Mladen Ovadija

DRAMATURGY OF SOUND IN THE AVANT-GARDE AND POSTDRAMATIC THEATRE

A manuscript submitted to the McGill-Queen’s University Press, March (revised in Aug.) 2011

Copyright by the author, 2011

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DRAMATURGY OF SOUND IN THE AVANT-GARDE AND POSTDRAMATIC THEATRE

Contents

INTRODUCTION 5

First Chapter -- The Performativity of Voice and the Architecture of Sound in Theatre 15

Second Chapter -- Avant-garde and Postmodern Conceptions of Aurality 39

A CENTURY OF SOUND SATURATION 39

THE SUBVERSIVE POWER OF NOISE 44

SOUND AND NOISE UNDER SCIENTIFIC SURVEILLANCE 50

ORALITY AND LITERACY: THE AURAL/TEMPORAL VERSUS THE VISUAL/SPATIAL 56

SYNTHETIC THEATRE AND THE SYNAESTHETIC POTENTIAL OF SOUND 61

AVANT-GARDE HYBRIDIZATION: TOWARD AN INTERMEDIAL THEATRE 68

SOUND AND MEANING: PERFORMATIVE IDIOM VERSUS DISCURSIVE LANGUAGE 72

SEMIOTICS AND THE POSTMODERN RENEWAL OF AURALITY 77

Third Chapter -- Sound Poetry and Bruitist Performance: Words-in-Freedom 94

ORALITY AS THE THEATRICAL SUBSTANCE OF FUTURIST SERATE 94

SOUND AND SANE IDEAS OF DADAIST FOLLY AND ABSTRACTIONISM 102

SYNCRETISM AND SIMULTANEITY OF THE VERBAL AND THE VISUAL

114

THE VERBO-VOCO-VISUAL FORM OF ZANG TUMB TUMB AND ITS PERFORMANCE POTENTIAL 118

ANALOGY, ONOMATOPOEIA, ICONICITY: FROM SOUND POETRY TO ABSTRACT THEATRE 128

Fourth Chapter -- Zaum: From a “Beyonsense” Language to an Abstract Idiom of Theatre 144

THE WORD-AS-SUCH: SOUND VERSUS MEANING AND CONTENT VERSUS FORM 144
AURAL RESOURCES OF WORD-MAKING (RECHETVORSTVO) 148

VERBAL ART: VOWELS AND CONSONANTS IN THE FRAGMENTED WORDS OF ZAUM 152

PRIMORDIAL INCANTATION IN THE ROOTS OF ZAUM 156

THE ARTICULATORY ASPECT OF ZAUM AS ITS PERFORMATIVE POTENTIAL 152

AURAL PRINCIPLES OF ZAUM IN FUTURIST MUSIC, PAINTING, AND THEATRE

164

VICTORY OVER THE SUN: A CASE STUDY OF THE THEATRICALIZATION OF ZAUM 167

ZANGEZI: AN ANTI-BABEL SOUND SCULPTURE 173

THE CORPOREAL AND ABSTRACT SOUNDS OF ZAUM: TOWARD THEATRE PERFORMANCE 182

Fifth Chapter -- The Dramaturgy of Sound at Work: From Futurist Serate to Sintesi 194

PIEDIGROTTA AND GALLERY PERFORMANCES: VARIETY THEATRE GOES SYNTHETIC

194

L’ARTE DEI RUMORI: A NEW MUSICAL REALITY 202

THE ART OF NOISES IN TWENTIETH CENTURY MUSIC AND PERFORMANCE ART 214

LA RADIA: A MANIFESTO OF A PURE ACOUSTIC ART 223

RADIO SINTESI: PREFIGURING CAGE’S CONCEPT OF SILENCE IN MUSIC AND PERFORMANCE

229

Sixth Chapter -- Sound as Structure: Toward an Abstract Architecture of Theatre 241

ONOMATOPOEIA, ANALOGY, ICONICITY: TOWARD THE PLASTIC MOTO-RUMORIST COMPLEX 241

DADAIST SOUND AND SCHWITTERS’S MERZ-STAGE: PRELUDES TO TOTAL THEATRE 247

EXPRESSIONIST GEIST PERFORMANCE: A CONFLUENCE OF VERBAL, VOCAL, AND STAGE SOUND

260

AURAL DRAMATURGY OF THE FUTURIST SYNTHETIC THEATRE 265

PRAMPOLINI, CARRÀ, AND DEPERO: SYNAESTHETIC THEORIES AND ABSTRACT SYNTHETIC

STAGES 278

THE PLASTIC MOTO-RUMORIST COMPLEX: A PREFIGURATION OF THE BAUHAUS THEATRE 281

Seventh Chapter -- The Avant-garde Dramaturgy of Sound through a Rear-view Mirror of

Postdramatic Theatre 295

EPILOGUE 337

Bibliography 342
DRAMATURGY OF SOUND IN THE AVANT-GARDE AND POSTDRAMATIC THEATRE

INTRODUCTION

This book, strictly speaking, belongs to the field of theatre studies, but to be true to its

subject, sound, it adopts a multidisciplinary approach and includes discussion of the aural

principles and methods of poetry, performance, painting, and music developed in the historical

avant-garde and subsequently applied in contemporary theatre. It explores the dramaturgy of

sound -- at first glance an oxymoronic term. If dramaturgy’s customary concern is the temporal

and spatial disposition of the plot in a dramatic text and its staging -- an orderly and ordering

enterprise par excellence -- how can it possibly be paired with something disorderly, something

as transient and at once as delicate and powerful as the sound of wind through leaves, as

emotional as a sigh or a cry, or as disruptive as a clap of thunder? Fluid, erotic, immediate, and

signifying through its own materiality, sound is not an arbitrary signifier denoting a thing or an

act; it is a thing and/or an act in itself. It is an aural object thrown onstage through a performative

act -- utterance or gesture -- that “betrays” the text (of literary drama). “Representation and

interpretation,” alleges Jim Drobnik, “are issues in which sound shares with pictures and text, yet

sound reconfigures these very issues by inflecting representation with affect, and interpretation

with embodiment … [and] challenges the conventions of visual and textual models.”1 The

transience, immanence, fluidity, dynamics, and sensuality of the human voice and expressiveness

of stage sound - traditionally considered secondary to the primacy of the text - are essential

elements of the performativity and scenic dynamics that propel contemporary theatre. As such,

sound reveals - or perhaps more appropriately, is - performance. The dramaturgy of sound,

therefore, reads/writes another type of text (one of physical theatricality) by the temporal and

spatial disposition of aural objects/acts of performance: voice - not only a carrier of speech but

also an emotional, pulsional,2 gestural expression in excess of it - and sound - not only

supporting music or incidental noise but also an autonomous stage building material. Discussing

Robert Wilson’s “theatre of images,” an epitome of “postdramatic” staging, Patrice Pavis notes

that it “plays simultaneously ‘on both panels’ [visual and auditive] according to the two rhythms

peculiar to each system, and particularly that such a theatre needs music [or organized

sound/silence, as John Cage would have it] and the voice to ‘cement’ the images.”3

I see dramaturgy in the sense of Eugenio Barba’s description of the term as a live process

of drama-ergon, that is, “work of actions” in the performance,4 which is based on his

understanding of the term “text” in its pre-verbal meaning of “a weaving together,” a ritual

process of discovery of a never decipherable world. In contemporary theatre practice this textual

attribute of “weaving” becomes simultaneously available for theatrical and dramaturgical use

that does not stop at the representation of a play, if such really exists as a blueprint for

performance. It does not stop even at a director’s creation of a conceptual and practical shape of

mise-en-scène or its factual incarnation by the performers’ stage presence but stretches into an

interactive environment of the theatrical event to solicit the audience participation (the

immersiveness of sound first comes to mind here as its constituent). It thus translates play text

into textuality of stage performance. Possibly, but not necessarily, it may start as “narrative

dramaturgy” that through “organic or dynamic dramaturgy, which is the composition of the

rhythms and dynamisms affecting the spectators on a nervous, sensorial and sensual level,”

evolves into “dramaturgy of changing states when the entirety of what [is shown] manages to

evoke something totally different, similar to when a song develops another sound line through
the harmonics.”5 One should note that while the first dramaturgy still holds to the Aristotelian

concept of drama, the last two remind us of the avant-garde methods of assaulting the audience

with deliberate sensory overload and the inclusion of spectators in a performance event, both of

which are closely linked with sound. Indeed, the theatrical event lives and dies with the lights

and sounds of a stage inhabited by moving bodies by exposing all the event’s elements in their

perceptible materiality. Its ergonomics depends on visceral, concrete, and abstract qualities of

kinetic masses of stage objects and suffering/joyful human bodies, changing lights and colours,

and voices, noises, sounds, and silences felt, seen, and heard as much as on plot development.

Here, the “work of actions” is not exhausted in the realm of the dramatic plot of

interwoven characters’ actions, which as Aristotle admits, does not even require

spectacle/staging (opsis) since it is complete in itself. Elinor Fuchs notes: “If we are approaching

the end of character [and plot] on the postmodern stage, what is replacing it? Perhaps a flux of

Aristotle’s six famous elements, with Character and Action no longer holding dominion over

Music, Diction, Thought, and Spectacle. Indeed the independence Aristotle assigned to these

aspects of theater almost makes him sound like the first anticipator of the postmodern. … In the

theater of difference, each signifying element - lights, visual design, music, etc., as well as plot

and character elements - stands to some degree as an independent actor. It is as if all the

Aristotelian elements of theater had survived, but had slipped the organizing structure of their

former hierarchy.”6 The clash of independent material elements, although received as dramatic or

significant, breaks the rules of dramatic representation. It actually becomes essential for “the

dramaturgy on shifting grounds” in which “the traditional hierarchy of theatrical elements has

almost vanished: as the text is no longer the central and superior factor, all the other elements

like space, light, sound, music, movement and gesture tend to have an equal weight in the
performance process.”7 The dramaturgy of sound operates in this counterpoint of performative

and theatrical, corporeal and figurative, visceral and architectural elements.

I argue that the initial probes into anti-textual sonority made by the historical avant-

garde have a viable and germane relationship with the auditory semiotics of postdramatic theatre.

From the ideas and practice related to sound in different historical movements (Futurism,

Expressionism, Dadaism, the Bauhaus, etc.) a twofold, that is simultaneously oral and aural,

dramaturgy of sound, emerges. It is described in this book as a theatrical method developed in

the interplay of the performance’s corporeal elements, vocal gesture, and incantation (in an arc

from Artaud to Lyotard) with the abstract/concrete architecture of the aural stage (from the

Bauhaus to Wilson). This development appears to me to shed light on another contemporary

theatre weave -- an amalgamation of “performative turn” (Erika Fischer-Lichte) and

postdramatic theatricality (Hans-Thies Lehmann). Therefore, charting a history of innovative

early twentieth-century conceptions and practices of sound poetry, arts, and performance - and,

in line with Lehmann’s and Fischer-Lichte’s theoretical discourse - my study makes a case for

the centrality of sound as both a performative and architectural constituent of contemporary

theatre.

Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre (German edition 1999, English translation 2006)

appears as a proposal for contemporary discourse based on an autonomous theatricality of “states

and of scenically dynamic formations.” It is conceived as an answer to “the crisis of drama” that

Peter Szondi diagnosed in works of Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Maeterlinck, and Hauptman, in

his Theory of the Modern Drama (1956). These modern playwrights abandoned the absolute

correlation of content and form of the ideal “Drama” defined by Hegel and its historical source

that Szondi traces to the Renaissance, when “a bold intellectual effort [was] made by a newly
self-conscious being […to] mirror himself on the basis of interpersonal relationships alone” --

relationships that in effect dictate the dialogical structure of drama. “Man entered the drama only

as a fellow human being, so to speak. … Most radical of all was the exclusion of that which

could not express itself - the world of objects - unless it entered the realm of interpersonal

relations.”8 The representational capacity of such character/plot/action-driven situational drama

was challenged by the intrusion of epic features in modernist drama analyzed by Szondi. Soon

after, the historical avant-gardes started to question the integrity of this “newly self-conscious

being” and the representational techniques of his illusionistic, bourgeois drama, shifting

emphasis to the theatricality and materiality of performance and refusing to serve mimetic

reconstructions of the literary text. Another intrusion happening from the 1960s onwards, an

explosion of hybridized artistic techniques and forms, various audiovisual installations, and

media presentations -- cinematic, electronic, and digital -- that flooded the contemporary stage,

brought about further disruption of the dramatic form. Acknowledging this development, in a

way “different from Szondi’s, who only discusses modern theatre in negative terms -- as an art

form in crisis, a becoming-problematic of drama -- Lehmann maps out an affirmative aesthetics

of postdramatic theatre and provides a catalogue of ideas that allow describing and analyzing that

kind of theatre in positive terms.”9 In his “postdramatic” concept of theatre, the world of objects

and energies (and so of sound) re-entered the stage exclusively reserved for a dialogic interaction

of characters.

Presenting a “plethora of phenomena in the theatre landscape of the last few decades,”

the outcome of the heterogeneous “dramaturgies beyond the representation,” Lehmann inscribes

a new paradigm of the postdramatic in the contemporary theoretical discourse. This paradigmatic

landscape that appears after three centuries of dominantly dramatic theatre incorporates “the
enormous variety of theatre work: from a theatre of images to a theatre of voices, from choral

and monologic structures to durational performance.” Lehmann notes: “Today a Gotthold

Ephraim Lessing, who could develop the dramaturgy of postdramatic theatre, is unthinkable.”10

However, Lehmann acknowledges the role of the materiality of sound in the disruption of visual

and textual orders in both the avant-garde and the postdramatic theatre. His concepts of “auditory

semiotics,” “theatre as music,” “turn to performance,” and “scenic dynamic as opposed to

dramatic dynamic” haveproved instrumental for my exploration of the role of the dramaturgy of

sound in an all-embracing deconstruction of literary drama by postdramatic theatricality.

