![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/16\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/17\/2017\/09\/Photo-1-AusderHelle.jpg?resize=436%2C323&ssl=1\")
Circuit du Th\u00e9\u00e2tre Festival Amsterdam 1989. \u00a9 Courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Inspired by recent productions in theatre, dance, music-theatre and the sonic arts, as well as by the increasing scholarly attention given to an acoustic\/sonic turn<\/em> in recent years[1]<\/sup><\/a>\u2014closely linked as well to the growth in scenographic, acoulogical and design studies\u2014this special issue of Critical Stages<\/em> focuses on the sonification\/musicalization of the stage environment, on the Ortsklang <\/em>or \u201caural choreography\u201d imbued in spaces and sites, on voices and echoes, mirroring generative sonic and corporeal processes, theatre auralities, testimonials and recitals, tangible and audible interfaces, digital performances and sound design.<\/p>\n Dramatic and fictional texts appear too, as espaces musicaux, <\/em>and the rush of the heard, of the real world sound, is drawn and drawing closer. Sometimes, the frequencies of imagination, as Pieter Verstraete has argued, can cause auditory distress in the ear-witnesses of our world.[2]<\/sup><\/a> This we may not be able to avoid.<\/p>\n All myths (including the one about Echo) are changing of course, yet being alive<\/em>, as anthropologist Tim Ingold reminds us,[3]<\/sup><\/a> is a matter of realizing how we move and change, and how we are always ensounded moving through the world, which is also a world of sonorities and auditory spaces (and of enforced silences, as one writer from the borderlands points out, referring to the violent socio-political realities that are ours).<\/p>\n Sound is thus not (only) even an object of knowledge but a main medium of our perceptions, and sometimes of our survival. We close our ears, if only we could, at our peril. The attention to sound in performance, I suggest, is most welcome since we are again perhaps required to listen more carefully to fabrications and authenticities, the cooked and the raw in the ever expanding technologized, mediated noisy realms of life in the anthropocene era of relations and mash-ups, dub versions and glitches, faultlines and crashes.<\/p>\n Looking at a widening arena of composed theatre as well as interactive and sonic installation art, choreographic and kinetic objects and performance apparatuses, for this edition, I tried to encourage vigorous debate on emerging concepts of rhythmic spaces, resonant dramaturgies, audiophonic scenographies, vibrational theatres and collective bodies\u2014multisensory atmospheres in performance. Immediately when the call for papers came out, a sound artist responded sending me the grainy photo (above) from Ger\u00e4usche aus der Helle,<\/em> an installation he created in 1989 inside a former atomic bomb shelter.<\/p>\n Atmospheres<\/a> are difficult to capture and explain\u2014and the artist did not comment on the event except briefly declaring it a \u201ctheatre\/movement piece,\u201d with its immersive \u201cplayground divided in three sections from bottom to knee, from knee to middle and from middle to head, whereas the horizontal plane consisted of 8 to 9 perspex columns prepared with electronic devices\u2014both senders and receivers\u2014which triggered the sounds of a prepared tape recordings. . .\u201d. Dancers and audience moved around, there were vertical and horizontal frequencies, wave-tones of color\u2014and this was evocative enough for my imagination, especially when Andreas Maria Jacobs<\/a> added that the youtube link shows a \u201crather grainy and dirty registration of one of its enactments.\u201d<\/p>\nVideo<\/h6>\n