{"id":532,"date":"2021-12-08T21:44:50","date_gmt":"2021-12-08T21:44:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/?p=532"},"modified":"2021-12-20T19:43:01","modified_gmt":"2021-12-20T19:43:01","slug":"strategies-in-the-underheard-listening-in-to-new-compositional-queer-performance-making","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/strategies-in-the-underheard-listening-in-to-new-compositional-queer-performance-making\/","title":{"rendered":"Strategies in The Underhe(a)rd: Listening in to New Compositional Queer Performance-making"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Peta Murray<\/strong>*<\/a>, Alyson Campbell<\/strong>**<\/a> and Meta Cohen<\/strong>***<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

In Sonic Agency<\/font> (2019), Brandon LaBelle draws on the thinking of both Judith Butler (1990) and Sara Ahmed (2006) to put forward an argument for queering the acoustic, or \u201cgiving accent to the ways in which acts of compositioning assist in processes of (re)orientation that may additionally upset the dominant tonality of a given place\u201d (190). Here we draw on LaBelle\u2019s work to think into sonic elements of Practice as Research in a new work of music theatre on queerness and pandemics, HERD<\/font>. Through a speculative essaimblage sub-titled: \u201cFantasia on A Debrief We Have Yet to Have,\u201d we draw out the underherd and the underheard through the interplay of individual and collective experience and propose an emergent glossary of terms for queer dramaturgy. This, we propose, articulates nascent methodologies for queer performance-making, while providing a touchpoint for thinking through how we negotiate queerness and sound in our work, and in our methods of collaboration.

Keywords:<\/strong> Queerness, pandemics, musical thinking, dramaturgy, music theatre, collaboration, composition, sound, queer methods<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How to Approach this Article<\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

This article is peppered with lexical interventions. Many pre-date the HERD<\/em> project. Others have their genesis in different phases of our collaborative process, and are, in essence, purpose-built. To assist readers, we foreground a GLOSSARY of the pre-spoke, bespoke or we-yoked coinages that will be encountered herein.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pre-spoke neologisms appear as hyperlinks and\/or with references to connect them to an earlier source in which they have appeared. Many come from mmmmyCorona, a blogsite maintained by Murray over two years of serial lockdowns in the State of Victoria, Australia, where all three authors reside. See: https:\/\/mmmmycorona.wordpress.com\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bespoke words, referred to as uberneologisms for the sheer excess of them, arrived during the writing of this article and are denoted with an asterisk in the glossary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We-yoked terms appear as what we term hyper-bole-phenations. These are words in which prefixes, suffixes and other portman-towed parsings are tethered together with an over-abundance of hyphens to prompt fresh readings through the lens of prepositional thinking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GLOSSARY<\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

A<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

artfoolness:<\/a> mucking around with materials you like in a playful and unskilled way to make something pleasing to you and yours<\/p>\n\n\n\n

af-front: where public noise making meets the foremost part or surface of a thing <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

after-words: words following other words<\/p>\n\n\n\n

after-thoughts: thoughts following other thoughts<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(anti)-musical: a genre-bending, relatively unknown variant of the stage musical, so-named for the purposes of a Masters by research project. The (anti)-musical as a work \u201cregularly promises, yet declines to deliver the traditional release and uplift of music and song\u201d (Murray, Things<\/em> 26)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

audicle<\/a>: <\/strong>a particle of sounds, disconnected from their sources, and entirely unique<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

B<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

bloggery<\/a>: any queer, deviant or sp\/rainbow-coloured form of blog-keeping<\/a> that departs from an accepted norm<\/p>\n\n\n\n

bruize<\/a>: <\/em>the hip colour of 2020, applicable to skies, skin, hearts and hopes<\/p>\n\n\n\n

C<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

co-herd-nerding*: collaborative research work conducted by members of our creative cohort so as to ensure that the making of HERD<\/em> is documented as a site of practice-based inquiry<\/p>\n\n\n\n

co-labberation*: an experimental approach to collaboration whereby a creative process itself becomes a locus of investigation or observation<\/p>\n\n\n\n

E<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

essaimblage<\/a>: an orthographically-fluid, non-binary portman-tow of essai and assemblage first (f)used in 2020. Elsewhere spelled essamblage and essa(y)mblage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

H<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

herdage*: a state of fluidly ushering things together before seeing them disperse again<\/p>\n\n\n\n

hyper-bole-phenation*: obvious, extravagant and intentional over-use of the hyphen to yoke words or parts of words into new compounds for particular effect<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

in-scribe*: to write into, as opposed to onto something<\/p>\n\n\n\n

K<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

kiltlessness*: a quality of nonchalant misshapenness or insouciant disorganisation that allows exposure of understandings that might otherwise remain concealed, erased or invisible<\/p>\n\n\n\n

M<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

mi-la-not\u00e9*: queerly flamboyant and musically inflected pronunciation of the proprietary name, Milanote, a software company based in Melbourne, Australia, whose eponymous project management design tool has been integral to this project<\/p>\n\n\n\n

P<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

paracademic: <\/em>either a parody of an academic, or one who works alongside rather than within the academy (Murray et al. 13)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

pla(r)tform: <\/a>site of unintentional, serendipitous moments of performance, visual, audio and live art that spontaneously occur when online platforms mix, meld, combust, distort, mess up and implode<\/p>\n\n\n\n

portman-towed*: punful play on the word, portmanteau, turning it from naming word into active neologistic practice whereby new words may be coined by blending sound and meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

quamaturgical*: queer dramaturgical<\/p>\n\n\n\n

quamaturgy*: a queered theory and\/or practice of dramatic composition<\/p>\n\n\n\n

q(u)antata<\/a>: a queer counternarrative of modest proportion composed of music for voices and instruments<\/p>\n\n\n\n

quarely: to behave in ways that flout normative ideas of sexuality and gender<\/p>\n\n\n\n

quavoodling*: queer doodling of a quaversome musical kind<\/p>\n\n\n\n

qubble:<\/a> see also qubbler and qubbling<\/p>\n\n\n\n

qubbler:<\/a> the queer person you invite to join you for qubbling<\/a> in your queer bubble or qubble<\/p>\n\n\n\n

queerelous: a queerly arch, camp or playful manner of inquiry or critique (Murray et al. 258); see also queerelously<\/a> (Murray, \u201cMmmmyCorona\u201d 809)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

queertet*: a company of queer and\/or gender nonconforming singers or musicans, or a genre-bending composition<\/p>\n\n\n\n

queerum*: a majority of queer-identifying or gender nonconforming members of a collective, or ensemble<\/p>\n\n\n\n

quire*: an informal, pop-up queer choir<\/p>\n\n\n\n

R<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

re-act*: an arbitrary division of a work for the purposes of responding, reflecting or otherwise re-actioning proceedings<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ro-coco-composition*: a musical style marked by elegance, charm, excessive or extravagant ornamentation<\/p>\n\n\n\n

