Voicelanding - Exploring the scenographic potential of acoustic sound in site-sensitive performance

Mareike Nele Dobewall

This practical artistic research project explores how the performance of acoustic sound in dialogue with site can create a sonic scenography, experienced by an audience from within the sonic structures. Six art projects were carried out in the context of this research. Their form varies due to the site-sensitive approach that is employed: the space and the participating musicians are both the source and the frame for the resulting spatial sound performances. During workshops the collaborating musicians are introduced to site-sensitive methods. They learn full-body listening, spatial sounding, and space-care. The musicians learn to co-create with the space. In a collaborative process, spatial sound compositions are created using the site-specific sonic material that is elicited from the dialogue between the performers and the space. The relation to the audience plays an important role in the sharing of the performance space and the experience of the sonic scenographies. Therefore, active audience encounter is considered during the creative process towards the performance and it is further explored during each performance. As sound is invisible and ephemeral it is a vulnerable material to engage with when creating scenographies. In this research its instability has revealed itself as an indispensable quality of a scenography that aims to connect the elements of a shared space and make their relations perceivable. There is a tendency to make ‘reliable’ material scenographies and to sustain spatial sound through audio systems while attempting to overcome the challenges a site brings to performance. This approach to performance, scenography, and spatial sound composition, however, limits the relation between acoustic sound and site. In my sonic scenographies the performers are dependent on the dialogue with the space in order to create sonic structures that can be experienced by an audience. The attention needed for this collaboration is space-care. It includes care for all entities in the space, and especially the audience. The ephemeral quality of acoustic sound creates an active sonic scenography that performs together with the musicians, and engages multimodal listening. The resulting spatial sound performance includes the placement and movement of sonic expressions that are specific for each instrument-site relation. In the created performance, as the audience can ‘roam through’ it, they can experience a sonic scenography that unfolds around them. In the interaction of performers and audience in these shared spaces (architectural space and sonic space) a social space can develop that allows for an ephemeral community to emerge.

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I owe the term spatialist to composer Gísli Jóhann Grétarsson. When we started working together on the choir performance Voiceland in Iceland in 2016, he introduced me as a “spatialist - a specialist in space”.

To be called something, makes you something. At that point, I was already deeply inside the transformative process of becoming a lover of and carer for spaces. Space had become my passion, my way of thinking, my way of learning, and my path towards understanding. Through spaces, spaces in-between become more evident. In these spaces in-between I find what I care about. Gisli calling me a spatialist made me realize the importance that this particular focus has for me, and it encouraged me to follow this specialisation.

In the past two years, I have been 25 metres underground at Reaktorhallen (R1) in Stockholm several times. Once, I was asked if I do not “feel alone down there”. My response to this was and is: No, I do not feel alone when I am in a space. I am not alone. To me the presence of the space interacts with my presence. We communicate - quietly and loudly. When the space is shaken (At R1, by the underground trains passing nearby) it resonates in my body. I am shaken too. We are corresponding

In the creation of site-sensitive live performances, my curiosity for the space expands into the search for (and creation of) an experience of further spaces that emerge when spaces communicate with living entities through sound and presence. In my work with spaces, I am concerned with authenticity. My work is always site-sensitive (dictionary). By this I imply that the creative process employs the senses when engaging with and learning from the site. Sometimes it is even possible to let the site determine the process and the result. Robert Irwin calls this site-conditioned art, as the artistic response “draws all its cues (reasons for being) from its surroundings” (Stiles & Selz, 2012, p.572). My process on site is a ‘listening into’ all the ways a human can listen. (Refer also to the Listening Into book and the dictionary)

Our surroundings affect us. The interpretation of these effects is, for me, related to sensing. As Susan Sontag writes in Against Interpretation, our senses must be reclaimed, “we must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more” (Sontag, 2001, p.10). In the reading of a space, I engage in a great deal of dialogue with the space, its surroundings, its present history, its written history, and the stories of locals. My interpretation of this information is not intended to explain anything, however. Rather, I strive to reveal these elements through an artistic transformation that can be felt, sensed, and experienced by an audience-community. (see the text ephemeral communities and in the dictionary)

There is an ethical border that I am determined not to cross: I do not want to conquer a space. The space has a character that I am interested in and that I work with. The difficulties that spaces can bring to performances are my inspiration. I have no interest in rendering the space invisible, to conquer it sonically or to overpower it. To overcome the challenges of a space would be a loss.

Virtual spaces, sonic and/or visual, do not fascinate me. I can appreciate them, but they do not stimulate my analogue mind and body. Real spaces seduce me. They engage me on many levels. They excite me and trigger my imagination. To interact acoustically with spaces is a sensual and physical learning about the space. Even though the potential for manipulating sound electronically is endless, and can expand beyond the possibilities for sonic transformation that I can elicit from an analogue collaboration with real spaces, there is no ‘erotic’ in them for me. The erotic is here related to joy, to sensual experience and the sensing of potential. As Juhani Pallasmaa describes it in his article ‘Eroticism of space’, “Space re-enchants, re-mythologises and re-eroticises the world” (Pallasmaa, 2008, p.7). He describes the way that artists create with the whole body as they “merge with their work”. My interest in how sound and space interact is therefore only generative in real space. The physical interaction between all agencies in a performance is first and foremost provided by the sharing of the real space. This is related to the fact that spaces can give processual experiences, and that sounds reveal their lives in interaction with spaces over time. Spaces are even transformed by sound, but in my work this change is supported by the real space. It tinges the sounds with its material and through structural encounters. The changes in sound are a confirmation of the complexity of the space.

Sometimes, I like to think of spaces alone - by themselves. I imagine their existence without living things that create sound. In my imagination the spaces are full of presence in this situation. If someone was there to hear them, one could hear them breathing and communicating in the way that only spaces breath and communicate.

When I enter a space, I become instantly alert. There is a concentration, a focus inside the limits of a space that I do not experience outside. This confined focus allows me to go deeply into learning about the interaction between sound and space. To get involved with a space encourages an attention to the presence, a listening into the past and an aural imagination that projects forward into the future.

The more time I spend with spaces, the more convinced I am that they request our attention. Our listening into spaces is crucial. They have something to say.

I want to cultivate something that we all can do more of, which I call space-care. It is an active attention to space that acknowledges our responsibility for spaces. The relationship is reciprocal. One can rely on the response of a space. Not necessarily on how it responds but that there will be a reaction to one’s presence. One’s existence is acknowledged by the space one is in. This is a precious comfort that is not obvious.

References:

Pallasmaa, J., 2008. 'Eroticism of Space.' Oz 30. https://doi.org/10.4148/2378-5853.1451

Sontag, S. (2001). Against interpretation, and other essays. Picador U.S.A.

Stiles, K., & Selz, P. (Eds.). (2012). Theories and documents of contemporary art: A sourcebook of artists’ writings (2nd ed., revised and expanded). University of California Press.

I – am – here

Three words. Identity - existence - place. All made appreciable with the entrance into a space.

Confessions of a Spatialist

Confessions of a spatialist

Spatial

Space-bound

Always connected

through sound

Bodies interact

with spaces in-between

Partially

the visible

presents spaces

to be entered

reached for

dreamed of

Beyond this

the invisible

actively constructs

partly recognisable

noticeable

to a bigger degree

as abstract phenomena

multiple spaces

For all the senses

and those we don’t have

spaces emerge

They call, they touch, they protect

They are indifferent

but exist only in relation

To converse with

the spatial

To sense

an in-between

to enter it

it enters me

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