| dc.description.abstract | In July 2015, Adrift Performance Makers developed the project Portable Soundscapes:
An Acoustic Travelogue, travelling down from Portsmouth, UK, to Thessaloniki, Greece,
through Paris, Munich, Zagreb, and Belgrade. Carrying pre-recorded Southsea sound
clips in their luggage, they listened out for unexpected voicings, misplaced soundtracks,
fleeting sonic passersby. The project was curated as a series of online responses to
inadvertent encounters with unfamiliar sonic environments. AdriftPM developed DIY
strategies of aural dramaturgy, such as sonic conflations, sonic invitations, impromptu
compositions, short poetic responses, and dubious definitions of sound terminology. This
project revealed sound design as the enabling condition of a theatre, as the very
organizing principle of a performative dramaturgy of listening, therefore effecting a
reversal of conventional understandings of theatre sound design, which presuppose
theatre as the context and sound as the designed intervention. This article seeks to lend an
attentive ear to such unspoken assumptions. What if the complexity of the project posits
the listener as both the deviser of the audio project and the spectator of the ongoing
process that is the project? What happens when both audience and performance are
diffused across a variety of media? What practices of listening, designing and archiving
are required when Europe is your stage? | en_GB |