Accordingly, my book discusses a corpus of contemporary works that distance

themselves from dramatic representation by sonically, visually, or kinetically embodying their

postdramatic structures and “narratives.” It evidences the “echo” of the historical avant-garde

experiments with sound in the orality/aurality of recent performances/productions and, in the

process, espouses a novel approach to theatre based on the dramaturgy of sound as a viable tool

for a postdramatic performance analysis.

The lineage of both performative and theatrical aspects of corporeal vocal gesture and

abstract sonic architecture are traced back to their historical avant-garde sources from Marinetti’s

“lyrical intoxication with matter,” onomatopoeia, destruction of syntax, and liberation of words

in his sound poem Zang Tumb Tumb and the accompanying manifestos; through the bruitist

declamations at the Futurist serate, examined as predecessors of Hugo Ball’s verse ohne worte

(wordless verse), Richard Huelsenbeck’s celebration of rough noise, and simultaneous poetry

performances at the Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire; to Tristan Tzara’s and Marcel Duchamp’s poetics

of indeterminacy, which influenced the new American avant-garde, most notably John Cage.

Cage’s endeavours in performance art, dramaturgy of sound and/or silence, and durational
concept of music are analyzed in line with Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noises. This legacy is also

investigated in Kandinsky’s synaesthetic and vibrational theory of “inner sound” leading toward

synthetic and intermedial theatre and abstractionist tendencies of the dramaturgy of sound. The

Geist acting/staging style developed in this sense by Expressionist Lothar Schreyer is discussed

as a meeting point of the orality and aurality, the vocal performance of dramatic text, and

abstract/concrete stage sound. In the same vein, the poetic principles of Alexei Kruchenykh’s

and Velimir Khlebnikov’s zaum, a beyond sense (or “beyonsense”) language, are found to be

formative factors of the theatricality and kinetic sculptural character of the Russian Futurist stage

works Victory over the Sun and Zangezi, produced by Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Matiushin, and

Vladimir Tatlin. On the Italian side this path toward abstraction is documented in a number of

Futurist synthetic theatre pieces in which sound is considered an independent building block of a

scenography that incarnates the “plastic moto-rumorist complex,” a precursor of Bauhaus

synacoustic and synoptic stage architecture.

Finally, the last chapter looks at the dramaturgy of sound and its historical avant-garde

sources through the rear-view mirror of postdramatic theatre. It offers a series of short case

analyses of instances of the dramaturgy of sound in performance/production of the last few

decades, including works of the Living Theatre, Peter Brook, Tadeusz Kantor, Robert Wilson,

Caryl Churchill, Christoph Marthaler, Einer Schleef, Sound & Fury, the Socìetas Raffaello

Sanzio, and the Theatregroep Hollandia. Thus the book ends with a coda to the opening

discussion of the performativity of the corporeal voice and the architectural value of

concrete/abstract sound in poetry, music, visual arts, and theatre, which re-evaluates the legacy

of the avant-garde dramaturgy of sound in the contemporary theatrical discourse and

orality/aurality in postdramatic performance practice.

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1
Jim Drobnick, “Listening Awry,” in Aural Cultures, Toronto: YYZ Books, 1994, 20.
2
The term “pulsion/al” figures in several English translations of Jean-François Lyotard’s books,

representing the French pulsion/èle, which is in turn used for Sigmund Freud’s term Triebe,

whose standard English translation is “drive” or “instinct/ual.” Writing about sound in theatre, I

have opted for “pulsion” for its euphonic value, which connotes a pulsating rhythm of

performance.
3
Patrice Pavis, Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of the Theatre. New York: PAJ,

1982, 190.
4
Eugenio Barba, “The Nature of Dramaturgy: Describing Actions at Work,” New Theatre

Quarterly, 1 (1985), 75.

5
Eugenio Barba, “The Deep Order Called Turbulence: The Three Faces of Dramaturgy,” The

Drama Review vol. 44, no. 4 (Winter 2000), 60.

6
Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University

Press, 1996, 175/6.

7
Hans-Thies Lehmann and Patrick Primavesi, “Dramaturgy on Shifting Grounds,” Performance

Research, vol. 14 (2009), no. 3, 3.

8
Peter Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama: A Critical Edition, edited and translated by

Michael Hays, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 7.

9
Markus Wessendorf, “The Postdramatic Theatre of Richard Maxwell,” Norsk Shakespeare—og

teatertidsskrift (Oslo) 1/2006: 29-33. http://www2.hawaii.edu/~wessendo/Maxwell.htm

10
Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, translated by Karen Jürs-Munby. New York:

Routledge, 2006, 25.

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DRAMATURGY OF SOUND IN THE AVANT-GARDE AND POSTDRAMATIC THEATRE

First Chapter -- The Performativity of Voice and the Architecture of Sound in Theatre

The breakthrough of the dramaturgy of sound is not an issue of artistic technique or

craftsmanship; it is a consequence of the avant-garde’s recognition of the materiality of sound,

its revision of the conventional referentiality of artistic means, and its establishment of a new

aesthetic that deals with sound as matter, as form, and as an independent constituent of the work

of art. It is no longer a question of how to produce, by means of sound, a work of art that would

represent an object, signify something, or express an aesthetic idea formulated elsewhere in

culture, language, or theory. Rather, it is a question of how to deal with sound itself as an actor in

the drama of things, either as an erotic material of a carnal/vocal performance or as an element of

a new theatricality in which it interacts independently with lights, objects, and stage design.

Conceiving a method of theatrical composition or construction that tells its own “plot” through

the process of an oral/aural semiosis, the dramaturgy of sound has become constitutive of a

theatre that places more emphasis on performance, mise en scène, and the audio-visual

architecture of the stage than it does on dramatic text. Its story, recounted in this book, begins

with the historical avant-garde’s exploits in the field of orality/aurality of performance.

The topic of theatre sound is treated with an overwhelming negligence in contemporary

critical and scholarly discourse. By and large, theatre historians have ignored the seminal role

that the historical avant-garde’s treatment of sound played in the development of contemporary

performance. Likewise, theoreticians of sound poetry and audio art -- Douglas Kahn, Steve

McCaffery, and Klaus Schöning, to name three -- have identified the Futurists and Dadaists as

pioneers of acoustic art, but they have generally not examined the sustained and multi-faceted
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impact that the exploratory work of these forerunners has had on theatre. Philosophers and

theorists such as Adriana Cavarero, Martin Jay, and Steven Connor have discussed the aurality

paradigm that has recently gained currency in postmodern cultural discourse but have left

unexplored its theatrical aspect. The same can be said of recently published studies devoted to

the profound analysis of sound and its genuine philosophy and aesthetics, like those by Casey

O'Callaghan, Brandon LaBelle, and Salomé Voegelin. Nevertheless, the discourse on the

orality/aurality of theatre has been lately revived in academia, as at the Central School of Speech

and Drama at the University of London, a site of the conference “Theatre Noice: The Sound of

Performance” held in 2009, and home to sound design teacher Ross Brown whose

comprehensive reader in theatre sound practice appeared in 2010, and in theatre journals such as

Performance Research and Modern Drama, whose Winter 2009 issue was devoted to voice and

performance.

Meanwhile, general studies of theatre art have assigned sound a mainly illustrative role as a

sort of aural coulisse for a performance/production. Stagecraft manuals consider sound design in

a context of the practical application of other artistic disciplines such as architecture, sculpture,

painting, and music. Conceptually and pragmatically, sound has remained limited to its relational

role as a means that together with stage setting and lighting defines the location of the action and

the mood of the scene, marks the passage of time, and announces actors’ entrances and exits. The

2006 Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance reads: “Lighting and sound may be

indispensable elements of performance events but they are often overlooked by the public, critics

and academics alike. An explanation for this invisibility is the fact that they usually have

supplementary or supporting rather than dominant roles. Used often to provoke emotional

responses or create mood in a subliminal rather than overt way, they are mostly employed non-
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figuratively. They thus need to be considered in relation to other aspects of the mise en scène or

production rather than just by themselves.”11

More encouragingly, and in contrast to this summary description of the illustrative

function of sound, some theatre scholars, notably Hans-Thies Lehmann and Erika Fischer-Lichte,

the most cited theatre theoreticians of the last decade, have begun to give theatre sound its due.

Lehmann, in his Postdramatic Theatre, acknowledged the substantiveness of stage sound and the

emergence of an auditory semiotics, while Fischer-Lichte, in her work The Transformative

Power of Performance, conceived of a “performative generation of materiality” in which the

orality/aurality of performance plays a major role. Their central argument in the approach to

contemporary theatre builds on the historical avant-garde’s rejection of the literary/dramatic text

in favour of the performance, either as an immediate event or as an art installation. It concurres

with my point of view that the historical avant-garde’s recognition of the materiality of sound

and an ensuing dramaturgy of sound secured theatrical sound the position of a non-figurative

element participating in the synaesthetic, synacoustic, synoptic, and syncretic forms of

contemporary performance.

But what is sound to theatre, or theatre to sound? What would be the motive and the cue

for our cry for sound? Whatever the answers to this quasi-Shakespearean question, it holds true

that sound has become the subject of renewed interest in contemporary theatre discourse.

In theatre, as in life, sound is born and dies with action. The transitory life of sound is

essentially dramatic.12 It becomes audible only when a moving mass of gaseous, liquid, or solid

matter comes into contact with an obstacle to create whistling, trumpeting, hums, shrills, babbles,

gurgles, shrieks, drumbeats, rings, and the like. Sound emanates from the stage in the form of

vocal utterances (speech, chanting, and singing), instrumental renditions (music), and the
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clamour of environmental onstage and offstage events (noise). We perceive it as a sensory

attraction caused by a movement of air coming from an animate source (such as a performer) or

an inanimate source (perhaps a part of stage setting). The transience, immanence, fluidity,

dynamics, and sensuality of the human voice and expressiveness of the stage sound -

traditionally considered as secondary to the primacy of the text - are essential elements of the

performativity and scenic dynamics that propel contemporary theatre. Sound, thus, reveals - or

perhaps more appropriately, is - performance.

Sound by its very nature contradicts and destabilizes the objectivity, certainty, and

distinctiveness of sight on which Cartesian logocentrism relies. It has thus become a part of the

weaponry in the struggle of the historical avant-garde against the closure of representation of the

dramatic text as analyzed by Jacques Derrida. However, highlighting the role of sound in theatre

does not mean that we ought to consider aurality as the preferred sense of performance and

reception. Quite the contrary, the spatio-temporal reality of the stage is an area where sight and

sound overlap in a complex relationship. David Burrows notes that “at the same time that the

viewer in each of us is stepping back from the world and sorting its contents out into discrete

entities, the listener in each of us is merging with a range of its activity.”13 Experiencing theatre

(listening/watching/being there) is like stepping across a crevasse without looking down; we hear

sound emanating from an “opaque” depth and moving toward the signs at a “clear” horizon of

meaning. This sound presupposes the emotional and cognitive engagement of

spectators/listeners: their sensual immersion in the event and their reflection on its possible

meaning. But what appears as a tidy resolution, a dialectic unity of opposites, is undone by a

series of constantly renewed dichotomies -- sound/meaning, speech/language, time/space,

body/sense, performance/text -- that lie at the core of theatre theory and practice, layered with
 17

ancient history and contemporary urgency. Always associated with the first elements of these

pairs, theatrical sound was a subject of intense discussion in the historical avant-garde,

particularly among Futurists, Expressionists, and Dadaists, who largely focused their arguments

on two material aspects of sound: its corporeality and its abstract form. Hence, in the early years

of the twentieth century, the recognition of the materiality of sound, first practised in Futurist

poetry and performance, prompted the formulation of a genuine aesthetic and dramaturgy of

sound. The radical shift from the words’ meaning to their sounding was coupled with the

dissociation of vocal utterance from syntactical language. Coinciding with the avant-garde’s

critical rejection of narrative and figurative pretensions in literature, art, and theatre, this change

of perspective provided the conceptual grounds for the development of sound-text poetry,

musique concrète, abstract and objectless painting, and antitextual theatre. All of these artistic

trends were more concerned with material -- sound, noise, and colour, painterly mass and

physical elements of theatre -- than with signification.

Patrice Pavis argues that the materiality of theatrical signs arises when the spectator

perceives various sensory attractions acting alongside the signifier with no attempt to reach the

signified. Spectators/listeners enjoy the corporeality of the actor, the texture of the spoken voice,

music, sounds, colours, and rhythms emanating from stage: “they do not have to reduce this

experience to words; they savour rather the ‘erotic in the theatre act’ without trying to reduce the

performance to a series of signs.”14 Thus, through its perceived oral/aural materiality, voice and

sound (no longer necessarily vocal) reclaim their own structural value in a synergetic

relationship with movement, light, and other stage elements of postdramatic theatre.

