How can sound design, as performance, make the audience become participants

and provide them an embodied experience?

The following essay will explore how sound design can provide a bodily and participating
experience to the audience by inviting them into live performances not only through
visually narratives but also as a sensory involvement where they can even become
operators or players in the spectacle. These reflections will be discussed with
bibliographies that address the field of the sonic experience and the participation of the
audience in a more expansive way. Then, this theoretical conversation will be exemplified
through these writer's personal experiences as a spectator, developing an observation of
two performances lived in Chile between 2021 and 2022 - the first one Concierto Para
Ovnis of Daniel Marabolí and Héctor Morales, a site-specific participating spectacle. The
second one Il Terzo Reich of Romeo Castellucci, an inmersive videoinstallation - whose
creative engine was sound design and, where in both cases, sound affects or summons
the audience, revealing another way of understanding the sonic (Curtin & Roesner, 2015)
as a propositional phenomenon and not just a harmonizer at the service of the scenic
work.

From the thoughts of Marco De Marinis at the end of the 80s, which raised the idea of a
new theater, to the idea of a post-dramatic hinge with Lehmann in the 2000s, up to the
disciplinary breath that expand the field beyond scenography (Hann, 2019), we have seen
how the Performing Arts have expanded itself by refunding aspects that, in the midst of
this hierarchy or previous theatrical orthodoxies, used to understand them as background
tools. Probably, because of that same need for autonomy against the logics of tradition,
fields that were previously conceived as subordinate are beginning to expand or,
furthermore, go beyond their origin. Something that De Marinis would call a wide and
rugged field of theatrical experiences1 (De Marinis, 1988, p.14) and that will seek to
confront the official practices, to see new languages emerge to build scenic expansions
as a rebellion against old paradigms.

1. De Marinis, EL NUEVO TEATRO, 1988, p. 14. translated by D. Portillo “…por nuevo teatro se entiende
ese amplio y accidentado campo de experiencias teatrales…”

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 An understanding of scenography as emancipated from merely illustrating or
furnishing the realization of a dramatic text on stage (Curtin & Roesner, 2015,
p.109)

For the purpose of this essay, we will situate ourselves in the thought of sound as a field
that provides experience and participation through this expanded conception of itself.
Likewise, it is possible to observe how in recent decades there has been a sonic/acoustic
'turn' (Curtin & Roesner, 2015, p.107) inviting the audience to perceive sonorously rather
than just hear.

This new way of thinking about sound calls us to integrate experiences and pass it through
the body, unleashing the possibility of an atmosphere that inspires and intensifies stage
practice. Furthermore, performance in the last period, more precisely in the last decade
(Lai & Boverman, 2013), has put emphasis on how their works could present a challenging
experience for the audience, developing productions with a focus on embodied
interactions and not only passive visuality. In the next section of this essay, we will be able
to know two experiences that develop this area.

The land of sound/sonic design has provided other perspective that offers a way out for
the musical tradition in the field, seeking not to be only to complete, accompany,
sonorously speaking, as perhaps stage music or theatrical sound composition does,
complementing scenes with music and appealing to an incidental sound that makes up
the moments of the play, but that is not necessarily being thought as a language, but
rather as a tool.

Their aim seeks to co-create a sensorial experience that can go through the body of the
spectators even without the support of images, regarding to become the primary source
of creation at performance. This highlight a possibility of redirecting the methodologies in
performing arts to propose from the sensory-sound another way of understanding the
spectacles. Those bastions of the theatrical tradition, are no longer primary (Baugh, 2013,
p.223).

It’s precisely this openness to new possibilities of performative communication that allow
us to think that design for the performing arts begins to be understood not as

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ornamentation indicated by a dramaturgy but as an essential communicative component
that could “contribute to a more profound encounter than was initially suggested”
(McKinney, 2013, p. 63), and in which sonic experiences are not only there to provide
narrative, extravagance or diversion, but to provide an immersive experience that crosses
spectator’s bodies.

SONIC EXPERIENCES

The following section will present two cases regarding audience experience through
sound design to look up how this discipline is capable of building an embodied experience
and, even more, how it is possible to think that, through sound, the audiences can
participate in building the play.

