{"id":991,"date":"2020-10-25T09:21:09","date_gmt":"2020-10-25T09:21:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/21\/?page_id=991"},"modified":"2020-10-25T09:26:20","modified_gmt":"2020-10-25T09:26:20","slug":"aural-oral-dramaturgies","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/21\/aural-oral-dramaturgies\/","title":{"rendered":"Aural\/Oral Dramaturgies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Call for Papers & Essays<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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Guest Editors:\u00a0Du\u0161ka Radosavljevi\u0107<\/strong>\u00a0and\u00a0Flora Pitrolo<\/strong><\/em>
December 2021 (#24)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recent decades have seen an increased interest of theatre-makers in speech and sound as a starting point for making theatre and performance. This trend could be traced back to verbatim theatre of the early 2000s, evolving out of the political theatre experiments of Anna Deavere Smith in the United States, Tricycle in London, Teatr.doc in Moscow and eventually capturing the imagination of dance companies such as DV8. Canadian Robert Lepage\u2019s thematic interest in voice was also explicitly explored in his nine-hour ensemble piece Lipsynch<\/em> (2008). In 2015, Simon McBurney of Complicite made two productions in which the central medium of storytelling was (amplified) sound: Beware of Pity<\/em> and The Encounter<\/em>. Forms of theatre often qualified as immersive, such as the work of Lundahl & Seitl, Silvia Mercuriali and, selectively, Rimini Protokoll is often work that uses sound as an integral part of its dramaturgy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the UK a form of theatre known as \u2018gig theatre\u2019 has evolved over the years mostly on the festival circuit such as Latitude and Edinburgh Fringe, eventually entering mainstream theatre (Kate Tempest at the Royal Court) and the West End (Arinze Kene\u2019s Misty<\/em> 2018). That the use of rock iconography on the theatre stage is not a UK-specific phenomenon can also be detected in the works of Aris Biniaris, Oliver Frljic, Lola Arias and Yury Butusov in their respective cultural contexts, while in the United States the work of Lin Manuel Miranda used hip hop to challenge and change the form of the Broadway musical. For this special issue, we perceive these parallel trends as a paradigm shift.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to the various moves towards the sonic mentioned above, Covid-19 has brought about an increased focus on born-digital theatre and performance, much of which utilises the aural dimension. In amongst numerous, yet uncatalogued others, Stacy Makishi\u2019s The Promise<\/em> at the Yard Online and Yannick Trapman-O\u2019Brien\u2019s Telelibrary<\/em> used telephone technology to create performances during the lockdown and Toronto-based Dopolavoro Teatrale\u2019s Daniele Bartolini set up an entire festival of telephone performances Theatre-on-Call in April 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This investigation takes place at an interdisciplinary intersection between theatre and performance, dramaturgy, media studies, and theoretical and practical studies of sound and voice, and is also informed by insights from musicology, museology, anthropology and digital humanities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As editors of this special issue, we believe that the increased focus on sound as an integral dramaturgical element in (digital and non-digital) theatre and performance-making methodologies also requires a reconsideration of relevant research methodologies deployed in studying these works. As part of our own research shared on www.auralia.space<\/a> we have pioneered a number of new methods, including academic dialogic improvisation, the format of \u2018oral introductions\u2019 to academic books and the Zoom-generated \u2018making-of documentary\u2019. Additionally as part of this special issue we would like to continue exploring the process of methodological and presentational innovation in academic publishing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We therefore invite proposals of \u2018academic artefacts\u2019 combining or substituting the medium of the written word with the affordances of the digital domain \u2013 audio-visual recordings, coded submissions, and\/or other formal experiments in response to the following topics:<\/p>\n\n\n\n