Robert Wilson, who epitomizes a dominant performance trend in postdramatic theatre of

the last few decades, produces his pieces as kinetic constellations of aural and visual icons. He
 18

uses a method of switching channels between auditory and visual sensations, traditionally framed

as separate entities, conceived as a juxtaposition of “a radio image over the film’s voice” while

allowing both to maintain their autonomy. Wilson explains this criss-crossing of aural and visual

sensations by reminding us of the power of radio plays to suggest limitless images and the power

of silent films to provoke our unbounded imagination of sounds. Sergei Eisenstein similarly

conceived his method of “the montage of attractions,” in which sound, movement, space, and

voice do not accompany each other but function as elements of equal significance. In the

exemplary experience of Kabuki theatre that he describes, Eisenstein compares the audience to a

man who perceives vibration of light as sound, and tremors of air as colour; that is, he hears

light and sees sound. Wilson relieves us from listening to words, which are in any case

meaningless, and encourages us: “Just enjoy the scenery, the architectural arrangements in time

and space, the music, the feeling they all evoke! Listen to the pictures!”15

True experiences of the power of theatre are rare, but I remember one such moment when

director Paolo Magelli created an immersive aural space based on the purely physical sensation

of sound in his 1998 staging of The Phoenician Women.16 Long before the actors entered the

stage, we, the audience, were sucked into an intensely aural performance space. As we entered

the theatre (the audience were seated on the stage) and took our seats, we were deluged by a tidal

wave created by the constant wailing of a boat siren, gradually increasing in volume. Our initial

shock of disbelief was soon replaced by sensory overload and discomfort as we struggled to keep

our heads “above water” in this huge wave of sound. We had no choice but to swim. We felt a

heavy, wet burden around and in us as our bodies slowly began to resonate with the

overwhelming pressure of sound that for some of us was physically nauseating. The first

footsteps of the actors sounded in an acoustic hole created by the sudden retreat of the siren.
 19

With the clear echo of the cothurni in pitch darkness, the distinct percussive sound of their steps

across the empty stage brought relief from the physical burden and the deafening opacity of the

siren. But calming as the new aural configuration seemed, the eerie echo and imminent staccato

of the rushing steps of the chorus announced further turmoil. Our immersion in a sensual

(although involuntary) sound bath of the boat siren anticipated the coming bloodshed at the

Theban court. Rendered vulnerable by sheer sound, we listened to the actors’ voices, ears tuned

to hear what they had to utter. What they uttered was again defined by sound - the phonetic

material of speech.

The effective use of sound and voice in theatre, apart from the textual content of drama,

dates back to antiquity. Embryonic theatre events, religious rituals, tribal rites, and shamanistic

séances all used the magic of sound to heal and celebrate, to lament and mourn, to attract the

good spirits and scare the evil ones. The rhythms of drums and the melodies of primitive

euphonic instruments prompted chant and dance that united all participants in a ceremony. This

ability of raw sound to renew the communality of the event and to escape the dominance of the

text was recognized by poets, painters, and theatre artists of the avant-garde who returned to

“primitive” chant and dance, and the patterns of Balinese and African masks. Even Greek

tragedy, a classical source of Western text-based dramaturgy, displays an aural/rhythmical

structure that points to its oral and ritual provenance. Thanos Vovolis, who is known for his

restoration of the acoustical resonance mask used in Greek theatre, found that tragic verses

contained phonetic fragments (vowels, diphthongs, and syllables) inherited from the repertory of

lamentations rooted in the performance tradition of the Eleusinian mysteries, with a substantial

part of actors’ speech material consisting of the ritual lamentation cry (ololygmos). In Aeschylus’

Persians, for instance, there are more than one hundred such occurrences.17 The rendition of
 20

these archetypal sounds -- incomprehensible vocal remnants from Dionysian rites -- required a

technique of voice formation and speech articulation entirely different from the psychological

and intellectual manipulation of an actor’s expressive powers in naturalistic theatre. Hence, the

sound of the tragic actors’ voices carried not only the textual content of the tragedy but also an

aural texture travelling toward spectators engaged in communal listening to an oral performance

of mythos. This aural texture could not be exhausted by a mere articulation of the rhythmic

structure of iambic or trochaic verses shaped by prosodic and rhetorical rules. When director

Andrei Serban with his actors explored how to create “a sound which grows and turns into a

cry,” he turned to a classical example: “What is than that touches us in Electra? What does

Electra say during her long lament? It is difficult to determine. … She repeats: ‘eee’. It is simply

what one hears: a prolonged ‘e’. What does this continual repetition of a vowel mean? Nothing

that can be translated; ‘e’ means nothing other than ‘e’. The meaning is in the sound itself. The

fundamental character of the tragedy can be rediscovered in this unique sound -- impossible to

translate.”18 Apparently, underneath the mythos ran an opaque story, embodied in the voices,

verbal gestures, and actions of the actors, an aural story of a world created from the magmatic

state of matter through a turbulent history of strife between chthonic forces, Titans, Olympic

gods, and men. The oral performance of this primal story, still unrefined by literature, could be

achieved only through a Dionysian inebriation with music, regarded by Nietzsche as a source of

tragedy. Phenomenologist of sound Don Ihde explains this immediacy of music (or sound), a

dense presence in which there is no purity of conceptual meaning, following Sören Kierkegaard

who describes it as the “pure sensuous,” the “demonic,” or the pregnancy of meaning that

presents itself as music.

 21

No words could put the audience of Magelli’s The Phoenician Women in the centre of

Thebes, burdened with the expectation of unavoidable tragedy, with the armies surrounding the

city, the way the immersive aural space of the wailing siren did. Although it might be seen as

representational music used to support a dramatic situation or mood (as with Shakespearean

alarums, sennets, and flourishes), the siren, indeed an alarm, could not be exhausted in the

signalling of a coming event as would be the case with incidental music. Although its tone was

sorrowful, what the audience heard was not only an atmospheric enhancement of the mood of the

scene. The emotional urgency of its “tune” -- a single elongated note -- combined with the

physical ability of the sound to form an auditory space, forced us to be there, that is, forced us

into a ritual and sensorial co-presence. “Auditory space is very different from visual space,”

testifies R. Murray Schafer, sound artist, composer, and theoretician of sound environments; “we

are always at the edge of visual space, looking in with the eye. But we are always at the centre of

auditory space, listening out with the ear.”19

Ihde even establishes an ontology of the auditory that aims to discover what Maurice

Merleau-Ponty calls the “singing of the world.” He acknowledges our involvements with sound

through voice and listening as a pervasive bodily experience and claims: “Phenomenologically I

do not merely hear with my ears, I hear with my whole body. … This may be detected quite

dramatically in listening to loud rock music. The bass notes reverberate in my stomach, and even

my feet ‘hear’ the sound of the auditory orgy. … The bodily involvement comprises the range

from soothing pleasure to the point of insanity in the continuum of possible sound in music and

noise.” 20 Here Ihde obviously draws from Merleau-Ponty’s notion that we are, in the Bergsonian

sense, always/already immersed in this “singing” through our sensory and bodily presence in the

world. “We never completely escape from the realm of perceptual reality,” Merleau-Ponty
 22

writes, “and even the seemingly independent structures of categorical thought (of ‘rationality’)

are ultimately founded in perception. We are always immersed in the world and perceptually

present to it.”21

Interacting with the surrounding world, we discover phenomena through our

corporeality and our perceptive faculties before they get conceptualized in our consciousness. It

is the avant-garde insistence on the materiality of the theatrical sign and the immediacy of

performance that has instigated the push toward the phenomenological, as opposed to the

semiotic, approach in theatre studies. Attending to the fluidity, temporality, and transience of

theatrical events and acknowledging sound as the material that best supports these traits, recent

theatrical studies have begun to prioritize the aural paradigm in performance analysis. David

Roesner, for instance, points out “the musicalization of theatre” as a significant trend in

contemporary staging and performance. In Theater als Musik (Theatre as Music, 2003), Roesner

analyzes the work of Christoph Marthaler, Einar Schleef, and Robert Wilson and finds that they

place rhythm, sound, tonality of speech, and musicality of performance at the centre of the

aesthetic organization of their theatre pieces. Roesner’s assertion that theatre be considered as

music goes beyond the comparison of a theatre piece to a musical composition. It is not the

narrative or programmatic features of a specific form that theatre shares with music, but rather

the immediacy, materiality, and transience of sound. In other words, it is the dramaturgy of

sound -- that is, a compositional approach to the creation and structure of performance -- that

makes theatre music.

One particular example of such dramaturgy that can be traced back to the avant-garde

methods of sound-text poetry and physical performance is found in Marthaler’s Stunde Null oder

Die Kunst des Servierens (Zero Hour or The Art of Public Service, 1995), a work
 23

commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. In a large school

gymnasium, a recording studio, or a bunker designed by Anna Viebrock, a group of middle-aged

German state functionaries are taught how to shake hands, deliver speeches and slogans through

microphones, cut ribbons, roll out red carpets, and perform other routines public servants should

know. Undressed for exercise, these sorry-looking individuals in singlets and shorts go through

an exhausting physical and vocal drill interspersed with nostalgic singing numbers. In one of the

most impressive scenes, actor Graham Valentine delivers a long verbal cavalcade in which the

official four-language text of the 1945 Allies Control Council regulations gradually dissolves

into the incomprehensible sound poetry of Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, in what a London reviewer

described as “a crescendo of sound and fury signifying nothing - and everything. … As his

speech becomes more and more nonsensical, turning towards gibberish and pure vocal sound, it

actually makes more and more ‘sense’, shifting from bureaucratic jargon, meaningless in its

edited form, to a vocal evocation of the war’s soundscape (through the syllables of Kurt

Schwitters: trucks, machine guns, bombs, crackling radio reception, etc.), which becomes easily

comprehensible as an eerie echo with a fifty year delay.”22 Marthaler’s skewed perspective on

“zero hour” (a military term for the beginning of an operation), with all its socio-political and

historical ramifications, obviously resonated with German spectators, but the show became a hit

not for its ironic historical content but primarily for its sovereign display of theatricality.

Marthaler’s deliberate shift from verbal referentiality to an oral and physical travesty of

celebratory routines can be regarded as a legacy of Futurist and Dada sound poetry and

performance. His mise en scène for Zero Hour offers “new cohesive strategies and elements: the

investigation of voices, the musical [rhythmic] development of a visual or acoustic motif, the

experience of time, or the sonority of space.”23

 24

In her prolegomena for a new aesthetics of theatre, The Transformative Power of

Performance, Erika Fischer-Lichte identifies a process of the “performative turn” that “redefined

the relationship between the materiality and the semioticity of the performance elements,

between signifier and signified.”24 Initiated by the historical avant-garde and enriched by the

neo-avant-garde of the 1960s, this process reached its fruition in postdramatic theatre. Clearly,

experiments with the aural substance of words were among the early manifestations of this shift.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s poetics of onomatopoeia and “lyrical intoxication with matter” and

Nikolai Burliuk’s notion of “verbal texture,” for example, shifted the focus from the meaning of

words to their sound, favouring sensory attraction over communicational clarity. Their sound

poetry consisted of incomprehensible words, cries, breathing, whispering, glossolalia, and

onomatopoeic vocalization of noise designed to provoke the audience’s subliminal reflexes

rather than to create a mimetic illusion or deliver a message. The gravity and opacity that these

avant-garde poets added to their idiom by favouring pure sound prompted the vigorous

emergence of materiality in theatre. This development is nothing but a “performative generation

of materiality,” which, as Fischer-Lichte suggests, has been realized through the “corporeality,

spatiality, and tonality of performance.”25 Because voice and sound indicate corporeality and

tonality, a thorough investigation of avant-garde sources of the orality/aurality of contemporary

theatre earns a place in Fischer-Lichte’s newly proposed aesthetics of theatre, which leans more

toward a phenomenological than a semantic analysis of performance.

Similarly, Lehmann admits the participation of the dramaturgy of sound in his concept of

postdramatic theatre, envisioning “a theatre of states and of scenically dynamic formations … [in

which] there is a scenic dynamic as opposed to the dramatic dynamic.”26 This theatre of scenic

dynamic could be considered the legacy of a juxtaposition of aural and visual masses and
 25

intensities first employed in the avant-garde hybrid art forms of Futurist, Expressionist, and

Dadaist endeavours, particularly their experiments in which sound extends beyond its illustrative

dramatic role to become an independent scenic element. Lehmann acknowledges the significance

of this legacy in his discussion of the audiovisual scenic dynamic of John Cage’s Roaratorio: An

Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (1979), a sound/dance/theatre work performed by the Merce

Cunningham Dance Company at the Avignon Festival in 1985. In this performance Cage’s vocal

rendition the manner of a sound poetry reading represented a counterpart of Joyce’s writing “that

opened up a new era of ways of dealing with language material: transgressions of the boundaries

between national languages, condensations and multiplications of possible meanings, and

musical-architectonic constructions. Postdramatic theatrical signs are situated in the tradition of

such textures.”27

In addition to the “roar oration” of the script, the piece included live music by an Irish

traditional band and recordings of concrete sounds of crowds, radio broadcasts, street traffic,

barking dogs, and crying babies captured at numerous locales of the novel that culminated in an

excessive cacophony. As Robert Bean claims, Roaratorio “engages such heterogeneity of sounds

and noises that disruption and disorientation are paramount. … [It] requires a distinct mode of

auditory experience - what I call polyphonic aurality. This term, implying simultaneously the

opening of numerous ears and the production of an incomprehensible sound collage, also alludes

to a renewal of collective hearing. … Roaratorio can be best described as sixty minutes of

prepared noise. This creates an aesthetic of both anxiety and pleasure … [where] we witness the

‘activity of sounds.’”28

In Roaratorio’s stage version, its dense aural material served not as a ballet score to be

choreographed but as a soundscape to be counterpointed by dancers’ movements and figures.

 26

Here the usual dramatic scheme, relying on program music, choreographed dance, and written

libretto, was replaced by the scenic dynamic of a postdramatic sound/dance/theatre work. The

signs of this conceptual and practical change, abundantly present in the corpus of Futurist and

Dadaist poetry, manifestos, and performance, reveal a dynamic range of sound creation, from an

intuitive onomatopoetic vocal utterance to an autonomous material of theatre production.

Following the historical avant-garde’s experimentation, sound came to be understood and dealt

with as substance rather than as a means of signification and communication. As such, it entered

the realm of theatrical semiosis and prompted the emergence of an “independent auditory

semiotics” in postdramatic theatre that I refer to as the “dramaturgy of sound.”