S<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

salutary confinement<\/a>: Remaining contained and physically distanced for one\u2019s own wellbeing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

sociable dis-dancing<\/a>: The practice of dancing with others, despite being alone and\/or in the privacy of one\u2019s own home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

songwrighting: The construction of songs in a workpersonlike manner, with a focus on the manual and the material, as opposed to the lyrical or the melodic<\/p>\n\n\n\n

stucknexcesses*: an excess of standstills rendering progress impossible<\/p>\n\n\n\n

T<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

tendence*: any exaggerated inclination or leaning towards<\/p>\n\n\n\n

textract: <\/em>any fragment of textual or lyrical materiality made of verbiage of unknown origin (Murray, \u201cMmmmyCorona\u201d 806) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

texture-building*: playing with the relationship between sparseness and density in music<\/p>\n\n\n\n

trumpled<\/a>: weariness accompanied by a sense of defeat when confronted with the reality of LockDown 2: The Musical!!! (NOT!!!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

U<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

uberneologising*: an irresistible impulse to make up new words, even where existing words suffice, accompanied by the compulsion to make a bespoke glossary for each and every scholarly or creative work one undertakes. \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

uberneologism*: a new word made up under the above circumstances<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

V<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

verbandalism<\/a>: the pleasurable practice of putting a wrecking ball through words and smashing them to smithereens<\/p>\n\n\n\n

virtigo<\/a>: a sensation of profound exhaustion and loss of work-life balance associated with interacting on screens all day long with people you used to know as three-dimensional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

In Sonic Agency<\/em>, artist, writer and theorist Brandon LaBelle draws on the phenomenological thinking of both Judith Butler and Sara Ahmed to put forward an argument for queering the acoustic, or \u201cgiving accent to the ways in which acts of compositioning assist in processes of (re)orientation that may additionally upset the dominant tonality of a given place\u201d (190). We draw on LaBelle\u2019s work in thinking specifically about the sonic elements of our Practice as Research collaboration on a new work of music theatre on queerness and pandemics entitled HERD<\/em>. In this article, we deploy an array of performative modes and playful devices in an attempt to articulate the nascent methodologies we are finding that strike us as particularly queer and queering. In doing so, we have played with the rich territory of crossovers between (queer) herd and its homophone heard. Here LaBelle\u2019s idea that<\/p>\n\n\n\n

listening is often tuning us to the interplay of meaningful layers that constitute the world, bridging the seen and unseen, foreground and background, things and bodies . . . listening . . . draw(s) out the underheard <\/span>into greater volume.<\/p>161; our emphasis<\/span><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

has proved a touchpoint for thinking through how we negotiate queerness and sound in our work, and above all in our methods of collaboration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As such, in this article we build on this notion of the underheard in response to the invitation to contribute to methodological and presentational innovation in academic publishing. By adopting the form of a speculative essamblage <\/em>fancifully sub-sub-titled Fantasia on a Debrief We Have Yet to Have<\/em>, we offer a fictional expos\u00e9, in ten re-acts, regarding the making of HERD<\/em>. We outline particular queerings of collaborative methodologies through quamaturgical\u2014as in queer dramaturgical\u2014strategies including excess, uberneologising (see glossary), the revisiting and re-using of past work, queer autoethnography, queer musicking (Gray 133) and general queer doodling, henceforth quavoodling. In doing so, we hope to add a new perspective, or orientation, to the fields of queer dramaturgy and queer Practice as Research (Campbell and Farrier 83) while also crystallising some new lexical contributions towards that endeavour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Jane Murphy. HERD<\/em> logo, digital image, 2021. Photo: Used with permission<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Created by a collective of queer artists, and with playwright Lachlan Philpott\u2019s 21-year-old play Bison<\/em> undergirding initial explorations, HERD<\/em> sets forth to extend the original metaphor for the gay male herd by considering herding and herdlike behaviours, kinship, discrimination and isolation within a more diverse LGBTQIA+ community at large. Our intergenerational, all-queer creative team includes established artists Lachlan Philpott and Peta Murray (writers), Alyson Campbell (director\/dramaturg) and emerging artist Meta Cohen (composer\/dramaturg).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HERD<\/em> mobilises the underheard in the supposedly rousing heteronormative COVID rhetoric of \u201cwe are all in this together.\u201d In choosing to see both what unites us and where we diverge, HERD<\/em> asks, \u201cWhen and how do many voices become one? What happens when they do? And how do we tell communal narratives for an endlessly diverse group of people?\u201d We also wanted to know if invisible lines of queer kinship across time would be drawn between queer experiences of the AIDS epidemic and the COVID pandemic, without us naming either in any explicit kind of way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the time of writing, our project is entering a middle phase. Since its initiation in early 2020, the team has somehow\u2014miraculously\u2014given Melbourne\u2019s all but serial lockdowns, managed a creative development and the presentation of one public showing in St Kilda\u2019s Theatre Works before an actual living and breathing-through-masks audience on 25 April 2021. The rest of our collaboration has, by necessity, taken place by Zoom<\/em> and email. COVID permitting, we are working towards a world premiere production to take place in late 2022 at Theatre Works, with further performances anticipated in 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are, therefore, still at an early stage of the work and so documenting, within this article, processes that are very much in motion and formation. To this end, we offer snippets of work in progress, sharing unfinished or unrefined workings long before we would usually (if we ever would). This revelation of an underheard of our collaboration may itself be understood as a queering of academic methodology (which typically demands we write from an end point, almost as if there was no process). Articulation and refinement of the compositional strategies supporting such artfoolness requires slow work affording space for experimentation, iterative practices, feedback loops, dreaming, grant applications, report-writing, acquittals and, if and when circumstances permit, face-to-face, nose-to-tail debriefs. These last remain undone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We ask readers to receive this paper, then, as a dreamscaping of a post-Theatre Works Showcase debrief we should\u2014indeed, would\u2014have held months ago, had not illness, overload, deadlines, viral variants, lockdowns and other twenty-first-century incursions got in the way. Instead, in the ten purpose-built re-acts that constitute this paper, we shall endeavour to curate and interpose the traces of our queer dramaturgical and de-compositional thinking through sound, image and digital after-words and monological and dialogical after-thoughts. In doing so, we hope that what seems underhe(a)rd will be found to be quite audible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, we are at pains to illustrate our capacity to draw out the underherd along with the underheard through the interplay of individual and collective experience using such queer means as prepositional thinking, uberneologising and quavoodling. These approaches, we contend, expose fresh possibilities for developing a queer sociality within which, be it around the tables of Millner-Larsen\u2019s \u201cqueer commons\u201d (399) or within the thrum of queer \u201cswarms\u201d (Wilcox 4) new multi-modal methodologies as both generative processes and archival practices may emerge, along with a new language through which to rehearse them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

