Critical Stages (Dec 2021)
Strategies in The Underhe(a)rd: Listening in to New Compositional Queer Performance-making
Abstract
In Sonic Agency (2019), Brandon LaBelle draws on the thinking of both Judith Butler (1990) and Sara Ahmed (2006) to put forward an argument for queering the acoustic, or “giving accent to the ways in which acts of compositioning assist in processes of (re)orientation that may additionally upset the dominant tonality of a given place” (190). Here we draw on LaBelle’s work to think into sonic elements of Practice as Research in a new work of music theatre on queerness and pandemics, HERD. Through a speculative essaimblage sub-titled: “Fantasia on A Debrief We Have Yet to Have,” we draw out the underherd and the underheard through the interplay of individual and collective experience and propose an emergent glossary of terms for queer dramaturgy. This, we propose, articulates nascent methodologies for queer performance-making, while providing a touchpoint for thinking through how we negotiate queerness and sound in our work, and in our methods of collaboration.