Another facet of avant-garde sound poetry’s expressive power has been built on the

endless conflicting relationship between visuality and aurality that is reflected in the clash

between the shape of letters and the sound of phonemes, between written/printed text and vocal

utterance. It consciously plays in the interstice between the poem’s graphic representation and its

oral performance. An example of such practice is Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tumb, a book/sound

poem whose title is drawn from the noise of howitzer fire. On its pages the visual force attained

by the typographical revolution unleashes the vocal force of parole in libertà, whose dynamic

declamation echoes the noises of the modern battlefield. Letters of different shapes, sizes, and

levels of boldness, printed, written, drawn, or stenciled, are contrasted with the gaps of white

space on the paper. Graphic symbols achieve an uneven visual rhythm of redundancy and

sparseness, triggering a cacophonous vocal interpretation. Words explode on the page just as the

sounds of war burst onstage in their onomatopoeic rendition. Marinetti’s famous declamations of

Zang Tumb Tumb posit the complex issue of the inherent performativity of the verbo-voco-visual

structure of parole in libertà, which extends to contemporary performance poetry and theatre.
 27

Steve McCaffery’s frantic vocal performance at Instal 09, a Glasgow festival of

experimental sound in March 2009, originates from chaotically “organized” visual space of his

Carnival poems.29 McCaffery wrote Carnival I and II in the 1970s in the form of typewriter-

generated graphic tables in which the textual matrix consists of swarms of letters - at times in the

shape of readable sequences, at times utterly deformed in blotches that animate the visual play of

figures. As he admits, “language units are placed in visible conflict, in patterns of defective

messages, creating a semantic texture by shaping interference within the clear line of

statement.”30 However essentially visual McCaffery’s sound-text pages appear, when the work’s

swarming letters move into vocal performance, like the exploding letter-formations of

Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tumb, they reach the audience as sounds and noises. In the end it is the

voice/sound that is at stake in performance. Thus, on the video of his vocal performance at Instal

09, we see and hear the poet obsessed with sound. His utterances encompass everything from the

corporeal sounds of inhaling and exhaling to the articulation of standard speech elements,

phonemes, syllables, and words - along with the emphatic production of the consonant sounds of

sibilants, fricatives, and explosives - to the onomatopoeia of inanimate sounds, the mechanical

tearing of material, shrieks, scrapes, and blows. A poetry reading becomes an energetic transfer

of sounds in which all sound-producing capabilities of the performer’s body are engaged. “Voice

is the polis of mouth, lips, teeth, tongue, tonsils, palate, breath, rhythm, timbre and sound. …

Enjoying such complexity, even a single voice resonates as simultaneity of corporeal, acoustic

events,”31 claims the poet, coming close to Roland Barthes’s concept of “the grain of the voice”

that carries a message of the performer’s body to the audience.

The members of the Italian theatre company Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, whose

performances alongside compelling visual images contain a no-less-impressive layer of acoustic

 28

sensations, searched for the “lungs” of the words in preparing their Tragedia Endogonidia. One

of the authors, Chiara Guidi, explains the kind of sound she is looking for in her letter to sound

designer Scott Gibbons at the laboratory stage of the production: “None of the words I’d like to

use have any necessity. … What type of voice do you think could bring out that obscure and

hidden sound that accompanies the entrance of the audience, which only later might be

recognizable as belonging to a voice? … I am not thinking about texts but emulsions of sound,

built up rhythmically and then covered with their own breath. I want to get between the folds of

the specific sound … or get inside the cry of an animal and move it and shake it in a

dramaturgical key.”32

Tragedia Endogonidia, a theatrical project in eleven installments, was produced in the

course of two years in different European cities. In its second part, performed at the 2002

Avignon Festival, the authors wanted to excavate a language, a voice, or a sound of the mythical

animal tragos, which pulsates throughout the entire tragic poetry of humankind. A live goat that

appears physically onstage in one of the later episodes of Tragedia needed an oral/aural reality.

Therefore, the company put together the tragos’s “text” by rehearsing grammatical drills with

scattered letters/phonemes drawn from the names of twenty amino acids, the chemical

components responsible for carrying the energy of living creatures. Their inhaling/exhaling

exercises were conceived as gymnastics for the throat that would deliver bodily secrets through

vocal utterance and give voice to a possible oral “writing” of the endogenous growth of the

human tragedy. This search for the vocal expression, hidden underneath the graphic appearance

of letters, approaches, at least as a formal practice, the ideas of Marinetti’s parole in libertà and

the methods of McCaffery’s sound-text poetry.

 29

Using another technique of avant-garde sound poetry, the structural counterpoint of

different verbal textures, Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek, in place of dialogue, creates a

collage of “speech/language plates” (Sprachflächen) by manipulating texts of different (low and

high) style and juxtaposing blocks of their verbal sound to each other. The method of such

oral/aural composition in her plays “corresponds to the turning point of painting in modernity

when, instead of the illusion of three-dimensional space, what is being ‘staged’ is the picture’s

plane-ness, its two-dimensional reality, and the reality of colour as an autonomous quality,”33

Lehmann observes. The “plane-ness” here does not mean flatness or artistic impoverishment. On

the contrary, it means an enrichment of the substantial artistic form and matter by the shift of the

avant-garde away from the illusionistic, narrative, and figurative methods of bourgeois art. It

means a turn toward the “creation of painterly forms as ends in themselves,” shaping a new

painterly realism that would liberate “colour oppressed by common sense, enslaved by it,” and

let it live as “a painted surface - a real living form,”34 as Kazimir Malevich put it. Russian Cubo-

Futurist sound poets conceived of “language texture,” borrowing the term from contemporaneous

painters who treated paint as palpable mass rather than as a mere carrier of pigment. In their

expressive language beyond sense called zaum, words were treated as clusters of sounds bearing

aural density amassed in a poem comparable to the thick strokes of paint on a canvas.

Consequently, their theatrical language was to be exclusively valued, not as the speech of

characters, but as an autonomous oral/aural structure in which sound appears on an equal footing

with the other elements of theatre. There is hardly a better example of such cross-fertilization

between artistic disciplines than the collaboration between Suprematist painter Malevich, zaum

poet Alexei Kruchenykh, and Futurist composer and painter Mikhail Matiushin, in the 1913

production of the first Futurist opera, Victory over the Sun. In the same vein, the modern idea of
 30

“language surfaces” in theatre can be seen as a legacy of the recognition of the materiality of

sound as an autonomous element of art (i.e., a reality of sound that matches the above-mentioned

reality of colour).

On the Italian side the Futurist re-sensitization of the universe was aimed at opening

humankind to the dynamic and fractured world of modernity. Vocal sound and worldly noise

were among the protagonists of the dramatic faceoff of art and reality that the Futurists wanted to

show. Besides, sound was the right medium for the sensual immersion into the swirl of chaotic,

simultaneous, fragmentary, and interpenetrating elements of modern reality, a reality that as such

is deemed theatrical. As 1915 manifesto “The Futurist Synthetic Theatre” by Marinetti, Emilio

Settimelli, and Bruno Corra states: “Just as the painter and composer discover, scattered through

the outside world, a narrower but more intense life, made up of colours, forms, sounds and

noises, the same is true for the man gifted with theatrical sensibility, for whom a specialized

reality exists that violently assaults his nerves: it consists of what is called THE THEATRICAL

WORLD.”35

Futurist theatre artists unabashedly mixed different sensory attractions (colours, forms,

sounds, and noises) available to different art disciplines (painting, poetry, and music) to create a

sensorially overloaded medium of their “reconstruction of the world.” In the realm of orality,

they abandoned a semantically organized logocentrism in favour of a self-reflexive

phonocentrism of the performance. Marinetti’s poetics of “lyrical intoxication with matter”

triggered the creation of an impulsive and intuitive onomatopoeic poetry of parole in libertà, a

painting of “colours, noises, and smells,” and a music-hall acting style of fisicoffolia (body-

madness) meant to supplant the discarded narration, technicality, and psychology of passéist,

bourgeois theatre. At first the emphatic vocal expression and acoustic gestures marked the
 31

heightened poetic-sensual idiom of Futurist theatre. But in the multimedial stage environment,

and exposed to hybridizing impulses of other arts, Futurist and historical avant-garde theatre

adopted a dual oral/aural idiom that merges sensual and corporeal utterance of voice with

structural disposition of the concrete and abstract sound. Thus, the evolution of the avant-garde

dramaturgy of sound was determined by two inextricably intertwined aspects of theatrical sound

creation: the vocal exposure of the performer’s physicality and the stage’s aural composition and

construction.

The first aspect, which draws from the corporeality of vocal gestures and the power of

sound to express inner emotional, libidinal intensity, links the performer’s utterances to his

bodily presence and determines the orality of performance. Beginning with Futurist intoxication

with matter and onomatopoeia, in poetry, and fisicoffolia (body-madness), in theatre, this type of

oral expression includes Expressionist Schrei (scream) acting and the incantational idiom of

Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. It marks more recent physical performance styles of, for

example, New York’s Living Theatre, Peter Brook’s staging of Spurt of Blood, or Herman

Nitsch’s Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries, which celebrate the performer’s presence, on the stage

and in the world, through his self-realization in/by a non-discursive language, that is, through

visceral gestures that communicate the body/voice straight to the audience’s senses. This idiom

attempts to erase the liminal line between life and stage (life’s double) by unrestrained physical

stage presence, which Artaud called “the encounter of one epidermis with another in a timeless

debauchery.”36 It falls in line with postmodern discourse on theatre’s corporeality exemplified by

Roland Barthes’s notion of “the grain of the voice,” a sensual bridge between the body and the

performance, and Jean-François Lyotard’s plea for an energetic theatre that produces forces,

intensities, affects as “pulsional displacements” instead of “representational replacements.”

 32

The second aspect of theatrical sound creation focuses on the materiality of sound per se as an

independent, simultaneously concrete and abstract element, drawing on Marinetti’s vision of “an

abstract and alogical pure drama of pure elements ... and surprising combination of blocks of

typical sensations.”37 In this avant-garde theatrical tradition sound is conceived as palpable

matter and used as a malleable mass, comparable to paint or clay in painting and sculpture. As a

result, sound acquires the plasticity that allows it to participate in the building of the spatio-

temporal reality of the stage. Such transgression of sound into the sphere of plastic arts is notable

in the experimental stage designs of Giacomo Balla, Fortunato Depero, and Enrico Prampolini

based on the concept of the complesso plastico motorumoristo (the plastic moto-rumorist

complex), initially invented to describe the creation of robot-like “polyexpressive artificial living

beings.” Adopting a broad approach to the audio-visual hybridity of art, these authors

synthesized all that was seen and heard on the stage into an abstract, noisily kinetic compound of

scenic action and architecture. They dealt with sound as a sculptural mass that is

determined/liberated by its temporal flux (an approach comparable to Art Informel) or as series

of aural formations, blocks of sound/noise/silence available for artistic juxtaposition (similar to

techniques of collage and Constructivist art). Thus all the structural elements of the Futurist

stage, including sound, now understood as physical matter, acquired a dramaturgical value.

Consequently, a dramaturgy of matter (objects, colour, light, and sound) supplanted customary

dramatic plot and character development to create an audio-visual, kinetic art form of theatre that

is today often discussed as postdramatic. This Futurist discovery of sound as an autonomous

stage element, together with Kandinsky’s abstract synaesthesia of sound and colour, prefigured

the Bauhaus’s experiments with “theatre of totality” and a multimedial performance/production

style that reaches out to more recent theatre forms, such as Robert Wilson’s “theatre of images”
 33

and ensuing audio-visual installations and stage experiments of the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio,

the Theatregroep Hollandia, and Christoph Marthaler, to mention but a few protagonists of

postdramatic theatre.
 34

DRAMATURGY OF SOUND IN THE AVANT-GARDE AND POSTDRAMATIC THEATRE

Second Chapter -- Avant-garde and Postmodern Conceptions of Aurality

A CENTURY OF SOUND SATURATION

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the peaceful soundscape of countryside and

unspoiled nature, a welcoming refuge for the artist’s lyrical soul, had been overwhelmed by the

cacophonic, soiled sound of expansive technology, speedy communications, political strife, and

frantic city life. Sheer sound, a most affective/effective38 sensory attraction brought about by

the surge of industrialization, became a substantial element of the arts in the century that broke

out with noise. In his loutishly titled study of this phenomenon, Noise, Water, Meat, Douglas

Kahn avows: “Sound saturates the arts of this century, and its importance becomes evident if

we can hear past the presumption of mute visuality within art history, past the matter of music

that excludes references to the world, past the voice that is already its own source of existence,

past the phonetic task-mastering of writing.”39

Indeed, in the current discourse of the visual arts, which has been finally “un-muted”

by the inclusion of terms denoting temporality, kinetics, and aurality of a work of art in its

vocabulary, we can hear reflections of Futurist and Dadaist ideas of fluidity, simultaneity, and

the performative potential of sound. In contemporary musique concrète we can hear extensions

of Luigi Russolo’s art of noise, which introduced an ocean of raw, non-harmonic sounds to the

sphere of music. In the sound-text poetry of today, we attend to the interplay of graphemes,

phonemes, and vocal gestures instigated by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s onomatopoeia and
 35

Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexei Kruchenykh’s zaumny yazyk, a language beyond sense based

on the “word as such” and its phonetic roots rather than on its conceptual meaning. In the most

recent performance events and theatre productions, we can hear an interplay of live, recorded,

and electronically treated sounds that transcends vocal expression and dramatic writing to reach

toward a pure acoustic art. Actually, what we are witnessing as a breakthrough of aurality in the

arts of the twenty-first century initially emerged in the historical avant-garde as an artistic

reflection of a genuine phenomenon of the twentieth century - sound saturation. Confronted

with the speed, glitter, and noise of the industrialized world, the avant-gardes chose to immerse

themselves in the swirl of life here and now rather than look for an idyllic hideout of serenity

and the sublime, as was celebrated by the passéist poetics of the Belle Époque. The Futurists

were the first to sense the excitement of the swift changes in the world. It fell to the Futurists,

the self-proclaimed knights of merciless change, speed, and violence, to renew the sensibility of

modern humankind, engulfed in the burning dynamism and cacophony of a new age.

