Pulse (Dec 2022)
From Postdramatic Heterogeneity to New Reflections on Noise: The House of Extreme Music Theater and the Schachtophonia Accenni for Kamov
Abstract
Performative methodology of the House of Extreme Music Theater led by Croatian, Zagreb-based performing artists Damir Bartol Indoš and Tanja Vrvilo is largely based on the creation, recycling and abundant use of sound objects, deconstruction of voice and text, and collaborations with alternative rock and noise musicians and multimedia artists. But precisely because of its apparently chaotic, noisy manifestation, it is easy to miss the structure and concept that is undoubtedly in the background of every performance. If we take into account the predominance of music and noise in such an open model in terms of genre, it would be appropriate to try to define theoretical and methodological guidelines for its description, which this article will try to do. Observing the work of House of Extreme Music Theater, the following questions arise: How does its “noisy” poetics affect the definition of genre and analytical approaches to it, and, 1 conversely, how does the chosen genre framework affect the status of noise that is produced in the performances of this “theater”? In this sense, the article will refer to the previous theoretical reflections on the House of Extreme Music Theater genre coordinates while trying to expand them with the concepts of independent auditory semiotics and musicalization, closely related to the notion of postdramatic theater as proposed by Hans-Thies Lehmann. Finally, the analysis of the music theater performance Schachtophonia Accenni for Kamov will try to show how the broad and permeable postdramatic determinant shapes the interpretation of noise in theater or noise as theater.
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