Patrick Primavesi teaches Theatre Studies at the University of Leipzig and is Director of the Dance Archive Leipzig. He wrote his Ph.D. on Walter Benjamin’s theories of translation and theatre. He also worked as a dramaturg and co-directed a master’s program in dramaturgy at the University of Frankfurt am Main. He has published widely on contemporary theatre, on voice, gesture and rhythm, and on interrelations between theatre, film and new media. His current research projects connect the issues of representation and public sphere with the development of theatre, dance and performance art.

The works of Rimini Protokoll and LIGNA explore various tactics of participation, by crossing borders between theatre, dance and performance art, between media consumption and political activity, between different degrees of control and freedom, passive or active behavior in public. Thus the position and function of the spectator is challenged and tested as well. Sound plays an important role in this context, for pragmatic reasons (easily transmitted through everyone’s mobile devices) and as a means to reflect contemporary ways of participation. The lecture will discuss some productions of Stefan Kaegi, Rimini Protokoll and LIGNA as examples for the use of audio guided activities that shift from the participation in a public event or activity towards the public performance of participation itself. 

Ella Finer is a London based artist. Her MPhil (2008) at the University of Glasgow, focusing on the female body in photographic space, culminated in the transformation of a theatre into a working camera and dark-room. Her current practice concerns gender and sound and the materialising of female voice and presence in Theatre. Ella's recent projects include producing the Building:Sound symposium (www.buildingsound.org) at the National Theatre, London; live and radio performances of her voice-scores A Play for Offstage Voices, Playing Host and 1974; and a live, choreographed voicing of her doctoral thesis: Material Voice in Pitch Black.

This performance paper attends to the transmission of voice into the dark auditorium; it’s conditioning and calibrating through the distance and the darkness and what happens between the speaking body and the listening body in the shadows or partial light.

The spectacle, as the mediation between the artist and spectator, is defined by Jacques Ranciere as the ‘third thing that is owned by no one’, the thing to which both artist and spectator refer, but which prevents ‘any uniform transmission, any identity of cause and effect.’[3] This paper asks what implications this has for the voice in transmission between performer and spectator/auditor? Distance complicates any simple or passive attempt at ownership, serving as an intermediary state in which the sounded voice can exist outside of both bodies of performer and spectator. While the voice originates in the body of the performer and is caught by the ears of the spectators/auditors it exists in the time and space of performance also as ‘autonomous thing.’

Within this paper, I address how conditions of theatre darkness, and the choreography of illumination, might serve to reinforce both the perception of spatial dimension and the role of the voice as ‘autonomous thing’.