“The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” appeared as a paid advertisement on the

front page of Le Figaro, the most influential daily of Paris, on 20 February 1909. The article

broke the news of the movement’s birth to the world. Its author, Marinetti was an already

accomplished Symbolist, free-verse poet and strident declaimer of poetry (collected in La

Conquête des Étoiles and Destruction), an internationally acclaimed publisher of the journal

Poesia in Milan, a rather notorious playwright of scandalous theatre pieces in the style of

Alfred Jarry (Le Roi Bombance and Poupées Électriques), and a brilliant polemicist famed as

“the caffeine of Europe.” His announcement of the new poetics was fashioned as a calculated

bang, a provocation typical of Futurist aggressiveness: “We intend to sing the love of danger,

the habit of energy and fearlessness … Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility,
 36

ecstasy and sleep. ... The poet must spend himself with ardor to swell the enthusiastic fervor of

the primordial elements. … We want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors,

archeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians.”40 In numerous, similarly intoned manifestos that

followed, Marinetti kept proclaiming subversive changes in art and life: “re-construction of the

universe” based on a new sensibility, admiration for the modern age of industry, machinery,

electricity, speedy communications and traffic, and even praise of “war as the only hygiene of

the world.”

The explosive power of social, commercial, and technological development could

have been best felt in a modern industrial city, a hitherto unknown hive of activities in which a

buzz produced in the clench between machines and men never stopped. Writing about a

megalopolis, painting it, and echoing its noise in music and performance, all avant-gardes

acquired an urban and, consequently, international character. Marinetti’s initial Futurist

manifesto, which first appeared in the metropolis of Paris, soon spread to London, Berlin, New

York, and Tokyo. Many artists of these world centres were captivated by the birth of the

metropolis, a place of toil and joy, a Moloch-like beast devouring working men and a glittering

attraction for a flâneur, a place “where thousands of actors of different temperament, habit and

character competed for the major parts.”41 Jules Romains remembers feeling lost in the rhythm

and noise of the crowd and traffic at the Parisian Rue d’Amsterdam. Carried by metropolitan

“feverish pulsations,” in his 1908 book of poetry La vie unanime, Romains exclaims: “I am a

joyous intersection of rhythms, a condenser of universal energies … the unanime vibrates in

my brain: the city becomes my body.” Romains feels his sensual aura dispersing through the

city, barracks, factories, offices, cafés, carriages, trams, and boulevards full of people,

passersby that “join each other and join my body.” He becomes one soul with a mass of city
 37

dwellers, unanime (unanimous) with the pulsation of the metropolis that is “nothing but a

stream of force in which the rhythms are steeped.”42 Such buzzing metropolis was a stage

setting of Marinetti’s founding manifesto and a subject of Luigi Russolo’s composition for

noise intoners, “Awakening of a City,” a Futurist response to the wonderment of the

metropolitan life expressed exclusively by means of sound.

Symptomatically, Merinetti’s founding manifesto of Futurism begins with a lyrical

neo-Romantic story that tells of a night of “feverish insomnia” suffered by the poet and his

friends, exhausted with the boredom of petit bourgeois life. Responding to the call of “the

mighty noise of the huge double-decker trams” and the “famished roar of automobiles,” they

rush out to the streets of the metropolis, enchanted by its clamour. Prophets of speed and noise

for whom “a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of

Samothrace,” they jump in their cars, “snorting beasts” with “torrid breasts … like serpents of

explosive breath.”43 Marinetti’s vocabulary, loaded with auditory implications, determines the

character of the manifesto: it is definitely noisy. Its noisiness arises from the artist’s intuitive

and sensual confrontation with the new type of sound ushered into a new world by

mechanization: “The artificial amplitude of sound is one of the great inventions of the 20th

century. Modernity may be defined as the coming of the human capacity to make inhuman

noise. The great shock of the modern city and of the modern warfare … were not so much the

experiences of their disorientating energy and speed, as their sheer noisiness, the appalling,

exhilarating, omnipresence of man-made or mechanical sound: of cars, sirens, gramophones,

loudspeakers, cannons, airplanes and industrial machinery; all the dinning cacophony of the

modern.”44
 38

For the Futurists the convulsions of the emerging industrial world materialized as a

shrill noise that was hard to listen to and a red-hot sight that was difficult to watch conveyed in

the image of the volcano crater that figures significantly in Marinetti’s later writings. This

unbearable sound-picture was equivalent to the primeval sight of chaotic magma that the old

Titanic gods had been facing before the Earth solidified in the shape available to the

Apollonian gaze of the new Olympian gods. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in The Birth of Tragedy

from the Spirit of Music that the powerful sight of the world creation could be captured only by

the Dionysian music of intoxication, still unrefined by reason. Music, he thought, was superior

to all other arts because it did not represent a phenomenon but rather the “world will” itself. It

served as a non-representational bridge to the world of the unknown and to the creative impulse

which, as Sören Kierkegaard put it, brings about a demonic pregnancy of meaning which

presents itself as music. Nietzsche’s notion of Dionysian music undeniably inspired Futurists’

belief in “lyrical obsession with matter” and their dealing with life’s “sound and fury” through

the onomatopoeic vocal mimesis of worldly noise. A bruitist approach to poetry and

performance was a Futurist way to express intoxication with the “reality [that] vibrates around

us, hitting us with bursts of fragments, with events among them embedded one within the other,

confused, entangled, chaotic.”45 Therefore, Marinetti professed: “We will sing of great crowds

excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of

revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and

shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-

plumed serpents; … adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives

whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and
 39

the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer

like an enthusiastic crowd.”46

THE SUBVESIVE POWER OF NOISE

The avant-garde artists of early twentieth-century Europe rebelled against history, the

permanence of aesthetic values, and art as an institution. They questioned the existence of

masterpieces and renounced the myth of the progress of civilization, declaring it a spurious

advancement to an apex achieved by imitating and replicating past paradigms. Their manifestos

were thundering indictments against tradition. Italian Futurists: “We must shake the gates of

life, test the bolts and hinges. … Come on! Set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals

to flood the museums!”47 Russian Cubo-Futurists: “The horn of time blows through us in the art

of words ... Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc. etc., must be thrown overboard from the Ship of

Modernity.”48 Dadaist Hugo Ball: “Our cabaret is a gesture. Every word that is spoken and sung

here says at least one thing: that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect.

What could be respectable and impressive about it? Its cannons? Our big drum drowns them.

… Our spontaneous foolishness and our enthusiasm for illusion will destroy them.”49

The anti-bourgeois tendency of the avant-garde artists was a reaction to the

inadequacy of traditional art confronted with an increasingly fractured, mechanized, and

conflicting world. Faced with “the shock of modernity” (Walter Benjamin) and a fragmented

and destabilized world picture -- “the cinematic experiences of daily life” (Marinetti) -- modern

artists rejected the passéist production of illusions and escape into the sublime. Their offensive
 40

vocabulary often outraged members of European artistic circles. Composer Camille Saint-

Saëns wrote to Marinetti:

Sir,

You predict that in ten years you will be thrown in the wastebasket;

in my opinion one could do so now!

Unleash the forces of the unknown!

Open the floodgates of the impossible!

Add to the fervor of primordial elements!

All this rigmarole is perfectly ridiculous and

I beg you not to continue sending me your review.

I fear fisticuffs, which you extol;

I am seventy years old and I wish to die in peace. 50

Unfortunately, there was no peace in the social reality of Europe; the overriding

narrative of bourgeois art, the teleological path toward historical progress executed by the

bourgeois state, had already produced disappointing results. After only a decade of the

promising twentieth century, the European nations were about to start a mass slaughter of their

own people in the First World War. The time was ripe for a riot against the establishment. As

Matei Calinescu has argued, this was “the moment when socially ‘alienated’ artists felt a need

to disrupt and completely overthrow the whole bourgeois system of values, with all its

philistine pretensions to universality.”51 Dissatisfaction with the existing state was tangible in

the artistic manifestos and happenings that mushroomed across Europe. Expressionists
 41

portrayed a world where “man exploded in front of man”; Futurists energetically propagated

the nationalist war frenzy; while Dadaists refused to serve in the carnage and opted for

anarchism, absurdness, and nihilism.

Meanwhile, mainstream Parisian theatres kept producing Eugène Scribe’s well-made

plays; the Milanese audience enjoyed the grandiloquence and the pathetic heroism of Giuseppe

Verdi, Giacomo Puccini, and Gabriele D’Annunzio; Richard Wagner’s music drama as a

Gesamtkunstwerk (a total work of art) continued to hold sway with the Germanic theatre world;

and Konstantin Stanislavski directed naturalist pieces of fine psychological detail for the

Moscow Art Theatre. True, Aurélien Lugné-Poë and André Antoine, Georg Fuchs, Edward

Craig, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Sergei Eisenstein had started experiments by shifting the style

of mise en scène inside their theatres. But the avant-garde artists were far more vociferous in

their demands. They wanted to put an end to bourgeois art as an institution organized into

disciplines and removed from real life. They sought man’s presence in a world where art and

life were no longer separated.

Italian Futurism was perhaps one of the boldest and most disruptive art movements of

the historical avant-garde, and surely the noisiest: the noisiest not only for its uncompromising

art-action happenings -- public battles against old bourgeois art norms -- but also for its bruitist

performance poetry method. Futurists signalled an artistic uprising that almost immediately

spread to Russia and Germany, where Cubo-Futurists and Expressionists participated in the

germination of a proletarian revolution, and to Switzerland, where Dadaists took it over to

finish with an absolute negation of any sense making, even its own. Ball aptly defined a

seemingly paradoxical development of the artistic riot against the social and cultural status quo:

“Dada is a farce of nothingness in which all higher questions are involved.”52 Nietzsche’s and
 42

Henri Bergson’s merciless critique of positive science and Cartesian logic, the “higher

questions” of bourgeois creed, brought these two philosophers to the cusp of European thought

at the turn of the century. They influenced the historical avant-garde’s relentless immersion in

the dynamics and idiosyncrasy of the modern world, the Futurists’ love of speed, noise, and

action, and the Dadaists’ subversive nihilism. There is a saying that European art and culture

needed one Nietzsche and one Bergson to ventilate its brain and Futurism and Dadaism to

ventilate its lungs, to think and breathe freer. Inspired by Nietzsche’s “philosophy of the

future,” the Futurists embraced lyrical intoxication with the matter and dynamism of world

phenomena. They bravely looked in the eye of the big turmoil of modern times, like a

Dionysian chorus of satyrs watching theomachia in The Birth of Tragedy. They opted for

bruitism, the cacophonic, onomatopoeic vocal reflection of the din of reality, instead of

illusionistic musical or literary expression. Inspired by Bergson, who saw the phenomenal

world as a time-space continuum in which we can only live from the inside and not observe it

from the outside; Futurists strove for an art that reflects an intuitively experienced dynamic flux

of constant becoming. They, as Marinetti acknowledges, even considered “dynamism,” a key

word from Bergson’s vocabulary, for a name with which to christen the new movement.

Dadaists shared the methods of their performance poetry with Futurists. Richard

Huelsenbeck, a well-known Cabaret Voltaire’s “Dada Drummer,” explains Marinetti’s love of

war and his onomatopoeia of battlefield noise without suspecting his ideology. For him, it was

“the highest expression of the conflict of things, as a spontaneous eruption of possibilities, as

movement, as a simultaneous poem, as a symphony of cries, shots, commands, embodying an

attempted solution of the problem of life in motion.”53 Since according to Huelsenbeck,

“bruitism is a view of life which, strange as it may seem at first, compels men to make an
 43

ultimate decision. There are only bruitists and others,”54 one might conclude that Futurists and

Dadaists were brothers in arms at the time. Although Huelsenbeck draws a line between Dada

and Futurism, revered by “some imbeciles,” as he puts it, his description of noise as a “direct

call for action” additionally connects two essentially activist, anarchic, and rebellious

movements. Standing for an intuitive involvement in the world, a disruption of logic, and a

creative irrationalism, noise figured prominently in the poetry and performance of the both

movements. As a result, Futurist bruitist works were often performed at the Cabaret Voltaire

soirées. In all this noisy nonsense of “rejecting normal logic and trusting to instinct,”

Huelsenbeck remembers, “we realized the existence of a structure in ourselves.”55

It is the artistic bond between Futurism and Dadaism that hatched similar creative

poetry/performance methods in spite of the two movements’ opposite socio-political positions,

and not their ideological differences, that deserves to be highlighted. Conversely, the

significant artistic achievements of Futurism have been left in obscurity by the critique that

focuses on Benito Mussolini’s appropriation of the movement for the glorification of the

Fascist cause. But, luckily, a type of analysis that approaches the formal/material structure of

Futurist poetry and performance, instead of searching for their political messages, have

discovered plenty of their merits now accepted by the neo-avant-garde and postdramatic

theatre. It was an outcome of the shift in contemporary theatre historiography that began with

the writings of Michael Kirby, a leading American neo-avant-garde artist and theorist of the

1960s, who encouraged this kind of formal/structural analysis. Using his critical method, Kirby

in 1971 published a seminal study on Futurist performance illustrated by an exemplary

selection of manifestos and play scripts. More recently, in her keynote lecture for the Yale

Futurist Conference (October 2009), Marjorie Perloff stressed: “A hundred years after its
 44

inception, Futurism remains a curiously misunderstood movement. The reviews of the recent

Tate Gallery exhibition dismiss Futurism as inferior to Cubism and tainted by its Fascist

connections.” In her lecture Perloff reevaluates the historical and aesthetic merits of Italian and

Russian Futurism, asserting that they represent essentially one double-faced movement, a

movement that ends with the First World War -- in Russia with the victory of the proletarian

revolution and in Italy with Marinetti’s alliance with the Fascists. She even claims that