For this writer, it is important to point out the challenge of choosing this topic, considering
that my work has always been closer to images. Perhaps precisely for this reason and to
approach this, from the experience of the spectator, I decided that sound may provide
greater observation as a participant than as a professional in the field of performance.

“The current practices of site-specific theatre and theatre in the dark are perhaps
the clearest evidence of a sceno-sonic turn that plays directly upon these
modalities and their perceptual usettling in the dissolution of the sceno-sonic
boundaries…” (Nicholas Till at Curtin & Roesner, 2015, p.110)

“Concierto para Ovnis”

In the first place, we have Concierto para Ovnis a work that it is thinking, from its genesis,
as a sound spectacle with the participation of the audience as active operators of the
scene. The audience attends to a site-specific spectacle in cars, tuning into a radio that
will allow them to understand the narrative inside the trunks and with several non-diegetic
reverberations around them. This is conducted through technicians, who are facilitators of
the experience and are in charge of providing instructions to the audience to become
operators of the piece through their cars. The performers do not speak and everything is

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resolved by listening to the tuned radio and its echoes that are activated in different virtual
spheres of sound within the staged circularity proposed and its extensions of sonic
atmosphere, and body gestures of the technical and performance team that are constantly
giving instructions to the spectators to invite them to enhance the scene. It is in this way
that cars, commanded by the audience, build a sound and lighting atmosphere for each
scene, which is only possible with the participation of the attendees and their cars, who
turn on their car lights, honk their car horns, turn up the volume on their radios, open and
close car’s door, and, through their involvement with the show, bring the play to life.

For this opportunity, we interviewed Daniel Marabolí, sound leader and director of this
piece, in order to understand the purposes of linking with the audience in terms of sound
invitation and audience participation. About this, what is interesting to us is how the creator
is not interested in the forced participation of the audiences that could expose people in
an uncomfortable way, but rather involve them as executor or operators on stage who
complete the execution of the performance work. Regarding this, e.g. Maraboli (2022)
points out: "...my idea is always to transform the scenic act into an experience, the

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performative act into an experience, which is not simply contemplating (...) the notion that
the audience is executor..."2

The notion of operators and executors that Marabolí offers, complements the notion of
audience experience, from the category of a machinist-spectator. There is an invitation to
a conducted action that will complete the work as a community, exercising a 'shared
responsibility between the performer and spectator' (Baugh, 2013, p.230) giving the
audience a new role.

For this writer, as a spectator, my experience, beyond the visuality that caused a very
powerful sensation to be together building a great circularity of cars in the middle of a
large parking lot, the exercise of participation inside a car, the extended listening between
the internal sound of the radio, the slamming of the car doors, the sound of the external
antenna that reverberated the experience and, above all, the invitation to operate as part
of the experience, assuming a co-active responsibility with the show, means an example
of a large-scale show, unconventional, conducted from the sound and where the drama
is constituted as a mixture of choreographies, big scale objects, light and sound elements
where a car, operated by spectators, can become a sound performer of a game of new
roles and responsibilities for the performance that this team of artists invites us to live.

“good facilitators have strategies for overcoming the inhibitions that haunt this
change of role” (White, 2013, p.73).

Now, from a comparative point of view, valuing the choice of a conventional space, the
use of expanded sound and the operator linkage of the public; this play maintains a more
complete structure of work, which continues to contain in itself sound narration, bodies in
scene and visuality. On the other hand, we will get to know another work where the lack
of many resources of what we understand as mise-en-scène, inviate us to travel through

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e.g. 1 Maraboli D. 2022. Interview with D. Portillo 25th October. Online Interview, translated by D. Portillo:
" "...mi idea es siempre transformar el acto escénico en una experiencia, el acto performativo en una
experiencia, que no sea simplemente contemplar (...) la noción de que la audiencia es ejecutora..."

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the imaginary of the dark, the immolation of the word and the sound power, making the
performance emerge in our bodies (White, 2013, p. 161).

“Il Terzo Reich”

This second example is a video installation, directed by Romeo Castellucci, that places
spectators under a true dictatorship of words to precisely question the totalitarianism of
dramaturgy and invite the audience to experience the obsolescence of the words. This
experience includes loud music and high-frequency images that go through the viewer's
body in an immersive way in the middle of darkness.