RE-ACT NUMBER ONE: FANTASIA ON A DEBRIEF WE DON\u2019T GET TO HAVE<\/em><\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

Kindly imagine that I am writing this in Studio 7 at the Victorian College of the Arts (University of Melbourne), on an unseasonably warm autumn day, sometime in May 2021. It was here, around a Yamaha grand piano, that composer-dramaturg Meta Cohen first worked with performers Maude Davey, Ibrahim Hala\u00e7o\u011flu, and Willow Sizer on a song called \u201cVultures\u201d back in March. And it was here, too, that we began to sense the value of quavoodling our emergent methodologies via a notation and mapping process, using an innovative Australian-made platform, Milanote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This adaptable and intuitive online space will go on to become both our playroom, a safe place for bumping skulls (Manning and Massumi viii), while also serving as a pla(r)tform for making exhibitions of ourselves, should the need arise. But we don\u2019t know any of this yet. We are far too focused on the novelty of being able to meet in real life to make something new.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meta has already set some actual words by playwright Lachlan Philpott as a sombre chorale, harrowing, yet beautiful. Lachlan, on this day, is actual too, as we gather in this generous room, complete with sprung floor, soundproofing and pianoforte. This is a novelty; for once, he is not being beamed in via computer screen from another sequestered part of the country, or, worse, from another hemisphere, as the voice of our lead vocalist on \u201cVultures,\u201d Ross Anderson-Doherty, will be, when he sings for\/with\/to\/us from Belfast in our digital-live take on pla(r)tform-based performance. But more on that anon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On this day, we are playing with sonic suspension. Meta wants to hear what will happen when phrases sung by our live performers, Ibrahim, Maude and Willow, are abandoned in the air; when words are left hanging, to dissolve and decay. Occasionally the writers, director and composer lend our voices to a \u201ccloud\u201d of dripping sound. Meta calls this texture-building.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Meta Cohen. Rough score for experimentation on Vultures. <\/em>2020<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
RE-ACT NUMBER TWO: THESE ARE JUST WORDS AND I\u2019M JUST MAKING THINGS UP (AN ASIDE)<\/em><\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n
PETA:  <\/td>Sound a tucket, if you will and let me step into an aside and out myself here, as current custodian of the metaphorical pen, wherein to introduce and enlarge upon some of the key concepts to be toyed with in this essaimblage. As a constant neologiser, recovering playwright and emerging paracademic a devotion to the notion of prepositional thinking (Rendle-Short 84) has become one of my preferred means of practising queerelously. Typically located in the field of creative writing, prepositional thinking affords a relational agility such that one need never settle or lodge in any fixed position. Things may remain slant, askew, ex-centric, endlessly off-kilter. This kiltlessness in turn supports a dramaturgical dexterity, allowing one to work the gaps and the angles, the hyphens, sub textualities and slippages of \u201cmeaning.\u201d

(PAUSE FOR EFFECT)

A second methodological fealty\/allegiance (BREATH) attachment\/dedication (BREATH) enthusiasm\/fervour, from the field of language-based arts inquiry goes beyond my fetish for the Thesaurus towards an all-but-obsessive practice of uberneologism, whereby I forge\u2014in all possible ways\u2014an excess of queer words and phrases expressive of new meanings specific to circumstance. My initial point of entry to this practice was thanks to COVID, and a daily work of devotional bloggery where I delivered a neologism a day for the duration of our salutary confinement. In our quibbling. With our vertigo.

(PAUSE FOR EFFECT)

Over 2020 and into 2021, this durational divertissement delivered stockpiles (PUN ALERT!) of fresh words that now feed other creative works and research outputs including Murray\u2019s COVIDICTIONARY<\/em> and Glossalalalarium Pandemiconium<\/em>. These non-traditional research outputs, such as that modelled in a collaborative sound-inflected work, Sonic Dystonic<\/em><\/a>, underscore a dedication to Practice as Research (Skains 82) and to other sites at the intersection of the creative arts and related un\/disciplines where socially-impactful critical inquiry may be conducted, while ways of being in, and with the multiplicities and complexities of the world are acknowledged, charted and problematised.<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
RE-ACT NUMBER THREE: QUEER TEMPORALITIES<\/em><\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