Marinetti was the only major Futurist who seriously tried to take Futurism into the Fascist

mainstream. Perloff finds numerous, so far largely disregarded, congruencies of the poetic

principles and artistic methods of the Russian and Italian Futurists. In the same vein, the

evidence gathered in my research of the dramaturgy of sound points to shared features of

poetry, art, and performance in both varieties of Futurism and in Dada, stemming from their

formal rather than ideological aspects. Besides, if we examine the historical development of

Italian Futurism, Russian Cubo-Futurism, and Dadaism, we shall see that in the 1920s all three

were swallowed by ideology. While Italian Futurism was acknowledged by the Fascist

academy as stately art, Russian LEF and Constructivist groups soon started to serve the

practical needs of the Soviet communist cause. A bit later, in France, Tristan Tzara’s Dadaism

was absorbed by André Breton’s “Surrealist Revolution” and his agenda of liberating the

subconscious that ended up in Louis Aragon’s blind left engagement. The appropriation of

avant-garde artistic ideas on both ends of the political spectrum, and their practical inclusion in

the political struggle, bore ambiguous and controversial consequences. Still, in spite of their

contribution to the value of different ideological currencies, the formal features and aesthetic

methods of the avant-garde art movements have gotten carried ahead and reached today’s

artistic practice. One should not consider these surviving features as merely formal. The
 45

Futurist noisiness and Dadaist nihilism should be taken as signs of the inherent heteroglossia

(Mikhail Bakhtin) of the avant-garde idioms. Thus their sound poetry and performance, one

may say, voiced an ideological stance as well. Their heteroglossia spilled over to the

postmodern notion of ambiguity, not as an escapist strategy, but as a firm defence of genuine

humanity against the big narratives of ideology and history. Or, as Ann Smock and Phyllis

Zuckerman beautifully argued: “If the Revolution could be spoken, it would be only with a

discourse that cannot assume a coherent position of truth, with a series of contradictory voices

that cannot know themselves, which do not constitute a point of view, which repeat themselves

and fall apart, only in order to be able to begin again.”56

SOUND AND NOISE UNDER SCIENTIFIC SURVEILLANCE

In practical terms of economics and controllability, sound can be divided into three areas: the

vocal sound of language communication, regulated by phonetics; musical sound, organized by

its tonal and rhythmic composition; and noise, generally an unordered, wasteful aural mass.

The third area is subject to a “negative” control, a pest-control-like sound abatement designed

to protect human environments from noise pollution. The artistic embrace of noise was a

significant factor of the avant-garde’s attempted dethronement of traditional literature and

music. As much as Marinetti’s verbo-vocal experiments with onomatopoeic noise in parole in

libertà (words set free) contributed to sound-text and performance poetry, Luigi Russolo’s

contemporaneous invention of the art of noises (one might call it suoni in libertà -- sounds set

free) contributed to the liberation of modern music from the dictates of tonality. “As it [sound]
 46

grows ever more complicated today, musical art seeks out combinations more dissonant,

stranger, and harsher for the ear. Thus it comes closer to the noise-sound,”57 assert Russolo.

Inclusion of noise in music is a still viable artistic gesture adopted by contemporary

composers, sound artists, and theorists. One of them, Torben Sangild, chooses noise as the

prime subject of his aesthetics. He reminds us of the etymological root of “noise” in the Greek

word nausea, which stands not only for sound of roaring sea but also for seasickness, pointing

to our unavoidable corporeal involvement with sound. Sangild interprets noise according to

three aspects: acoustic, communicative, and subjective. In the acoustic sense, noise is defined

“as impure and irregular, neither tone nor rhythm - roaring, pealing, blurry sound with a lot of

simultaneous frequencies, as opposed to a rounded sound with a basic frequency and its related

overtones.”58 Then, in communication theory, noise is the distortion or impediment of the

message whose quality depends on the signal/noise ratio. Communicational noise, that is, an

obstruction of the signal, gets an aesthetic dimension when infused in music as a bearer of

tension and dramatic power. Finally, in the subjective perspective, the understanding of noise

as unpleasant comes from an emotional reaction of the listener. When addressing the

contemporary art of sound, the critic must expand this last aspect to take into account the

pleasure of discovery and sensory fulfillment induced by the, ostensibly unpleasant,

amplification and diversification of aural attractions through loudness and noise. In effect, all

three aspects find their place in the dramaturgy of sound that consciously employs the acoustic

and communicational impurity of theatrical signs/messages.

Jacques Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music sheds light on this

phenomenon from another angle. It considers noise as a counterpart of music whose ritual

(“primitive”), scored, and recorded forms reflect the historical socio-political changes that
 47

shaped the consumerist culture of modern capitalism. “Listening to music is listening to all

noise,” explains Attali, “realizing that its [noise’s/sound’s] appropriation and control is a

reflection of power that is essentially political.”59 Consequently, he explores noise in the

context of its colonization and cultivation by music. The ordering and transformation of raw

noise into discernible tonal forms, claims Attali, is a perpetual historical process, almost as

important for society as the development of means of production: “More than colors and forms,

it is sounds and their arrangements that fashion societies. With noise is born disorder and its

opposite: the world. […] Everywhere codes analyze, mark, restrain, train, repress, and channel

the primitive sounds of language, of the body, of tools, of objects, of the relations to self and

others. All music, any organization of sounds is then a tool for the creation or consolidation of

a community, of a totality.”60 Consequently, Attali describes the cultural conditioning of sound

as a historical process that passes through several sequential phases of turning noise into music:

(a) listening, (b) sacrificing, (c) representing, (d) repeating, and (e) composing. As Attali, in the

end, believes in the struggle against the political use of music as an entertaining commodity, he

envisions the socially positive outcome of the channeling of noise’s subversive powers into the

last phase of the historical process, that of true composition. This new epoch “heralds the

emergence of a formidable subversion, one leading to a radically new organization”61 that will

put an end to the establishment of a society of consumption and repetition ushered in by

normative music. Although it comes close to Russolo’s proposition of “the art of noises,”

Attali’s prediction of “a formidable subversion” is quite of another sort; it pertains to the

contemporary discourse of critical theories and cultural studies, descendants of the Frankfurt

School’s of social research. In contrast, the subversion initiated by Futurist onomatopoeic

performance and Dadaist simultaneous sound poetry grew out of artists’/performers’ intuitive
 48

response to surrounding noise and a pragmatic struggle with the raw sound material -- a din of

machines, traffic, communications, and warfare -- rather than out of a conscious effort to

impose a liberating sociocultural agenda.

However, Attali remains aware of the vital force of noise: “Our science has always

desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise

and that death alone is silent: [It has forgotten the] noise of work, noise of man, and noise of

beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise.”62

Futurists, who understood that very well, reacted to noise noisily and to life with live

performance. Marinetti and friends threw onomatopoeic sound bombs and vocal bursts of

shrapnel fire at their audiences, who responded with rotten tomatoes - a fair exchange between

anarchistic avant-garde artists and a bourgeois public. At least, in performances at the Futurist

serate, there was no fake representing, repeating, and selling of passéist goods to the

consumerist audiences. As Balilla Pratella wrote in his “Manifesto of Futurist Musicians”:

“well-made music [is] the falsification of all that is true and great, a worthless copy sold to a

public that lets itself be cheated by its own free will.”63

Noise has always been kept under the surveillance of the dominant culture, which

prefers verbal syntax and a harmonically ordered musical idiom. The understanding of sound at

the turn of the century was based on the ideology of the Enlightenment and scientific

positivism, which held that all phenomena are detectable, observable, and explicable in terms

of Cartesian logic. As Jonathan Sterne observes in The Audible Past, despite new dimensions of

hearing and listening that erupted with modernity, traditional science remained definitely under

the spell of rationality and harmony: “As there was an Enlightenment, so too was there an

‘Ensoniment.’ A series of conjunctures among ideas, institutions, and practices rendered the
 49

world audible in new ways and valorized new constructs of hearing and listening. Between

about 1750 and 1925, sound itself became an object and a domain of thought and practices,

where it had previously been conceptualized in terms of particular idealized instances like

voice or music. Hearing was reconstructed as a physiological process, a kind of receptivity and

capacity based on physics, biology, and mechanics. Through listening techniques people

harnessed, modified, and shaped their powers of auditory perception in the service of

rationality.”64

In 1863 one of the most notable scientists of the nineteenth century and a pioneer of

the philosophy of science, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1821-1894), published

a book called On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, a

canonical resource of traditional musicology. Helmholtz conceived his theory of music as an

amalgamation across “the boundaries of physical and physiological acoustics on the one side

and musical science and aesthetics on the other.”65 His theory of music stemmed from a belief

in the civilizing, cultural power of science and an empiricist philosophy that correlated

aesthetic perception and the laws of nature. Helmholtz explored physical acoustics in detail and

proposed a theory that sound arises from the motion of elastic bodies. Additionally, he

investigated physiological and psychological aspects of perceived sensorial stimuli produced by

sound.

Devoted to the experimental method, Helmholtz even constructed experimental

devices (like Helmholtz’s resonator) that enabled him to demonstrate how series of physical

impulses produce vibrations of the air that result in audible sensations. If repeated with

sufficient rapidity, these impulses generate sounds, which, if the impulses recur with perfect

regularity and in precisely equal time, become musical tones. Interpreted mathematically as
 50

ratios of small whole numbers, such tones provide syntactic material for musical composition

based on harmonic intervals. In contrast, irregular agitation of the air produces only noise,

considered undesirable for musical composition. Helmholtz’s theory of harmony and musical

scales, intervals, consonances, and so forth was already conceived in his physical acoustics. But

it is his exploration of the physiological and psychological processes of the perception of

musical sounds in the human ear that has earned him prominence in musicology. Connecting

physical acoustics with the theory of sensations, Helmholtz was able to analyze the perception

of sound as a formative element of human emotions caused by the sensory reception of musical

movements. He argued that “the properties of musical movements which possess a graceful,

dallying, or a heavy, forced, a dull, or a powerful, a quiet or excited character, and so on,

evidently chiefly depend on psychological action.”66 This interdependence of the physical

movement of sound and its aural, psycho-physiological reception introduces Helmholtz’s

discussion into the field of aesthetics. Thus his book became the foundation of a modern theory

and aesthetics of music.

From the contemporary perspective, however, a weak point of Helmholtz’s theory is

that he considered music as an art consisting exclusively of concordant or harmonic sounds that

are rhythmically expressed in time. His scientific tools were designed to analyze only

physically measurable elements of sound used in music: pitch (including melody and

harmony), rhythm (including tempo and meter), and the sonic qualities of timbre, articulation,

dynamics, and texture. This approach was overtaken by the musicology and aesthetics of music

at the beginning of the twentieth century, awaiting the Futurists’ furious renewal of sensibility

and the breakthrough of the art of noise.

 51

ORALITY AND LITERACY: THE AURAL/TEMPORAL VERSUS THE VISUAL/SPATIAL

“The scientific study of sound makes sound rational or measurable … reduced to or

transformed into a visual pattern that becomes scientifically intelligible,” as if positivist

scientists have forgotten that sound is strictly speaking invisible, states Don Ihde worning that

while “visual phenomena tend to be spatially oriented; auditory phenomena tend to be

temporally oriented.”67 Positivists’ efforts to access experiential phenomena by discursive

means remained consistent with the visual metaphor of the world established by Cartesian logic

and the philosophy of the Enlightenment. The acoustics of the nineteenth century could easily

measure the intensity, pitch, tempo, reverberation, and diffusion of sound in a way that

conformed to a spatial concept of the world, but it could hardly cope with sound in its

permanent becoming, its fleeting presence on the brink between birth and death. Apparently,

bonded to the visual/spatial paradigm of the world, positive science approached sound without

due attention to its fluidity, transient character, and imminence, quintessential features of the

aural/temporal paradigm of the world.

Our chirographic culture that writes/reads encoded graphic symbols (letters and

words) to grasp phenomena -- objects, creatures, actions, and qualities -- has also been

developed on the power of a visual metaphor of the world. In his influential 1982 book Orality

and Literacy, Walter J. Ong charts a distinction between oral and chirographic cultures. He

finds the term “oral literature,” a customary name for the creative verbo-vocal practice of the

not-yet-literate, somewhat oxymoronic: “Oral expression can exist and mostly has existed

without any writing [literature] at all, writing never without orality.”68 Obviously, he prioritizes

oral expression for its maintaining an authentic contact with the world. But prior to the analysis
 52

of its implications in literature, Ong describes physical features of sound, such as its

temporality and materiality: “There is no way to stop sound and have sound. I can stop a

moving picture camera and hold one frame fixed on the screen. If I stop the movement of

sound, I have nothing -- only silence and no sound at all. All sensation takes place in time, but

no other sensory field totally resists a holding action, stabilization, in quite this way. Vision can

register motion, but it can also register immobility. Indeed, it favors immobility, for to examine

something closely by vision, we prefer to have it quiet. … There is no equivalent of a still shot

for sound. An oscillogram is silent. It lies outside the sound world.”69

Ong’s discussion of this spatio-temporal distinction, sustained by the physical features

of sound and vision, opened a significant cleavage between the visual and aural paradigms in

the interpretations of the world (and consequently of the arts). It was just this awareness of two

opposing but never-fully-separated aspects of the phenomenal world (sound and silence,

movement and immobility, time and space) that allowed for a renewal of aurality in

postmodern aesthetics and cultural studies. The aural paradigm of the world first gained

prominence in the philosophical work of Henri Bergson, who criticized the essentially static

Cartesian world-view that relies on the sense of sight. To escape the classical notion of

measurable, spatialized time, represented by a chronometer that shows a succession of

mechanically/visually discerned moments, Bergson introduced the notion of la durée (duration)

that is determined by a time-space continuum. He imagined the unbreakable process of

“coming into being” as a continuity and interpenetration of time and space, which can only be

grasped in terms of duration. Bergson’s durée thus should be understood as the constant flux of

the phenomena that indicate our being in time. Taking his cue from Bergson, Ihde elaborates:

“The ever-changing presence of sound is time-full. Sound is never static. It is coming into
 53

being and its passing from being is continual in its variations. ... The constant temporality of

sound presence is almost total.”70

Bergson’s thought invoked an aural paradigm of the world that profoundly influenced

the art of the historical avant-garde. In fact, Bergson himself used the metaphor of musical flow

to illustrate his idea of the world in constant flux. Hearing, he thought, provides the experience

of temporal duration that, like music, intertwines past, present, and future. In his ever-changing

world “there is neither an immutable substratum nor are there distinct states that appear and

pass like actors on a stage. There is simply the continuous melody of our interior life, a melody

that runs and will run indivisible, from the beginning to the end of our conscious existence.”71

Nevertheless, the visual paradigm of the world as a stable and discernible picture of

reality has a long philosophical tradition. Aristotle in Metaphysics affirmed: “Above all, we

value sight; disregarding its practical uses, we prefer it, I believe, to every other sense, even

when we have no material end in view. Why? Because sight is the principal source of

knowledge and reveals many differences between one object and another.”72 René Descartes

reinforced the authority of vision as our most truthful sense by his belief that the cognition of

distinct phenomena constitutes humankind’s only source of knowledge. Hence, he praised

sight: “All the management of our lives depends on the senses ... [and] that of sight is the most

comprehensive and the noblest of these.”73 The prevalence of visual perspective is most notable

in the metaphor contained in the name for Enlightenment. This movement, which strove to

spread knowledge and establish an optimistic, positive, and rational view of the world, was

named after a visual phenomenon -- the shedding of light upon what was thought to have

previously been a mystified, dark picture of reality.

