Hear Tell: Describing, Reporting, Narrating

If you hear tell of an event, somebody relates it to you. Hear tell involves both a speaker and a listener, a performer and an audience. It represents an account communicated in speech of something that might have happened. Theatre involves and prompts such acts of hear telling, dialogues, like those described by Joe Kelleher, ‘as to what was seen or heard tell of and what it might mean, what it might be worth, what there is to do with it’.¹ This special issue concerns methods for transmitting events, objects, and experiences – methods that arise both within performance and when we engage with performance as critics, scholars, or simply theatregoers compelled to recount what we have experienced. Contributions circulate around three key actions: describing, reporting, and narrating. These actions are forms of exchange, both verbal and textual. Across the issue, contributors pay attention to the sensorial and cognitive dimensions of these forms (linguistic, sonic, haptic) and to the way form itself is never separate from the conditions (historical, social, political) in which it emerges and which it also shapes.

One of our aims as editors in developing a special issue themed around ‘hear tell’ is to contribute to a growing reappraisal of formal methods for approaching theatre and performance, which complicates ideas of form as hermetic or apolitical. The editors of Postdramatic Theatre and Form, for example, trace a history of the emergence of theatre and performance as an academic discipline in the mid-twentieth century, distinct from literary studies, which was achieved in part by disavowing the prevailing formalist methodologies of that discipline exemplified by New Criticism.² The volume argues for ‘an expanded and avowedly social understanding of form, one that requires we shake off common conceptions of form as mere ornamentation or as something that seals an artwork off from society’.³ Likewise, our own previous collaborative writing looks at the form of the retrospective exhibition as a way to trace complexities in the encounter between performance and practices of display in contemporary museums across an artist’s oeuvre.⁴ Form, in that work, is not separate from context; rather, contextualisation is a key formal consideration for artists and curators bringing performance into the museum. Building on this expansive understanding, then, we frame ‘hear tell’ as a formal investigation of the accounting of experience, examining verbal, textual, and oral/aural registers, and considering performances of hearing and telling as complex entanglements.

Describing, reporting, and narrating are capacious terms, and in conceiving the issue, we imagined contributors responding to a varied set of examples and questions, from the vexed status of ekphrasis in writing about live work to the importance of description as a step towards analysis and action as exemplified in such canonical political theatre as that of Bertolt Brecht or Augusto Boal. The articles and documents collected here do, indeed, traverse a wide-ranging field, and while terms like postdramatic, documentary theatre, essay-performance, new writing, installation, and sound art are all relevant, the ambitions of the issue are interdisciplinary. Ultimately, for Contemporary Theatre Review, we are interested in examining how theatre addresses itself to the contemporary across a multiplicity of situations.

A familiar analysis of the state of the contemporary is that it is anxious, in part because of a crisis public truth-telling.⁵ Sites that translate experience into categories of meaning – social media platforms, mainstream international news outlets, political punditry, the programming of cultural institutions – produce versions of reality that are incommensurate but also proximate, which jars our sense of certainty in the constitution of the world as we encounter it. These are underpinned by economic uncertainty, existential fears about climate crisis, and political polarisation among other material concerns. What tools do theatre and performance scholarship (an often-marginalised field) have to address this anxious multiplicity while remaining suspicious of nostalgic accounts of a more stable past? We suggest that the question of form becomes particularly important. How do we maintain complexity while dodging tactics of obfuscation so central to contemporary politics of domination? How might (re)turning to the theatre ‘itself’ complicate our understanding of relations between actions and their circulation as speech and spectacle? To what extent is it the task of theatre and performance to ‘tell it like it is’?

These questions arose in part from our work as co-convenors of a working group on Documenting Performance, for the Theatre and Performance Research Association from 2016 to 2019. Across three gatherings at the annual conference and two interim study days, we engaged in a sustained and productive collaborative conversation asking how we do the work of writing and thinking about theatre and performance. The themes of the gathering are relevant to the work we have assembled in this special issue. In 2016, we considered ‘Intransigence and Sensibility: The Work of Documentation’, focusing on the work we put into documentation, the work we ask the document to do, and the complex status of documents as ‘works’ of art in their own right. Ultimately, we asked how the sensibilities of documentation shape our field – a question we continue to develop here. Our 2017 gathering addressed ‘Migration and Documentation’, looking at the performative role of the document in the movement of bodies (of all kinds) across borders, and our final conference gathering in 2018 conceptualised ‘Classes of Categories’, drawing particularly on theorist Sianne Ngai’s exploration of ‘our aesthetic categories’ (for Ngai, the ‘zany’, the ‘cute’, and the ‘merely interesting’) to examine historically conditioned methods for making accounts of experience.⁶ In two interim study days, both held at Tate Exchange at Tate Modern in London, we discussed ‘Curating and Collecting Sound’ (2017) and we convened a discussion that would lead directly to this special issue, ‘Hear Tell: Describing, Reporting, Narrating’ (2019). These conversations were iterative, building from what came before and anticipating the next discursive gesture. Across these gatherings, what emerged was a complex and collaboratively produced set of vocabularies, conceptual frameworks, and on-the-ground examples that help us articulate what is meaningful about the theatre and performance we encounter and the accounts that we make of those encounters.

