A SOUND CONVERSATION : PERFORMANCE - MAKERS AND SOUND PRACTICES WITH ROSLYN OADES, MADELEINE FLYNN AND TAMARA SAULWICK

Recent debates about mediating bodies in live performance foreground advancements in audio technologies, highlighting the ways these advances have shifted disciplinary boundaries and propelled us into a new digital reality. What are the implications for embodied practice as it sits in relationship to technology? When does the body end and the technology begin? How do we understand the boundaries between skin, breath, plastic, voice, gesture, electronic signal, and metal? How does the body listen, and why is it important to know? In June 2021, via the ubiquitous Zoom room, I brought together three contemporary artists working in and across sound and performance - Roslyn Oades, Madeleine Flynn and Tamara Saulwick - for a discussion about sound. The aim of the conversation was to focus on the artists’ sound practices and the ways they have shifted over time. In writing up the interviews, however, this essay became a broader consideration of the fluid boundaries across and between improvisation, sound, performance, music, technology and the body. The paper is structured around three provocations for thinking about sound, as I integrate considerations of my own theatre-making practice, as well as the artists’ verbatim responses, into the discussion. The first provocation is the crucial role attention plays in performance-making as a means to experience the world differently. The second is the spectrum of engagement that is possible between the fleshy human body and digital technology, and how the shifts in and through that engagement might remind us of the body’s potential. The third provocation considers the ways in which sonic practices can highlight the extraordinary that is implicit in the ordinary.