Our next discussion point, more principle than precept, might have been our shared commitment to revisiting and re-covering our early and\/or pre-existing works. This is a pushback against a disposable approach to theatre in Australia in which any new work is developed to death, has one premiere production and is seldom seen again. By re-turning to Philpott\u2019s work Bison<\/em>, and re-fashioning it for the realities of changing cultural moments, Campbell and Philpott\u2019s theatre company wreckedAllprods cultivates an ethos of resistance to this fetish for the new. Perhaps this recuperation of material that has not been exhausted, in the hands of an intergenerational group of collaborators, may also be read as a gesture of queer kinship? As Elizabeth Freeman has suggested of \u201cbelonging\u201d or \u201cbeing long\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

to want to belong, let us say, is to long to be bigger not only spatially, but also temporally, to \u201chold out\u201d a hand across time and touch the dead or those not born yet, to offer oneself beyond one\u2019s own time.<\/p>299<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Murray\u2019s take on this is her conscious choice to value-add so that any one source may become fodder for multiple projects. She sees this as both a contribution to the discourse of queer autoethnography wherein it becomes not just \u201ca bid to assemble queer spaces and the \u2018we\u2019 that needs and remembers them\u201d (Holman Jones and Harris 46), but an act of queer defiance by an ageing writer who managed to eke out a living as a professional theatre-maker for almost three decades. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But is there not also, plainly, a dramaturgical element of queer excess and polyphony in these makings as we voice and re-voice, re-voke and in-voke the same material in new guise? This time, the garb is music and song as our queerum of two writers, Philpott and Murray, and two dramaturgs, composer Cohen and director Campbell, set out to make what we pronounce a q(u)antata, well before we know what such a thing might be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the absence of a definition, or a debrief, and in the spirit of good scholarship, we might have described what happened next, taking our lead from Gray, as a process of queer musicking.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Queer musicking has grown out of a powerful history of independent, socially conscious media, and is founded in a DIY ethic, feminist ideology, queer transgressions, and trans theory. Queer musicians acknowledge change and fluidity as a given in the pursuit of social justice, and employ frameworks of intersectionality, multiplicity of identity, collaborative inquiry, interdependence, and non-hierarchalized (sic) modes of engagement in their musicking.<\/p>133<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Thus, a lone BISON<\/em> may make way for a collective HERD<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

RE-ACT NUMBER <\/em><\/strong>FOUR: WHEN WORDS FAILED US<\/em><\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

Music, like identity, is both performance and story, describes the social in the individual and the individual in the social, the mind in the body and the body in the mind; identity, like music, is a matter of both ethics and aesthetics.<\/p>Frith 110<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

As one of the most useful conjunctions in the English language, the word \u201cand\u201d thwarts the binaries of either\/or, inviting an accumulating, even hectic, plurality. Taking our cue from Frith, we might add that the collaborative creative process is material and mysterious and mutable and mundane and more. It is not trackable, so much as it is modular, stackable, with its elements coming into their own through conditions that favour playfulness and flexibility of re-arrangement and display. As noted above, the application Milanote<\/a> <\/sup>has become integral to our queer musicking process. Milanote is designed for creative collaboration in fields such as theatre and screen production, but we have come to rely on it for everything from the preparation of grant applications to a space for co-mapping work-in-progress to a means of disseminating backing tracks for singers to co-herd-nerding <\/em>this journal article for Critical Stages<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All this without ever being able to convene in the same room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Meta Cohen. Material and image on the HERD<\/em> Milanote<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Our Milanote platform\u2014or as we like to call it, the mi-la-not\u00e9\u2014<\/em>has become an archive of compositional strategies with its own evolving aesthetic. It houses genealogies of audicles and textracts in ways that allow makings to be traced and mapped, and processes of \u201ccompositional thinking\u201d to remain, if not explicit, then at least extant. It has become a proliferating anthology of incipience, arrayed through<\/em>, around<\/em>, between <\/em>and beside <\/em>imagery and commentary, scraps and snippets, fragments and inklings. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This, we propose, is a queered dramaturgy or quamaturgy, capable of describing, even while in-scribing the backstories of its own af-fronting matter. So that, even as words continue to desert and disappoint us, we are still able to catch something of the drift, the synchronicities, the jolts and paradoxes of a collective creative process. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

RE-ACT NUMBER FIVE: LET THE GAMES BEGIN<\/em><\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

Music plays. Stops. A bundle is passed from hand to hand. Whenever the music stops, a fresh layer of wrapping is removed. <\/em>Music resumes.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Dianne Toulson. Theatre Works HERD<\/em> showing, Digital Image used with permission, April 2021<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

For purposes of any such debrief, HERD<\/em> would have been defined as a modular work-in-progress, disposed through a range of units\u2014texts, variously arrayed as song and un\/song. It is a work for voices and in this too we worked quarely,<\/em> with three live performers on the floor in Melbourne, and a fourth in Belfast, delivering his part of the queertet in pre-recorded and post-mixed fragments. In the absence of a chorus, our professional artists were backed up by the writers and dramaturgs as a four-part quire.    <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For our public showing, we gave our textual and choral units names and arranged them in sequence: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Bruize”
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The Bias of Infection\u00a0
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Is This How It\u2019s Done (Disco)
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Tasty Monologue
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0“Vultures”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is an arbitrary way to array the compositions for display. Nothing need be read into it. In fact, in our debrief we might have observed that, as they are almost in alphabetical order, a randomising-instrument might serve just as well. There is no chronology, no storyline, no logic to HERD<\/em>; nor are there \u201ccharacters,\u201d per se. There is no concerted bid for sense-making, no hidden meaning to be unearthed, no uplifting message or public service announcement to be delivered. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

