PARIP 2005

International Conference | 29 June - 03 July 2005

Brown: Ross | UK

Workshop abstract:

THE WORK OF THE GESTURE-OBJECT

Ross Brown and Simon Shepherd

Central School of Speech and Drama

The researchers:

Ross Brown is a theatre sound designer and composer.  He has a specific interest in sound which happens alongside or escapes from that which has been scored.  The accidental sounds, the bangs and bumps and mobile phones, all the clutter of endemically noisy bodies.

Simon Shepherd once directed shows and now simply writes about them.  He has a specific interest in what theatre does to and with bodies.  These bodies differ across history, culturally and biologically.  And in the theatre two sets of bodies, with differing deliberateness, respond to each other.

Their theme:

Brown argues that there is no such thing as silence, Shepherd that the bodied is always constructed.  Together they have become interested in what bodies do to make noise, and how noise helps to construct body.  To explore this interest they have focussed on gesture.  By their definition a gesture without sound is not possible. So to specify the character of this entity of combined elements - the muscular and sonic - they refer to the 'gesture-object'.  The muscular may be explicitly trained or so deeply learnt that it is called natural; the sonic may be scored for external or internal sounds, music or breath pattern, or it may be accidental and random.  Both the muscular and the sonic are space-defining.  As such the gesture-object may work on other bodies.

Their questions:

In general: How to name, and define the relationship between, the elements in the gesture-object; and specifically: How to define the relationship between sonic and muscular. In general: How to account for its effects on others; and specifically: How to determine the space-defining properties of the gesture-object. 

Their problems:

- They are making an abstract transhistorical model of something which is materially historically variable.    The specific applications of their modelling may well throw up unforeseen issues.  In particular they are working outside the conditions in which performance is watched.

- In this respect, they are trying both to show their work and evidence its truthfulness: the extent to which an audience knows itself to be observing may well impact on the ways they physiologically respond to what they see.  (And does performance research in this respect need to return to anthropology, rather than vice versa?)  How does one prove a phenomenological proposition?

- When an audience responds to a gesture-object, is a new gesture-object created, this time consisting of multiple bodies?  So then, are the researchers bound into a gesture-object, is the conference audience bound into the gesture-object?  And does the inhabiting of a gesture-object then have an effect on what someone thinks they are doing or seeing?

- Do we need to invent an audience audience?  What is it?

Their contribution to knowledge:

• Have they invented a viable concept: the gesture-object?
• Have they extended the ways of understanding the performance-audience relationship?
• Have they enabled further thought about observer/participant processes in sharing research outcomes?

Session abstract:

16 Essays on Composing The Third Man

r.brown@cssd.ac.uk

An original score for a stage production of The Third Man, presented in the form of a musical suite with video.  The production opened at Greenwich Theatre in October 2004 and tours the UK until December 2005.  It was announced in advance that the practice would also function as research. These audiovisual essays [re]present the original score as an artefact, reworked in 16 goes, with footnotes.

The post-production crafting of these essays provided a 2nd phase of practice-based interrogation of:

• The ‘site specific’ dramaturgies of staging and composing for a ‘classic’ film with an iconic score
• Music other than as setting, underscoring, incidental, background and atmospheric
• Music and material presences (actors, set, verbal objects and temporal objects such as lighting cues).
• Noise / signal and the ways in which Theatre (the capital T invokes audiences, stages, overtures, actors, plays etc.) offers the composer opportunity to organise the relationships of music with the surrounding noise (I extend the term beyond sonic noise).
• Dramaturgy of non-verbal hunch, resonance, suggestion, juxtaposition and anecdote en route from text to performance.
• Scenography – how to speak to sophisticated audience competencies learned from film / TV drama which subvert, dislocate, or ‘colour’ a scene through allusion, and to effect the relationship of audiences and performers to dramatic space and time (e.g.: through [irregular] rhythm and physical properties of sound).

In responding to this interrogation these essays attempt knowledge that avoids certainty, critically-distant objectivity and conclusive or singular answers.  Ambiguity, prevarication and distraction, along with hunch defined both of the composing process but also of reflection on that process and meta-practice.  Along with stylistic pastiche and cliché they both worked as features of the dramaturgy, and also became conceits that were worked.  The resultant performance was a deliberate theatrical pulp fiction: a yarn which the music helped spin  (in appropriately lurid musical language) whilst providing an autonomous plan of the performance.

The score tries to exist meaningfully here, away from its touring show.  In this abstract form the music tells its own story; Graham Greene’s story is not told.  Words, images and nearby theory swirl about in the thermal currents of the music and occasionally adhere with one another in molecules of potential meaning.  There is radio static under the sheets.  1948 is confused with 1967.  Spies and cowboys sip chocolate liqueur together in Vienneses cafes to the sound of the Stratocaster and harmonica.