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Contrary to our traditional Cartesian interpretation of the world in Apollonian visual

terms of clarity and distinctness, sound in Futurist art lived its Dionysian predisposition for

disturbance, making a blurred but no less true image of reality. It lived not only in the contrast

between the aural and the visual -- instinctual and cognitive -- but also in the contrasting

inclinations in the very creation of sound between noise-music and music proper. The latter

dichotomy has its roots in ancient Greek mythology and theatre. Specifically, as Nietzsche

describes in The Birth of Tragedy, there was an instrumental symbolism in the music

accompanying the performance: “the aulos reed-pipe represented Dionysean rudeness and the

crafted, stringed lyre represented Apollonian serenity and order.”74 A myth goes that the first

known player of the aulos was Marcyas, the satyr who lost a musical contest to Apollo playing

lyre and consequently was flayed alive for his hubris in challenging a god. The story presents

the tension between freedom and tyranny, moderation and excess, inebriation and sobriety,

primitivism and culture through a significant opposition in the approach to noise/sound/music

making.

Steven Connor stresses that Nietzsche finds the lyre, or cithara, representative of

“Doric architecture expressed in sound. … In a sense, Nietzsche seems to be saying, the music

of the lyre is no longer music at all, but only the symbol of the higher, more abstract kind of

music of mathematical relations. The lyre is identified with reason and measure, presumably

because it includes within itself the regularly-spaced intervals of the mode, or the octave. The

strings arrayed in parallel approximate to the abstract picture of music provided by the stave.”75

In addition, plucking the strings on the lyre meant operating the instrument at a distance, while

blowing in the aulos meant an immediate corporeal contact -- its shrill sound was a direct result

of the performer’s physical efforts, an extension of the vocal gesture of excessive pain or joy.
 55

The onomatopoeic mime of noise not only reflected the fragmented world of

modernity but also exposed carnal and libidinal values of voice in performance. This was

because vocal utterance produced by movements, frictions, and explosions of air in the body

always/already exhibits its somatic aspects. It holds true for any sound as postmodern theorist

Steven Connor alleges: “Sound, wrote Aristotle (De anima, II. 8), is a kind of pathos, a

suffering. The air is battered, stretched, percussed when there is sound. The voice never simply

appears, but is expressed, its shape formed out of resistance. What resists the voice? The

heaviness, the reluctant inertia of things, the world’s weary wish to hold its peace. The voice

must overcome this lethargy deep down things. It is a striving, and a disturbance: it subjects the

world to strain.”76

Sound in its pure materiality, a physical disturbance of the air that makes it audible (as

Helmholtz explains), when thought of as a carnal emanation of the human spirit (breath or

pneuma) becomes a compelling emotional, sensorial, and spiritual substance. Aristotle’s

musing, paraphrased by Connor, is reminiscent of Roland Barthes’s writing on “the grain of the

voice,” which became a paradigmatic figure for the actor’s bodily presence in theatre

performance. Barthes finds in the grain of the voice “a dual posture, a dual production of

language and of music,” a locus of “the encounter between a language and a voice,”77 that is,

between performance and the performer’s body. He regards a vocal interpretation of an aria as

a wider and more concrete phenomenon than a mere reproduction of a text or a rendition of a

musical phrase. It is, Barthes says, “a cantor’s body brought directly to your ears ... from deep

down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, and the cartilages. ... The grain is that: the

materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue.”78

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So what Aristotle describes as the pathos and suffering of physical sound becomes a

jouissance, an erotic exchange between the performer and spectator conveyed by voice. The

sound of the actor’s voice gives a corporeal, sensuous dimension to the performance; it

achieves an erotic reciprocity or an extra-textual communication, a communication in excess of

the linguistic one. “Reciting or singing in front of others entails showing them something of

one’s body,” suggests French psychoanalyst Pierre Fédida; “it also means discovering, in a

flash, a given diffuse sensibility of our body. The voice is bodily matter - a pre-objective

element quite unlike the objectivity of our ocular relation to the person and their capacity to

represent themselves.”79 Clearly, the presentational ability of voice/sound, in contrast to the

representational features of the visual, coheres with Ong’s distinction between the oral and the

written. It lies at the root of the antitextual orientation toward performativeness in sound poetry

and the theatre of the historical avant-garde. The Marinettian onomatopoetic declamation at

Futurist serate, the return to the sound substance of language in Russian zaum (beyond sense)

poetry, and the alogical verbal and vocal practices of Dadaist simultaneous poetry -- all

followed this very impulse toward a pre-objective quality of voice and its material realization in

sound of speech and performance.

SYNTHETIC THEATRE AND THE SYNAESTHETIC POTENTIAL OF SOUND

The popularity of synaesthesia in artistic circles at the turn of the twentieth century was

impelled by the mystical teachings of Esoteric Buddhism, Anthroposophy, and Theosophy as

promulgated by Madame Helena Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner, among others. The Symbolists
 57

were the first to thoroughly consider the potential of synaesthetic artistic expression based on

chromatic or tonal features of sound and colour. They celebrated the audition colorée, of which

Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “Voyelles” (Vowels) provides a well-known case in point [errata]:

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles,

Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes:

A, noir corset velu de mouches éclatantes

Qui bombinent autour des puanteurs cruelles …

A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels,

Someday I’ll explain your burgeoning births:

A, a corset, black and hairy, buzzing with flies

Bumbling like bees around a merciless stench… 80

Rimbaud’s colour-sound synesthesia obviously applies to all other senses: in A we

can touch a “heary” corset and smell “a merciless stench.” The Futurists and other avant-gardes

soon adopted the idea of sound-colour correspondence. Thus, Nikolai Kublin, impresario of the

Russian avant-garde and one of only a few Cubo-Futurists to welcome Marinetti’s 1914 visit to

Moscow, wrote a manifesto entitled “What Is the Word?” in which he assigned each vowel its

own pitch and each hard consonant its own colour. Poets Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov joined

in: “We understand vowels as time and space (a characteristic of thrust), and consonants as

color, sound and smell.”81 Consequently, they started to use these tactile and spatio-temporal

qualities of vowels and consonants to shape newly coined words of zaumny yazyk.
 58

In his argument for Rayonism painter Mikhail Larionov explained: “Obviously, a blue

spread evenly over the canvas vibrates with less intensity than the same blue put on more

thickly. Hitherto this law has been applicable only to music, but it is incontestable also with

regard to painting: colors have a timbre that changes according to the quality of their vibrations,

i.e., of density and loudness. In this way, painting becomes as free as music and becomes self-

sufficient outside imagery.”82

Italian Futurists were drawn to synaesthesia as well: Enrico Prampolini wrote a

manifesto titled “Chromophony - The Color of Sounds,” in which he wrote: “We conceive

painting as an aggregation of chromatic vibrations. ... The aim will be to encourage the optical

appreciation of fine distinctions, atmospheric subtleties, and rhythmic influences of the atom,

and to be able to express in chromatic terms the sound waves and the vibrations of all

movements within the atmosphere.”83

Obviously, both Larionov and Prampolini tried to give some scientific credibility to

their artistic theories. However, although the idea of the vibrational nature of sound and colour

has been established by experimental physics, in the arts it has been interpreted in a more

mystical way as a fluid correspondence of sensory attractions aimed at the mutual

reinforcement of the expressiveness of aural and visual material. Wassily Kandinsky, for

example, who wrote about his appreciation for Mme. Blavatsky in the essay On the Spiritual in

Art, attended several of Steiner’s lectures in 1908,84 and advocated the dominance of spirituality

in arts through his quasi-scientific speculations on the nature of sound, colour, and form. He

regarded aural and visual sensory attractions as conduits of “inner sound” (innerer Klang), the

mystical vibration that reverberates between the artist, its object, and the spectator, between

soul and nature. From his experience in work on canvas, Kandinsky contrived the idea of the
 59

“inner sound,” an intrinsic fluid content that a painter senses in each object and reproduces for

the viewer. He wanted to develop an abstract painting technique that would function in the

same way as “musical sound [that] acts directly on the soul and finds an echo there.” Arnold

Schönberg, Kandinsky’s composer friend, but also a painter, noted this affinity between music

and painting: “Kandinsky and Oskar Kokoschka paint pictures in which the external object is

hardly more to them than a stimulus to improvise in color and form and to express themselves

as only the composer expressed himself previously.”85

In his memoir Kandinsky recounts that once, in the years of his youth, during a

concert of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin at the Moscow Court Theatre, he heard/saw, in a sort

of hallucination, musical sounds as an abstract composition of colours: “The violins, the deep

tones of the basses, and especially the wind instruments at that time embodied for me all the

power of that pre-nocturnal hour. I saw all my colors in my mind; they stood before my eyes.

Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me. I did not dare use the expression that

Wagner had painted ‘my hour’ musically.”86

This early fascination, he admits, inspired his exploration of synaesthesia later

elaborated in his essay On the Spiritual in Art (1911). But in 1909 Kandinsky had already

begun to experiment with the links among colour, music, and human movement in his plays

Green Sound, Black Sound, White Sound, and Violet Sound named by sound-colour

correspondences. For one of them, The Yellow Sound, Kandinsky engaged Russian Futurist

composer Thomas De Hartmann to write “a radically antidiatonic, polychromatic score for his

minimalist stage piece.”87 However, although published 1912 in the Blaue Reiter Almanach in

Munich, the work waited a full sixty years to be performed for the first time in 1982 at the

Guggenheim Museum in New York.88

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The Yellow Sound is an abstract play of colour and sound in six stage pictures. Its

performers move on stage merely as bearers of colour, sculptural mass, and form, and produce

indiscriminate sounds, as is evident in the following stage directions:

The people resemble marionettes. … First there appear gray, then black, then white,

and finally different-colored people. The movements of each group are different.

Many of the groups are illuminated from above with stronger or weaker lights of

different colors. … The background becomes dark blue in time with the music.

Behind the stage we hear a chorus, without words, which produces an entirely wooden

and mechanical sound without feeling. After the chorus finishes, a general pause: no

movement, no sound. Then darkness. Lights. Five bright yellow giants (as big as

possible). Very slowly, they turn their heads toward one another. The giants’ very low

singing, without words, becomes audible.89

“The sound of the human voice,” Kandinsky insisted, has “to be pure, i.e.: without

being obscured by words or meaning of the words.”90 This resulted in the almost complete

absence of dialogue, plot, and sequential action in his play. It is obvious that music and noise

together with light and movement were supposed to create, not a drama, but a kinetic

performance bordering on visual and aural art installation.

In the introductory essay to The Yellow Sound, entitled “On Stage Composition,”

Kandinsky elaborates a theatrical theory behind his staging. He argues that every art has its

own language, externally discernible by the means it uses -- sounds, colours, actions, and words

-- but internally they remain essentially one and the same idiom, one of abstract attractions that
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the human soul attains as vibrations of the “inner sound.” To Kandinsky, there are three distinct

external elements used primarily for their inner value: “(1) musical sound and its movement;

(2) bodily spiritual sound and its movement, expressed by people and objects; (3) color-tones

and their movements (a special resource of the stage). Thus, ultimately, drama consists here of

the complex of inner experiences (spiritual vibrations) of the spectator.”91 In spite of their

idiomatic differences, these elements together create a play’s dynamic structure and its inner

vibration that resonates in the spectator’s soul.

Kandinsky’s theory of stage composition made a significant contribution to avant-

garde theatre in two respects. First, it established a dramaturgy of music, body/spirit, and colour

as three compatible stage elements and their kinetic relationships, and, second, it left the

ultimate sense of the play to the spectator’s imagination. It provided an argument for the aural,

kinetic, and sculptural dramaturgy later developed by Futurists and Dadaists into a theatrical

technique similar to postdramatic staging. The Yellow Sound was a pioneering application of

such abstract structuring of sound, image, and movement in theatre. It has been said that

Expressionist and Bauhaus theatre innovator Lothar Schreyer “built a whole theory of

performance on the expressive process first suggested in The Yellow Sound.”92

Kandinsky’s stage theory stood in stark contrast to the plot-and-character-based

configuration of nineteenth century theatre. He found the naturalist, slice-of-life theatre

insufficient since it represented “in general the more or less refined and profound narration of

happenings of a more or less personal character,” while “the cosmic element was completely

lacking.”93 Hence his banishment of dramatic plot from theatre. Similarly, one of the first of

Marinetti’s theatre manifestos stated Futurist disgust “with the contemporary theatre (verse,

prose, and musical) because it vacillates stupidly between historical reconstruction (pastiche or
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plagiarism), psychology, and photographic reproduction of our daily life; a finicky, slow,

analytic, and diluted theatre worthy, all in all, of the age of the oil lamp.” As an alternative,

Marinetti extolled a theatre of “all the new significations of light, sound, noise, and language,

with their mysterious and inexplicable extensions into the least explored part of our

sensibility.”94

As much as psychological aspects of the performance-reception loop of theatre in

general, be it dramatic or postdramatic, are relevant for performance analysis, they were not so

sharply articulated in the historical avant-gardes’ theory and practice. Nevertheless, there is

ample evidence of their disregard for psychology, especially in their experiments with sound.