HERD <\/em>is, instead, a herding of textracts and audicles that somehow keep or are kept together, albeit briefly. The act of herding\u2014bringing\/keeping together\u2014is quamaturging, and while we do not yet know how the herding becomes the HERD<\/em>, we intend to find out through our further re-versioning into 2022 and beyond. Our emergent process engages with ideas of queer dramaturgy\u2019s exuberant \u201cmessiness\u201d (Campbell and Farrier 1), both in terms of form and boundaries between artistic roles and disciplines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile there is a pleasing cyclical form to this process not unlike the circle of a game of pass the parcel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Meta Cohen. Material and image on the HERD<\/em> Milanote. 2020<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
RE-ACT NUMBER SIX: RHAPSODY IN BLURGH: A RANT AS AN ASIDE<\/em><\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n
PETA:<\/td>Forgive me a further interjection, but dare I venture that such herdage also infers arrangements that give pleasure in brief and ineffable ways? They may be pleasing to the eye or ear, or through alternating momenta or through contrary motionswhose affect declines to be \u2018read\u2019 or decoded like a typical textual composition (Campbell 310).
In creative collaborations of yore (group devised, co-created and more), collaborators worked to nut out a trajectory for the work. A throughline might be narrative or thematic or didactic or stylistic; regardless it prescribed and proscribed edges of a field within which collaboration would take place. With HERD<\/em>, there are no such edges. In this expanded field, collaboration becomes co-labberation whereby co-making itself becomes a site of experimentation and research.
Songwrighting, such as it is, is neither composer-led, nor lyric-based, but phonic-meets-sonic. There is a blurring of boundaries and of roles, a porosity affording lateral passage of possibilities back and forth. Play and whimsy dissolve any sense that words are my department or music is M\u2019s. Rather, songs accrete, gathering mass and form around a word or idea that serves as with other life forms that accrete, as irritant or provocation.<\/td><\/tr>
META:<\/td>(ASIDE) Is This How It\u2019s Done?<\/a><\/td><\/tr>
PETA:<\/td>(BENEATH) And so what is underhe(a)rd becomes gradually audible. Textual and sonic remnants leave aural stains and written traces of process across surfaces of the digital archive, to be re-herd and re-herded in any order. Perhaps these impressions constitute a truer, queerer record of the vagaries and happenstance of creative process, while also serving as a response to the inadequacies of language to speak to, <\/em>or capture pre-scrivenings and pre-soundings, makings and becomings? If so, this is where prepositional thinking will come into its own. It allows us to consider compositional dramaturgies of between-ness so that we need not seek to synthesise, distil or to unite.
Nor need we look for resonances, crossovers or touchpoints between MmmmyCorona<\/em> and Bison<\/em>, even if they are there to be found in attuning to queer temporalities, a shared sense of world-weariness, or a plethora of animal metaphors. Instead, through a flipped, playful process that is a kind of dramaturgy-of-the-moment\u2014we are led by dispositions of words and sounds as morphemes, collisions of vowels and consonance on the ear, certain comportments of pausings and phrasings in the mouth and certain pleasures in and of the textual (Barthes 3), so that a queered erotics of practice gives rise to compositional possibilities that would never have arisen had we started with idea or gesture, concept or story.<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
RE-ACT NUMBER SEVEN: A CASE STUDY, WITH KEYBOARD ACCOMPANIMENT<\/em><\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

Let us revisit all this in the concrete setting of one of the songs, \u201cBruize.\u201d This ro-coco-composition exemplifies an accretion process in the way it gathers substance, ornamenting and elaborating itself around a single nonsensical neologism towards profuse and abandoned tonal dynamics that carry what we find ourselves striving to express.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The notion of verbiage as overabundance or superfluity might have been deployed here to describe how a word soup was Murray\u2019s first lyrical offering to the composer. A word soup is a chunky broth of potentially settable clumps of wordings and phrases. Seeing words not as units of language for carrying meaning but as phonological packets filled with dissonances and essences allows for malformed\/preformed\/deformed inklings of felt experience to drip through. The making of a word soup, composed of random extractions of words and phrases from Murray\u2019s bloggery becomes one such gesture. Then, as the next quamaturgical stage, Campbell and Cohen arrange and gift these back as chunks-within-chunks served up as pleasing or curious or otherwise appealing to them. Hearing these aloud, in a kind of call-and-response or antiphonal manner, delivers further layers of possibility as certain strains and refrains emerge or converge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was via this method that we first he(a)rd, through the action of passing words back and forth, repeated reference to tensions between actual and virtual, or online and real lives. We also he(a)rd insistent but inadequate attempts to account for or translate some kind of sense of what each of us was experiencing as an instability, or doughiness of time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We he(a)rd inadequacies and failures of language to speak to so-called unprecedented experiences of pandemic. Certain neologisms\u2014for instance, sociable dis-dancing\u2014pointed to a further strand specific to queer experience under lockdown. And a completed blogpost in which Murray had coined and elaborated upon the nature of bruize as the look of 2020 pointed to a song in its own right. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These observations delivered leaping off points for the next experimental phase: a de-compositional quavoodling. <\/em>For Murray as wordsmith, this meant slicing and dicing chunked text into lyrics with no obligation to meet any metrical or rhythmic constraints or conventions of versification. Cohen\u2019s sonic bent was to explore text that was rhythmic or musical in some way, yet not constrained to conventional patterns or consistent metre. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

META:<\/td>(ASIDE) Here is an early idea that formed the basis for the phrase \u201cthis year is all about.\u201d<\/a><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Liberation from prosody or scansion, syllabic accentuation or lack of it, caesura or pause, saw Murray soon stray beyond notions of free verse and familiar patterns of utterance to play with language in all its sensuous plasticity. Cohen, meanwhile, is conducting musical experiments, some on Murray\u2019s untuned upright piano and others on an unassuming MIDI keyboard. The addition of sonic effects with vocal effects pedals and loopers is captured alongside an almost synaesthetic approach to composition via quavoodling visual maps, audicles and sketches with pen on paper. This visual scoring practice\u2014which takes place in the lineage of composers such as Cage and Ligeti\u2019s use of graphic musical notation\u2014allows Meta to explore and share musical and visual shapes poetically. This process gives vibrancy to Cohen\u2019s approach to dramaturgical practice in not being bound to defined notes or a stave and in allowing for an attitude of musical openness to remain inclusive and welcoming of collaborator input.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RE-ACT NUMBER EIGHT: WAXING LYRICAL AND ASIDE<\/em><\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n
PETA:<\/td>(ASIDE AGAIN) In writing this fictional debrief up<\/em>, down <\/em>and out<\/em>, do we observe these flips in practice? Do we discuss what it means to find Meta working as I might as a writer, building structural ideograms from lines and shapes that bear a resemblance to written words and sentences? Is it observed that I am working with phonetics, from and within sound?<\/td><\/tr>
META:<\/td>Yes\u2014and there was a mutual curiosity, I think, in the permission to meddle in each other\u2019s artforms. I suggest that there was something queerly hybrid (Freeman 305) in the decision to work this way: it disrupted rigid boundaries between text-writing and music-writing, and perhaps also allowed us to re-imagine our artistic identities.<\/td><\/tr>
PETA:<\/td>Is it noteworthy that assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia and other poetic techniques have come to the fore, allowing me to exercise or exorcise a musicality and euphony a playwright rarely gets to indulge? Even one with a love of the lexical? A tendencefor the taxonomical? A bias towards the cunning lingual? A weakness for the rhetorical? A leaning to the terminological? A hankering for verbandalism? A yen for the idiomatic, a passion for phraseology? For yes, I am a wanton for wordage!<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Meta Cohen.  Material and image on the HERD<\/em> Milanote <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

