion. Concluding, we assume that the experience of auditory participation is somehow linked to the potential of choice, sensual withdrawal, mobility and distance, as well as inattention.