The installation is made up of an empty space inside a museum room that leaves you
inside an obscurity atmosphere. It is not possible to perceive where to sit, so initially it is
your hands that explore the space to find a "safe place" where to live the experience. In
the distance, you can see a bony body, an animal's column... Then everything is an
audiovisual stimulus, sub-bass sounds and darkness.

From Castellucci's perspective, this furious projection of words is also an invitation to see
the text fall down. A phenomenon that is “questioning the established hierarchies of
production and aesthetics” (Curtin & Roesner, 2015, p.110).

The first thing is that my experience lacks the presence of a performative human body.
Apparently, the dancer who is part of the work only attended to the firsts performances in
Chile, and then, the vestige of what her performance was, with an installation of a piece

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of animal bone is the only thing that accompanies that empty space, that darkness
dialoguing with those words that go from being letters to being visual stimuli; to being a
sensory atmosphere that, personally, even though White in Audience Participation in
Theatre (2013) talks about the perception of safety to the participants, produced
everything but calm in me. Of course, I am aware that the work of Castellucci appeals to
another type of involvement and, from that perspective, I understand the validity of the
darkness in me as an audience, allowing me to experience the desolation or the feeling
of the end of the world that this video installation provides. In addition, what seems
significant to me is that the artist's post-dramatic intention of wanting to immolate the word,
destroy, deconstruct it, becomes body in me even making me to stop seeing (or trying to
see) and I dedicating myself to feel. The sensation of sound moved me to another space,
to a liminal space, even a little apocalyptic, where the museum room was lost, where the
dimensions became a soundscape (Brown at Curtin & Roesner, 2015, p.112)

If we analyze both shows, obviously the sound component mobilizes the experience and
this is capable of linking them with the initial question. But probably the first is more
attached to enhancing participation while the other is conducting an embodied immersion.

We already point out how Marabolí offers another term to our list of denominations for the
audience, while Castelucci's work would be more linked to the immersed spectator. In any
of the cases, we are dealing with works that go through the experience of the attendance
(Di Benedetto, 2013) through sound.

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Conclusion

It is possible to show how the performative turn that we are experiencing invites us to
deconstruct the traditional margins of the performing arts that previously understood the
spectator as a simple visitor and passive spectator of the staging to advance to a link that
agency changes in the experience of the spectators, even putting at risk the formal
structure of the work or performance in question. From that place, thinking about the sonic,
as proposed by Curtin and Roesner (2015), offers an exploration of the material as an
invitation to change, to break the paradigm and the notion of the untouchable work of
orthodox theater and performing arts.

From this point of view, understanding the body as a channel of reactions proposed from
sounds that constitute imaginary, drive emotions or even allow the audience to operate
the work, leads us to think beyond the parameters. Likewise, to understand the elements
on stage as materials capable of building what Baugh would call a mise en évenement
where more often the opening to new roles, no longer as subservient to the text but for
the development of its own logic (Baugh, 2013) will appear.

Furthermore, I project more expansion of sonic-scene as a narrative language, declaring

myself interested in discovering what darkness and the suspension of the image in
exchange of sound immersive experience are about to provide us in the coming years.

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Reference List

 Curtin, & Roesner, D. 2015. Sounding out “the scenographic turn”: eight position
statements. Theatre and Performance Design, 1(1-2), 107–125.
 De Marinis, M. 1988. El Nuevo Teatro, 1947-1970. Instrumentos PAIDÓS.
 Di Benedetto, S. 2003. Sensing Bodies: A Phenomenological Approach to the
Performance Sensorium. Performance Research, 8(2), 100–108. London: Routledge
 Hann, R. 2019. Beyond scenography. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
 Lai, Ch & Bovermann, T. 2013. Audience Experience in Sound Design. Aalto University
paper.
 Lehmannm H.T. 2006. Postdramatic theatre. Translated by K, Jürs-Munby. Oxford:
Routledge.
 McKinney, J. 2013. Scenography, Spectacle and the Body of the
Spectator. Performance Research, 18(3), 63–74.
 Palmer, S. 2006. Theatre, Performance and Technology: The Development of
Scenography in the Twentieth Century. By Christopher Baugh. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005. (Chapter 11)
 White, G. 2013. Audience participation in theatre aesthetics of the invitation. Palgrave
Macmillan.