And so it is that \u201cBruize: A Rhapsody in Blurgh\u201d accretes itself around a neologism from a blogpost. Neither music-driven nor text-led, it arrives via queer acts of passing-between. Each takes a phrase or a word and does things with and to it, before passing it back to the other. There is a playfulness in this, like a game of cat\u2019s cradle, defined by Dictionary.com as: \u201ca children\u2019s game in which two players alternately stretch a looped string over their fingers in such a way as to produce different designs.\u201d At the same time, there is talk of music and of words, feelings, influences, forms. There is speculation about what it might look like to queer the cantata. Is this how it\u2019s done? Milanote enables these processes of bartering and exchange. Songs and sounds are played at one another. Spaces appear and remain open for new lyrics in later blocks if or when the song asks for them. For, as a word like verbandalism suggests with its mashing together of ideas of the verbal, the vandal and the abandoned, there is shared joy in putting a wrecking ball through words <\/sup>while attending to what voices may or may not want to do with, and in their dust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

META:<\/td>[LINK<\/a>] This is another early setting made using Murray\u2019s words.<\/td><\/tr>
PETA:<\/td>This song asked for more and more voiced and plosive conso-dissonance. To allow this it is detonated and re-constructed in response to Cohen\u2019s sonic offers.<\/td><\/tr>
META:<\/td>These include an exploration of the idea of bruising notes through sighing glissandos, the use of quartertones and experiments with stacked diminished chords moving in parallel in the choir parts. These prompted me to consider relationships between compositional choices and convention, opening further provocations: how might the song keep delivering us to places we have no expectation of visiting, and how might we go about disrupting this expectation? The process allowed us to think both compositionally and dramaturgically.<\/td><\/tr>
PETA:  <\/td>It also amplifies our insight into the inability of any singular genre to hold the immensity of what the song is attempting to express\u2014the toll of a year, or indeed, of an era. <\/td><\/tr>
META:<\/td>Yes\u2014the song\u2019s inability to contain itself to one mode became its dramaturgical drive.<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Only now does it dawn on us that all this toying with form and genre is not mere subversion for subversion\u2019s sake but, rather, a dialogue with convention. This song asked us to play with the act of listening itself so as to interrogate how a heteronormative ear might want it to take us somewhere and how a queer composition might decline to do so. Through departures from parody and satire of beloved music theatre and operatic diva expectations and other guilty pleasures in Gilbert and Sullivan, Sondheim and beyond\u2014Juliette Noureddine, Dresden Dolls, Max Richter\u2014we pushed this bruiz-\u00e8d song beyond camp into the political realm of \u201cthe (anti)-musical\u201d (Murray 24) in its disruption of musical rules. It is worth nothing that, rather than merely a complete refusal to comply, this approach relies on establishing conventions in order to depart from\u2014and unwind\u2014them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The resultant song is wracked with instabilities, multiple modes, falsities and faux, excess to the point of asphyxia, beauty that is ugliness, failures of mastery (Halberstam 11) and more. All of this is mirrored in the wordage, with its excesses and stucknexcesses, its chaos and incoherence, and an all but unsingable coda that re-dresses any Model of a Modern Major General as a Drag Artiste on Speed so that by the time we reach the final finale after a seemingly endless series of endings, it is with a question for the listener: how on earth did we end up here?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

META:<\/td>[LINK<\/a>]. How on earth did we end up here?<\/em> (Click to listen to the current iteration of \u201cBruize\u201d).<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
RE-ACT NUMBER NINE: WE FLIRT THROUGH DOUBLE-GLAZING<\/em><\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

When we presented our one-off showing at Melbourne\u2019s Theatre Works, we made the considered choice to share fragments only and were at pains to emphasise that the sequencing of the extracts as song-text-musical interlude-text-song was arbitrary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We wanted to find out how our exploration of the resonances between AIDS and COVID landed, particularly with queer audience members; we wanted to know if listeners could themselves hear the underhe(a)rd, the under-spoken, the over-looked parallels between times and worlds and experiences of stigma, loneliness and loss when bodies, fearful of infection, are sent back to their rooms to take a long hard look at themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We counselled ourselves that we had no obligation to polish the work; we wanted to share and show our workings and invite an audience to peer into the innards of the beast. And peer they did, as, in one further flip, we maker-performers occupied a perspex booth\u2014one of several terrarium-like tanks built to house audiences at Theatre Works in the name of a COVID-safe theatrical experience. Onlookers remained safely dis-danced in the open space that would otherwise have been declared a stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Dianne Toulson. <\/em>Theatre Works HERD<\/em> showing. Digital Image used with permission, April 2021<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The showing began with \u201cBruize\u201d which saw Willow Sizer deliver a melodic meltdown of <\/sup><\/em>trumpled <\/u><\/em>proportions. In its ambition to disport, only to discard what LaBelle has called \u201cthe illegible and the unrecognizable\u201d (275) it attempts to push at and to extend upon what is counted as identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Bias of Infection, Murray\u2019s trialogue, was next. This is a kind of spoken word canon, in themes and variations. Is This How It\u2019s Done provided a musical bridge to Maude Davey\u2019s delivery of Philpott\u2019s Tasty monologue. And we closed\u2014or more accurately suspended\u2014the showing with \u201cVultures,\u201d a song that emerged through yet another revisiting and reimaging of Philpott\u2019s play Bison<\/em>. With the repeated refrain \u201cEach day one of us will drop,\u201d its resonance seemed only to emphasise the pain of the physical absence of Ross Anderson-Doherty, along with so many others across time and space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RE-ACT TEN: CODA<\/em><\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