Several of the contributors to this issue took part in the working group that we convened, while others come from different backgrounds altogether. We hope that this special issue acts as both a continuation and opening up of the previous conversations.⁷ Of course, in the time between our last co-convened gathering and the development of this special issue, the COVID-19 syndemic⁸ has affected, at every level, the work that we do as theatre and performance scholars, putting pressure on our key notions, from presence, to liveness, to collaboration and theatrical infrastructure. Some of the contributions speak to these issues directly, while others do not, but the conditions of the issue’s coming together necessarily haunts its outcomes.

The four articles in this issue are wide-ranging in their form and content, and in the methods they deploy to trace connections between them. Joe Kelleher’s modestly titled ‘Attempts at a description’ marks the hear tell out for the ‘access it offers to milieu, ambience, circumstance, and environment’. His writing centres on the acts of description involved in the construction of British artist Rose English’s Plato’s Chair (1983–84) as Kelleher encounters it in a retrospective exhibition of performance documents and as the performance journeys outwards from its filmic record. Through English’s repertorial work, Kelleher engages/stages/figures/instantiates (brings into being as he encounters it) ideas of re-iterative representational structures, self-descriptive recovery, and ironies at the intersection of what is heard and meant.

Sensitive to the vexed implications of the special issue’s key terms, Sharanya’s contribution navigates a space between narration and description to locate ‘the possibility of telling without describing’. Sharanya recounts her experiences listening to ‘survivors and witnesses’ of the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom in New Delhi and traces walks they take to recall and re-tell what happened. These walks, Sharanya argues, ‘produce a hear-telling of an archive of memories, sited, sighted, and cited’. The essay draws on the work of theorist Saidiya Hartman to formulate, without final resolution, the problem of telling history based on archives produced through violent systems, without reinscribing that violence. In the essay, the act of walking emphasises the fraught positionality of all ethnography, as questions of distance and proximity are mobilised – quite literally – and renegotiated.

In a very different register, Georgina Guy’s article builds on her ongoing work on ‘reported action’, or verbal tellings of events happening offstage, often used because these events are thought to be, in some ways, unstageable. Guy explores two contemporary performance works – British playwright, director, and performer Tim Crouch’s Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation (2019) and Irish company Dead Centre’s Chekhov’s First Play (2015) – where what is reported in speech and what is seen and heard in other modes reveal disjunctures and incoherences that in turn illuminate complexities at the heart of theatrical representation as such. Here, it may be that what is unstageable is the theatre itself, the wider consequences of which Guy considers.

The final article in this issue takes up the literary form of the essay to expand our vocabulary for the documentary in theatre. Jasper Delbecke considers four artists – Jaha Koo, Sachli Gholamalizad, Ogutu Muraya, and Samah Hijawi – whose work in European theatres stage significant questions about the experience of living in the diaspora. Delbecke examines how these theatre-makers from very different backgrounds each use essayistic techniques, intricately weaving a first-person perspective with historical documents, cultural artefacts, and philosophical reflection. The performance essay emerges as a form particularly suited to the layered complexity of diasporic subjectivity, configuring ‘hear tell’ as a form of transmission connecting personal experience with historical/political conditions.

We have also collected a series of Documents, each of which evokes ‘hear tell’ through the practice of correspondence. Arising from the exhibition Mapa Teatro: Laboratory of Social Imagination, celebrating the 40th anniversary of Colombian artistic laboratory Mapo Teatro, writer Giulia Palladini and performer Agnes Brekke write to each other ‘not in an interview, nor in a commentary parachuting ideas onto praxis, or the other way around, but in an exchange of letters’. This layered conversation, unfolding in text across time and space, describes/narrates/reports vital ideas about a political poetics of collaboration. In her introduction to the exchange, Palladini makes a radical proposition for an understanding of authorship far from any connotation with singular authority. Rather, she argues, we must associate authoring with the verb augere, to augment, and thus with ‘a commitment to enhance, to augment the world: not in terms of quantity nor proportions, but rather in terms of intensity, capacity to look at the world and make space for its own plural imagination of itself’. This understanding of expansion is not wasteful or dominating but open and multiple: hear-telling as unending relation.

