This project has attempted to convince the reader of the significance of sound
design in contemporary theater practice by moving beyond common assumptions of the
purposes of the “soundtrack” and reconfiguring the location of sonic activity in audient
and sonorous bodies. Critics have long debated musical meaning in the theater without
satisfactory conclusion, while audiences have enjoyed, even savored the sounds of
theatrical performance, finding rich possibilities therein. Brown describes “the
audience’s cultural familiarity” with music in the theater as “a kind of participatory
dramaturgy, while the cadences and rhythms of the music still do their work of
underscoring emotional vectors in the liminal space between performance and reception”
(Sound, 65). An audience’s cultural familiarities with what is heard in performance is a
kind of ghosting from one performance to the next as well as the more important work of
moving beyond the theater to understand performance in terms of everyday life. How are
sound, voice, music, and noise in performance related to the world an audience will
return to when they leave the theater? While many audiences are offered clear and fixed
meanings for the sounds and sights they experience in performance, perhaps a
dramaturgy of multiple meanings and possibilities might offer audiences a more
satisfying theater experience through the participatory activity of doing their own
thinking and feeling.
SITI Company’s mode of theater creation, in which “one can both see and hear,”
might be such a model. A daily part of their practice, SITI’s relationship with sounding,
154 listening, and vibration opens their work to affective possibilities. As Jean-Luc Nancy
writes, “The sonorous… outweighs form. It does not dissolve it but rather enlarges it; it
gives it an amplitude, a density and a vibration or an undulation whose outline never does
anything but approach” (2). SITI’s work attempts to approach meaning without fixing it
in place. They do so by cultivating an active relationship with sensation and affect that is
especially pronounced in the ways they work with sound. Deleuze and Guattari identify
three “compounds of sensations” in art that may be identified in SITI’s work. These
compounds of sensations are:
the vibration, which characterizes the simple sensation (but it is already durable
or compound, because it rises and falls, implies a constitutive difference of level,
follows an invisible thread that is more nervous than cerebral); the embrace or the
clinch (when two sensations resonate in each other by embracing each other so
tightly in a clinch of what are no more than ‘energies’); withdrawal, division,
distension (when, on the contrary, two sensations draw apart, release themselves,
but so as now to be brought together by the light, the air, or the void that sinks
between them or into them, like a wedge that is at once so dense and so light that
it extends in every direction as the distance grows, and forms a bloc that no longer
needs a support). Vibrating sensation—coupling sensation—opening or splitting,
hollowing out sensation. (What Is Philosophy? 168)
Suzuki actor training, as practiced by SITI Company, involves embodied work with
vibration, while the composition process, as led by Anne Bogart and informed by
155 Viewpoints practice, attends to the vibration of intensive moments on stage, the embrace
or clinch of two sensations resonating together—like the embodied sounds of Ellen
Lauren and the second sound of her sonic body reverberating as she sleepwalks through
the spherical pickup of onstage microphones, and the withdrawal, division, distension
that makes up Viewpoints work in general as it operates on the plane of immanence.
I have focused on affect in SITI Company’s acting and sound design work
because the experience of multiplicity—what Barney O’Hanlon calls “the theater of co
existence” (O’Hanlon, Personal interview)—an acknowledged goal of the company,
involves the power and ability to affect and be affected. Cox points to a body’s “dynamic
relationships with other entities” (Cox, “How Do You…”) as a description of affect. In
an effort to address the difficulty of writing clearly about affect—“hazy, atmospheric, and
nevertheless perfectly apprehensible” (Guattari, 158)—I have applied the theories of
Barthes and Peirce. Barthes’s “grain” of the voice, the embodied excess involved in the
process of signifiance, both individual and cultural, I suggest is affect at work. By
confining myself to the work of only two of Peirce’s ten sign categories, the icon and the
index, I am able to identify affect in what he describes as emotional and energetic
interpretants. The endless chaining of signification for Peirce, in which interpretants
become signs that then have another effect in the auditor is alike to Barthes’s ever
changing, ever growing process of signifiance. Both are affect, and both theories have
enabled me to think about SITI Company’s work and the relationship between sound
design and acting in general.
156 Sound, affect, multiplicity, co-existence—these are all aspects of SITI’s theater
practice. When Anne Bogart was asked what legacy she and the company might leave
for future generations, Bogart replied, “it’s actually a way of leaving a legacy of a way of
being together” (Conversations with Anne 507). The unique relationship between sound
design and acting practiced by SITI Company is a way of being together, a commitment
to the social experience of theater practice and theater reception, a theater of co
existence.