In this debrief-as-essaimblage we began with Brandon LaBelle\u2019s call to reconsider the potential of listening and sonic practices as \u201csocial acoustics,\u201d capable of housing \u201creflections on the distribution of the heard and the underheard, the reverberant and the withdrawn, materiality and energy\u201d (272). We dipped our lids to Doty in a bid to make both dramaturgical and musically theatrical accompaniments \u201cperfectly queer\u201d (1). Finally, we sought mixed and multi-methodological means to sound, or more accurately, to resound queerelously and in the name of scholarship \u201can alternative framework for thinking about the sharing of research, one that poses more questions than answers, one that privileges our capacity to wonder over our need to know\u201d (Taylor, Murray and Sempert n. pag.).  Soundings and re-soundings of this kind have been and will remain an integral part of HERD<\/em>\u2019s dramaturgy beyond our now retro-debriefed development phase through to further iterations for public presentation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through adaptive methodologies and innovative approaches to junctions between theatre and performance, Practice as Research, queer musicking, lyric and language-based methods of inquiry, we generate possibilities for compositional thinking as a queer herd. Such a quamaturgy emboldens us to craft new forms for creating \u201ccollective and experimental socialities\u201d (LaBelle, 272) while underscoring a politics of listening as a queer social act.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Acknowledgments: <\/strong>The authors wish to thank writer Lachlan Philpott and performers Ross Anderson-Doherty, Maude Davey, Ibrahim Hala\u00e7o\u011flu and Willow Sizer for their participation in the development phase of this project which has been supported by Theatre Works, Creative Victoria, RMIT\u2019s Creative Agency, and the Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne.
<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others<\/em>. Duke UP, 2006.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity<\/em>. Routledge. 1990.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text<\/em>. Translated by Richard Miller, Hill and Wang, 1975.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Campbell, Alyson. \u201cAdapting Musicology\u2019s Use of Affect Theories to Contemporary Theatremaking: Directing Martin Crimp\u2019s Attempts on Her Life.\u201d Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance<\/em>, vol. 4, no. 3, doi: 10.1386\/jafp.4.3.303_7<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Campbell, Alyson, and Stephen Farrier, editors. Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer<\/em>. Palgrave Macmillan. 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

—. \u201cQueer Practice as Research: A Fabulously Messy Business.\u201d Theatre Research International,<\/em> vol. 40, no. 1, 2015, pp. 83\u201387, doi: 10.1017\/S0307883314000601<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cappello, Mary. “Propositions; Provocations; Inventions.” Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction<\/em>, edited by Margot Singer and Nicole Walker, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, pp. 65\u201374. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Doty, Alexander. Making Things Perfectly Queer<\/em>. U of Minnesota P, 1993.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Freeman, Elizabeth. \u201cQueer Belongings: Kinship Theory and Queer Theory.\u201d  A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies<\/em>, edited by George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry, Blackwell, 2007, pp. 295\u2013314.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

—. \u201cTime Binds, or Erotohistoriography.\u201d Social Text<\/em>, vol. 23, no. 3\u20134, 2005, pp.57\u201368.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frith, Simon. \u201cMusic and Identity.\u201d Questions of Cultural Identity<\/em>, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, Sage, 1996, 108\u201327.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gray, S.M. The Queer Sounds of Justice: Contemporary Queer Musicking and Transformative Justice in The United States<\/em>. 2012. Wellesley College, PhD dissertation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Halberstam, Jack. \u201cThe Wild Beyond: With and for the Undercommons.\u201d The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study<\/em>, edited by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Autonomedia, 2013, pp 5\u201312.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Holman Jones, Stacy, and Anne M. Harris. Queering Autoethnography<\/em>. Routledge, 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LaBelle, Brandon. Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance<\/em>. Goldsmith Press, 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LaBelle, Brandon, and Guiliana Fenech. \u201cThe Counter Text Interview.\u201d Counter Text<\/em>, vol. 5, no. 3, 2019, pp. 271\u201389.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Manning, Erin, and Brian Massumi. Thought in The Act: Passages in The Ecology of Experience<\/em>. U of Minnesota P, 2014.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millner-Larsen, Nadja, and Gavin Butt. \u201cIntroduction: The Queer Commons.\u201d GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies<\/em>, vol. 24, no. 4, 2018, pp. 399\u2013419, doi: 10.1215\/10642684-6957744<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Munro, Kim, Peta Murray, and Stayci Taylor. \u201cSonic Dystonic.\u201d Sonic Field, <\/em>24July 2020, sonicfield.org\/sonic-dystonic-kim-munro-peta-murray-and-stayci-taylor.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Murray, Peta. Things That Fall Over: Women\u2019s Playwriting, Poetics and the (Anti)-Musical.<\/em> 2011. Queensland University of Technology, Masters dissertation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

—. \u201cGlossolalalararium Pandemiconium: A Meaningfully Irreverent, Queerelously Autoethnographic Essamblage for Trying Times.\u201d Qualitative Inquiry<\/em>, vol. 27, no. 7, 2021, pp. 806\u201311, doi:10.1177\/1077800420960144<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

—. \u201cMurray\u2019s COVIDICTIONARY: New Words for Testing Times<\/a>.\u201d The In \/ Completeness of Human Experience<\/em>,special issue 58 of TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses<\/em>, edited by Julia Prendergast, Shane Strange and Jen Webb, vol. 24, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1 \u2013 159.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

—. MmmmyCorona<\/a>. 2020, WordPress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Murray, Peta, Stayci Taylor, and Mattie Sempert. \u201cPanel Play in Three Acts Or, How (or When) Does a Panel Become a Playpen?<\/a>\u201d Axon: Creative Explorations,<\/em> vol. 7, no. 1, 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Skains, R. Lyle. \u201cCreative Practice as Research: Discourse on Methodology.\u201d Media Practice and Education<\/em>, vol.19, no. 1, 2018, pp. 82\u201397.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wilcox, Lauren. \u201cDrones, Swarms and Becoming-Insect: Feminist Utopias and Posthuman Politics.\u201d Feminist Review<\/em>, no. 116, 2017, pp. 25\u201345. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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*<\/a>Peta Murray <\/strong>is a playwright, writer-performer, librettist and dramaturg. Best known for Wallflowering<\/em> and Salt, <\/em>she was awarded an Australian Government\u2019s Centenary Medal for Services to Society and Literature in 2003. Peta is a Lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University in Melbourne.     Her research focus includes queer and art-based activism, new secular rituals, and innovative methods of collaboration based on \u201cradical joy\u201d, associative leaps and communal meaning-making. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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**<\/a>Alyson Campbell <\/strong>is an award-winning director and co- artistic director of queer performance collective wreckedAllproductions with Lachlan Philpott. She has made work in Australia, the UK and Ireland since the late 1980s. Alyson is Professor in Theatre at the Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne.     She teaches and researches dramaturgy, directing and  gender and sexuality in the arts, with a focus on queer dramaturgies and performance around HIV and AIDS. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