Johanna Linsley reflects on Sonic Spectral Summoning, a ‘correspondence course’ and audio work for voice and electronic sound that she developed during the Spring 2021 lockdown in the UK. The project took a remote group of participants through a ‘module’ based on the premise that certain everyday sounds hold a latent capacity for summoning the spirits of the dead. In her essay, Linsley considers how fiction, queer domesticity, and sound studies’ preoccupation with alternative knowledge systems and unknowability inflect the work. A polyphonic record of the project, this account frames it in relation to the discursive possibilities of hear tell as a ‘shuffling through meaning and association, sense and its others’.

Roberta Mock puts herself in correspondence with British performance artist Marcia Farquhar, through a first-person narration of her experience watching Farquhar’s eight-hour performance film And I (made collaboratively with Reynir Hutber). Mock in turn puts the work in conversation with Andy Warhol and Samuel Beckett’s Not I, which the film references. Mirroring the drawn-out and discursive structure of Farquhar’s performance technique, where speech, anecdote, improvisation all accumulate over time but without coercive finality, Mock’s essay circles and iterates around the elusive ‘I’ at the centre of Farquhar’s durational monologues and finds, as with Palladini and Brekke, that it is plural.

The last document presented here is a conversation between Georgina Guy and theatre director Walter Meierjohann about the sound and light installation Blindness, which was commissioned by the Donmar Warehouse in London in 2020. Created for socially distanced audiences, the work made use of binaural sound to immerse theatregoers in a narrative adapted from the novel by the same title by José Saramago. In their conversation, as Guy notes in her introduction, Meierjohann speaks to questions of ‘presence, community, and collective experience central to the theatrical encounter that are called into question by restrictions on bodily closeness’ while articulating how ‘experimental modes of performance that intersect installation and sound’ offer new avenues for this encounter.

Across the issue, the theatre is framed as a site for hear-telling, and at the same time, this framework allows us to think reflexively, too, about the forms that theatre scholarship can take. As performance theorist Theron Schmidt titles his contribution to an issue of Performance Research journal ‘On Writing and Performance’, ‘how we talk about the work is the work’.⁹ Our term ‘hear tell’ asks us to consider this work in embodied and relational ways, not exclusive to capacities for audition, speech, reading, and writing but sensitive to the material conditions and formal sensibilities that shape what we do and do not say to each other when we go to the theatre.

Notes

1. Joe Kelleher, The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 22.

2. Michael Shane Boyle, Matt Cornish and Brandon Woolf, ‘Introduction: Form and Postdramatic Theatre’, in Postdramatic Theatre and Form, eds. Michael Shane Boyle, Matt Cornish and Brandon Woolf (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 1–19 (7–10).

3. Ibid, 1.

4. Georgina Guy and Johanna Linsley, ‘Retrospective Remarks on Rose English, Mona Hatoum, and Ana Mendieta: Where Is Performance?’ in Reconstructing Performance Art: Practices of Historicisation, Documentation and Representation, ed. Tancredi Gusman (London: Routledge, 2023), 209–228.

5. In 2014, the activist group Plan C posted an anonymously authored article to their website titled ‘We Are All Very Anxious’ that diagnoses an early 21^st-century collective psychology. The Institute for Precarious Consciousness, ‘We Are All Very Anxious Six Theses on Anxiety and Why It is Effectively Preventing Militancy, and One Possible Strategy for Overcoming It’, 2014 https://www.weareplanc.org/blog/we-are-all-very-anxious/ [accessed July 23, 2023]. For discussions in a contemporary performance context, see Patrick Duggan, ‘Unsettling the Audience: Affective Dis-ease and the Politics of Fear and Anxiety in Contemporary Performance’, Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism 15 (2017): 40–54.

6. Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).

7. The editors would like to acknowledge to work of subsequent convenors of the Documenting Performance working group in carrying on these conversations. These are Harriet Curtis, Diana Damian Martin and Eleanor Roberts, and current convenors Emma Bennett, Rebecca Collins and Vanessa Macauley.

8. As Guy notes later in the issue, this term helps draw attention to the social and political dimensions of disease.

9. Theron Schmidt, ‘How We Talk About the Work Is the Work: Performing Critical Writing’, Performance Research 23, no. 2 (2018): 37–43.