Aurality and Performing the Unheard

Can attention to the aurality of performing simultaneously reveal and problematise the production of meaning in acts of performance? How does the performer’s aurality – in particular their vocal aura: breath, body and air – function as an arbiter of this? This paper investigates how theatricalised vocality, in particular the performance of the unheard voice, creates a gestic aurality, which in turn generates an opportunity for non-ocularcentric dialogue between the body and voice. I will argue that within gestic gaps emerge certain affects of aural performance, and in these incomplete acts of utterance and our un-finished acts of listening are the points at which noise emerges. This paper will suggest that at these moments of aural hiatus, noise becomes productive in the problematisation of meaning. The ‘noise’ of performance and its aural adumbrations present an affective acoustic model for performance analysis, not within or beyond but generated by the body. This allows and enjoys the aural excesses of theatre noise in our understanding of how subjectivities are acted and how performance functions which, in turn, agitates the prevalent ocularcentricism of performance analysis