***<\/a>Meta Cohen<\/strong> is a queer composer, dramaturg and sound designer with work spanning music, theatre and interdisciplinary art. Meta\u2019s music has been performed in diverse venues ranging from London Synagogues to the Sydney Opera House, and in theatre work, Meta specialises in sonic dramaturgy and musical thinking in theatre-making. An associate artist at wreckedAllprods, Meta is passionate about queer, interdisciplinary and sound-driven work, and is currently undertaking a PhD at the Victorian College of the Arts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Copyright \u00a9<\/strong> 2021 Peta Murray, Alyson Campbell and Meta Cohen
Critical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/em> e-ISSN: 2409-7411<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Creative<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":547,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-special-topic"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/featured.jpeg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":389,"url":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/dramaturging-from-within-the-dramaturg-as-first-experiencer-in-immersive-audio\/","url_meta":{"origin":532,"position":0},"title":"Dramaturging from Within: The Dramaturg as First Experiencer in Immersive Audio","author":"Peta Murray, Alyson Campbell and Meta Cohen","date":"December 17, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Hanna Sl\u00e4ttne* Abstract This article focuses on the role of the dramaturg in the process of creating performances in which immersive audio is at the heart of the meaning-making, arguing that in immersive audio the dramaturg takes up a position of first experiencer, rather than first spectator, and that this\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Special Topic"","block_context":{"text":"Special Topic","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/category\/special-topic\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/11\/image3-3.jpeg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/11\/image3-3.jpeg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/11\/image3-3.jpeg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/11\/image3-3.jpeg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":316,"url":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/sonic-antagonism-the-sounding-audience-of-performance\/","url_meta":{"origin":532,"position":1},"title":"Sonic Antagonism: The Sounding Audience of Performance","author":"Peta Murray, Alyson Campbell and Meta Cohen","date":"October 27, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Andrej Mircev* Abstract Focusing on two examples, the performance Revolt Against Violence (2012) by the Kosovo artist Fitore Berisha and the theatre work Our Violence and Your Violence (2016) by the Croatian artist Oliver Frljic, this article examines the sonic environment in which the works were realized. In both cases,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Essays"","block_context":{"text":"Essays","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/category\/essays\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/11\/image5-1.jpeg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/11\/image5-1.jpeg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/11\/image5-1.jpeg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/11\/image5-1.jpeg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":599,"url":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/aural-oral-dramaturgies-editors-introduction\/","url_meta":{"origin":532,"position":2},"title":"Aural\/Oral Dramaturgies: Editors\u2019 Introduction","author":"Peta Murray, Alyson Campbell and Meta Cohen","date":"December 18, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Photo: Giudi di Gesaro (Silvia Mercuriali\u2019s Swimming Home) Du\u0161ka Radosavljevi\u0107* and Flora Pitrolo** It is, perhaps, particularly suitable to our topic of dramaturgies of speech and sound that the process of putting together a special journal issue functions on the principle of call and response. In our Call for Papers\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Special Topic"","block_context":{"text":"Special Topic","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/category\/special-topic\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/Silvia-Mercuriali-Swimming-Home-photo-credit-giudi-di-gesaro.jpg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/Silvia-Mercuriali-Swimming-Home-photo-credit-giudi-di-gesaro.jpg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/Silvia-Mercuriali-Swimming-Home-photo-credit-giudi-di-gesaro.jpg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/Silvia-Mercuriali-Swimming-Home-photo-credit-giudi-di-gesaro.jpg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":265,"url":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/aurality-and-the-actor-in-filter-theatres-twelfth-night\/","url_meta":{"origin":532,"position":3},"title":"Aurality and the Actor in Filter Theatre\u2019s Twelfth Night","author":"Peta Murray, Alyson Campbell and Meta Cohen","date":"December 11, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Sarah McCourt* Abstract This article explores the relationship between aurality and the actor in Filter Theatre\u2019s Twelfth Night. It explores how Filter\u2019s collaborative process and focus on resolving staging problems sonically creates a productive interplay between visual, embodied and aural modes of performance. It also considers how the productive tension\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Special Topic"","block_context":{"text":"Special Topic","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/category\/special-topic\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/11\/image2.jpeg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/11\/image2.jpeg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/11\/image2.jpeg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/11\/image2.jpeg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":521,"url":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/staged-installation-reported-speech-and-syndemic-images-in-blindness-and-caretaker-2020\/","url_meta":{"origin":532,"position":4},"title":"Staged Installation, Reported Speech, and Syndemic Images in Blindness and Caretaker (2020)","author":"Peta Murray, Alyson Campbell and Meta Cohen","date":"December 9, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Georgina Guy* Abstract This essay attends in detail to the\u00a0specific\u00a0verbal techniques used in the construction of two installation-based performances presented in London in 2020:\u00a0Blindness, a socially distanced\u00a0sound installation,\u00a0adapted by playwright Simon Stephens from Jos\u00e9 de Sousa Saramago\u2019s 1995 novel\u00a0Ensaio sobre a Cegueira,\u00a0staged at the Donmar Warehouse;\u00a0and Caretaker, a\u00a0durational installation by\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Special Topic"","block_context":{"text":"Special Topic","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/category\/special-topic\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/image2.jpg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/image2.jpg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/image2.jpg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/image2.jpg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":326,"url":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/you-and-me-where-and-how-do-we-meet\/","url_meta":{"origin":532,"position":5},"title":"YOU and ME\u2014Where and How Do We Meet","author":"Peta Murray, Alyson Campbell and Meta Cohen","date":"December 15, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Electa Behrens* and \u00d8ystein Elle** Abstract YOU and ME\u2014Where and How Do We Meet is a 40 minute film presenting our research focused on the intersectional materiality of the voice and the potentialities of aural diversity and audience agency.\u00a0Within the larger framework of new materialism, aurality studies and critical race\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Special Topic"","block_context":{"text":"Special Topic","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/category\/special-topic\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/Cover-image-You-and-Me-C.S..jpg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/Cover-image-You-and-Me-C.S..jpg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, 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