Ototheatre: Learning to Listen and Perform in Sonically Augmented Spaces

Lauren Rachele Beck

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/N2717P

Work

Ototheatre: Learning to Listen and Perform in Sonically Augmented Spaces

Public Deposited

Download PDF

Download All Files (.zip)

This dissertation explores a form of performance I call “ototheatre,” which is a mobile and participatory audience experience executed with portable sound technology. Ototheatre is an emergent artistic form that sits at a convergence of contemporary technologies and audience consumption habits. Case studies, including smartphone applications and new theatrical works incorporating novel uses of sound technology, reveal the antecedents and characteristics of this form of theatre. I explore the methods by which these works create intimate, interactive theatrical experiences that extend modes of audience experience. Podcasts are a new media practice that have multiple theatrical antecedents and ototheatrical potential. I analyze a particularly theatrical podcast, choreographer Hofesh Shechter’s Everyday Moments, to show new possibilities for individual modes of performance scripted by podcast artists for solo listening. I trace a genealogy that includes the théâtrophone, radio drama, and the downloadable podcast to demonstrate how the recorded voice has long been creating remote theatrical experiences for audiences through the use of mediatized sound technology. While radio has been called a “theatre of the mind,” I argue that podcasts can create an intimate, post-humanistic theatre of the body. I examine artistic sound works that are related to the audio tour to explore ways of mapping space with sound. The case studies I have chosen attempt to help participants to see hidden social, historical, or spatial layers of an unfamiliar site. My research explores how audio walks allow users to create mental maps of memory, history, and experience that engage the user with a place. I argue that sound augments the mapped space for listeners, transporting them into the space rather than placing them outside as observers. I analyze two theatrical audio “tours.” The first, As If It Were the Last Time by Circumstance, pulls the participant into the experience of a busy New York street. The second, Sights by Tricksterp, guides participants around the city of Bern to telephone booths where they listen to site-responsive stories from people who are blind. I then conduct an analysis of my own sound art project, a sonic map of London that uses binaural recordings to guide listeners through my memories of discovering London by foot and underground train in order to push the experience of the audio tour to a virtual realm. I connect all three case studies by focusing on the power of sound technology to help participants create affective maps of urban spaces. An audio drama/fitness application called Zombies, Run! uses mobile sound technologies to create embodied role play for audiences. In a survey of Zombies, Run! fans, I found that users shifted their interpretations of the work based on how they wished to engage with it, showing how participants in sound-based theatre individualize their experiences as audience members based on how they synthesize prior knowledge of related media forms. I posit a new mode of theatre performance made possible through a combination of open and serial narrative, embodied and individualized engagement through sound, and easily distributed fan content through internet forums.

Last modified