Aside from the disrespect for psychologically motivated acting that mimed everyday human

behaviour, Marinetti and Kandinsky had further motivations to remove psychology from their

creative process: reasons both corporeal and spiritual. Futurists wanted to immerse the

audience in noise, to expose it to sensory overload without any pretension of creating

understanding or empathy but simply to trigger instinctual revolt -- their oral/aural

performance communicated on the psychosomatic rather than psychological level. Kandinsky,

on the other hand, encapsulated the audio-visual and kinetic essence of the stage in emanations

of “inner sound;” his abstract theatre pieces named after sounds conveyed spiritual energies of

synesthesia rather than psychological truths.

Similarly, Kandinsky, who conceived his theatre with an ambition to create a

Gesamtkunstwerk, clearly expressed disapproval of Wagner’s representational mode in theatre

as too programmatic and of his leitmotifs as too repetitive. While admitting that Wagnerian

musical drama “created a link between movement and progress of music,” Kandinsky argued

that “the inner sound of movement did not come into play … [because] in the same artistic but
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still external fashion Wagner subordinated music to the libretto, that is, … the hissing of red-

hot iron in water, the sound of the smith’s hammer, etc., were still represented musically.”95

Instead of the musical representation of something behind an action, Kandinsky sought the use

of sound in its unmediated form, constituting an action in itself. His interest in concrete sound

was notable in the specific treatment of the human voice in The Yellow Sound, where actors

were supposed to utter pure concrete sound not “obscured by words and meaning.” Kandinsky

thus rejected the psychologically motivated exaltation, weeping, and emotional speech of

characters habitual in naturalistic theatre in favour of the vibration of bodily sound and its

movement as the basic elements of stage performance. The focus on the concreteness (or

materiality) of sound and the dismissal of the anecdotal and the psychological, proposed by

Kandinsky, represent two facets of the same disruptive tendency of the avant-garde, leading

away from the logic and discursive language of literature and art.

AVANT-GARDE HYBRIDIZATION: TOWARD AN INTERMEDIAL THEATRE

The historical avant-garde appeared at a “climactic moment of rupture,” claims Marjorie

Perloff: “the moment when the integrity of the medium, of genre, of categories such as ‘prose’

and ‘verse’ [as well as drama and theatre] and most importantly, of ‘art’ and ‘life’ were

questioned.”96 The theatre of the avant-garde spoke this language of rupture and dissociation

with existing cultural and artistic practice. It refused to obey distinctions of medium, genre, and

artistic form. No longer dominated by the literary text, it developed an antitextual idiom that

focuses on the performance and the multimedia structure of the theatrical event (happening,
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kinetic installation) and consciously opted for an anti-art form based on the poetics of

discontinuity and hybridization. Futurist evenings, serate futuriste, and Dadaist soirées at the

Cabaret Voltaire are prime examples of the hybrid mixed-media events that made an early

impact on the avant-garde theatre. They contained declamations of parole in libertà or

simultaneous renditions of sound poetry, readings of manifestos, installations of paintings,

posters, and sculptures, and presentations of the new noise music, assembled in the form of a

happening. These arte-azione (action art) events soon became rallies at which poets, painters,

sculptors, and musicians fought with all expressive means at their disposal against the

passatismo of conventional art. Upon Marinetti’s demand, from the first manifesto of Futurist

playwrights, they were performed for the “pleasure of being booed,” causing quarrels, riots,

and physical conflicts. The unexpected sound of onomatopoeic poetry and eccentric

verbalization of manifestos constituted part of their offensive arsenal. In the belief that “only

theatrical entertainment is worthy of the true Futurist spirit,” they staged these bombastic

evenings in grand theatres all across Italy. A grande serata at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome on 2

March 1913 exemplified a typical serata, containing a Molotov cocktail of agitations,

invectives, extravagant theories, and provocative art. Its program included Giovanni Papini’s

speech against the city of Rome, Umberto Boccioni’s talk on Futurist painting and sculpture

(exhibited onstage), and Marinetti’s declamation of poetry, such as Aldo Palazzeschi’s poem

“La fontana malata”:

Clof, clop, cloch,

cloffete,

cloppete,

clocchete,
 65

chchch… 97

The eroiche serate would often begin with the symphonic “Inno alla vita” (Hymn to

Life) by maestro Balilla Pratella, on later occasions joined by the machine music of Russolo’s

noise intoners, intonarumori. Marinetti’s own bellicose declamation of Zang Tumb Tumb

would have inevitably been staged as a highlight of a serata, especially on the European tours

of the Futurist “circus.” The audiences, who came to hear a lecture or a poetry reading, see an

exhibition, or watch a theatre piece, would find themselves immersed in a provocative hybrid

of sound poetry, installation, happening, and performance.

An often quoted case of transgression across the borders of conventional artistic

genres is Oskar Kokoschka’s Murderer, the Woman’s Hope, performed in the Vienna

Kunstschau’s courtyard on 4 July 1909.98 Kokoschka’s hybrid piece was a sign of the avant-

garde “performative turn” that liberated theatre from its representational mandates. The

audience was scandalized and disgusted by the illicit cruelty of the performance, announced in

advance by the visual rawness of two graphic posters for the piece. One of these posters, based

on Kokoschka’s already notorious self-portrait in Fauvist colours, was actually transposed into

the performance itself. Its lines and colours were transferred to thick traces of paint smeared on

the performers; nerves and blood vessels appeared on their bodies as if their skin had been

literally turned inside out. This extroversion of man’s inner self, executed by pragmatic use of

visual means, not only adhered to the Expressionist theatre’s demand that on the stage ‘man

explodes in front of man’ but also showed the artist’s preoccupation with the materiality of his

art. In the same vein, actors with their faces made up as masks from “primitive” cultures

produced untamed cries, moans, and grunts rather than clearly pronounced lines of verbal

dialogue. Kokoschka’s emphasis on the visceral physicality of vocal gestures strove to

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communicate performers’ corporeal presence while omitting the figural and narrative

procedures of drama. The auditory aspect of the performance represented not only an instant of

Expressionist Schrei (scream) acting, but also a deeper plunge into pre-verbal vocal sound and

art practice. The vocal gestures of the performers were amplified by the sound of archaic

instruments, dissonant and rough, closer to noise than to music, expressing an uncomfortable

mixture of pleasure and pain. Thus, besides relying on Fauve colours, Kokoschka’s piece drew

on Fauve sound, that is, on the expressive potential found in sound’s materiality. It is important

to highlight that Murderer, the Woman’s Hope was a play by a painter, as was typical of the

historical avant-garde, where stage performances were very often produced by visual artists,

poets, and musicians outside the institutional theatre. The creators of such performances were

more concerned with the material of their art, sounds, objects, and images, and the kinetic

sculptural environment of the stage, than with the plot, character, denouement, and other

elements of traditional drama. Hence, they turned to the interpolation of heterogeneous aural

and visual materials in a work of art that would replace the linear narrative structure of the

naturalistic theatre.

The concept of the hybridization of the aural and visual arts was put forward by

Futurist synaesthetic theories, for instance, Carlo Carrà’s “The Painting of Sounds, Noises, and

Smells” and Enrico Prampolini’s “Chromophony - The Colors of Sounds.” Drawing their

vocabulary from theories of sound and music, they introduced primarily aural features of

fluidity, loudness, temporality, and the interpenetration of time and space into a plastic arts

discourse. At the same time Futurist sound poets talked about thickness, opaqueness, weight,

and palpability, introducing these features of painting and sculpture into their poetry creation

and performance. The process was mutually enriching. Thus, painters Boccioni, Russolo,
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Carrà, Giacomo Balla, Francesco Cangiullo, and Gino Severini, together with poets, actors, and

musicians, created boisterous multimedia events of serate that informed the theatricality of

Futurist synthetic pieces, again written and performed by artists of diverse profiles. Russolo’s

daring tractate “The Art of Noises” was equally inspired by Marinetti’s liberation of words,

Balilla Prattela’s enharmonic music, and by the author’s own painting experience.

Kruchenykh’s Victory over the Sun, the first Russian Futurist opera, was a theatrical extension

of zaum poetry by painter Kazimir Malevich and composer Mikhail Matyushin. Khlebnikov’s

supersaga Zangezi reached its stage form designed and performed by Constructivist painter and

sculptor Vladimir Tatlin. The list of interdisciplinary contributions by poets, painters, and

musicians could easily go on, including Kandinsky, Kublin, Elena Guro, Natalia Gonchareva,

Mikhail Larionov, and many others.

SOUND AND MEANING: PERFORMATIVE IDIOM VERSUS DISCURSIVE LANGUAGE

The focal point of the avant-garde’s struggle against the existing art practice was the

rejection of logocentrism and discursive language employed in fiction, poetry, drama, and the

entirety of Western cultural production. The main target of “A Slap in the Face of Public

Taste,” a manifesto signed by David Burliuk, Alexei Kruchenykh, Velimir Khlebnikov, and

Vladimir Mayakovsky in December 1912 in Moscow, was conventional poetry’s use of a

fossilized language emptied of life energies and as such useless for art. The document stated:

“We order that the poets’ rights be revered: 1. To enlarge the scope of the poet’s vocabulary
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with arbitrary and derivative words. 2. To feel an insurmountable hatred for the language

existing before their time.”99

To release language from its enslavement to rational thinking, Kruchenykh and

Khlebnikov created zaumny yazyk (an idiom beyond sense). Zaum was a transrational, emotive,

and intonational speech consisting of freely combined verbal roots, phonemes, and sounds. It

harvested a vocabulary from ancient forgotten languages, vocal practices of schizophrenics,

folk incantations, baby talk, glossolalia, and onomatopoeia. Zaum evolved from still alive

‘sound patches,’ remnants from an Ur-sprache in which sounds and meanings were not yet

alienated but still floated within otherwise worn-out practical language. Preferring the sound of

language to its meaning, the poets of zaum relied on phonemic rather than syntactic or

signifying quality of the ‘word as such.’ Khlebnikov exclaimed: “the word is no tool for

thinking anymore but material for art.”

In numerous manifestos such as “New Ways of the Word: The Language of the

Future, Death to Symbolism,” Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov argued for a poetry as a

word/sound art:

before us there was no verbal art

there were the pathetic attempts of servile thought to present everyday reality,

philosophy and psychology … but

the art of the word

did not exist. …

In art we have declared:

THE WORD IS BROADER THAN THE THOUGHT

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the word (and its components, the sounds) is not simply a truncated thought, not

simply logic, it is first of all the transrational (irrational parts, mystical, aesthetic).100

The two men sought a new art of words. Khlebnikov wanted to build a language

accessible to all of humanity, based on the internationally shared sound structure of primordial

phonemic roots. Kruchenykh, for his part, searched for zaum in the primitive chant structures

and incantations of archaic cultures and the glossolalia of religious mystics. He often referred

to the practice of the flagellant Varlaam Shishkov, who, when in ecstasy, would chant in a

language previously unknown to him: “namos pamos bagos/gerezon drovolmire

zdruvul/dremile cherezondro fordei …”101 Following the same intuitive impulse, Kruchenykh

had been able to declare the unintended birth of his famous zaum poem:

On April 27, at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, I instantaneously mastered to perfection all

languages Such is the poet of the current era I am here reporting my verses in

Japanese, Spanish and Hebrew:

iké mina ni

sinu ksi

iamakh alik

zel

GO OSNEG KAUD

M R BATUL’BA

VINU AE KSEL

VER TUM DAKH

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GIZ

SHISH 102

In both Italian and Russian Futurist manifestos, there is harsh critique of the

logocentric, referential, and communicative features of language. Marinetti compared syntax to

a boring interpreter or tour guide that confines a poet to language “that is traditional, heavy,

restrictive, earth-bound, with neither arms nor wings, because it is merely intelligent.”103

Khlebnikov praised the ability of “primitive” man (along with insane persons or poets) to

“express his emotions in novel pronouncements and rhythms far from everyday frozen

language with its conventional attachments that link precise meaning with articulation.”104

Their words conform to Antonin Artaud’s well-argued diatribes against worn-out language,

which were adopted by the whole avant-garde: “We must agree words have become fossilized,

words, all words are frozen, strait-jacketed by their meanings ... Under these conditions it is no

exaggeration to say that in view of their clarity defined by a limited terminology, words are

made to stop thought, to surround it, to complete it, in short they are only a conclusion.”105

Obviously, the production of meaning that depends on linguistic encoding, already

inscribed in the arbitrary pairing of the Saussurean signifier and signified, was an inappropriate

method for the expression of avant-garde revolt and rupture with the cultural and artistic status

quo. The closure of discursive language within the teleological schemes of representation was

deemed to be an unfavourable and repetitious scenario for an art that wanted to change the

world. Avant-garde artists felt trapped between langage and parole (language as a cultural

denominating system and speech as an act of individual expression), between a representational

and a presentational mode of speech, or between “enunciated discourse” and “enunciating

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gesture,” as Patrice Pavis words this dichotomy. Futurists found a way out of this trap by their

insistence on authentic vocal enunciation. Voice in Futurist performance poetry refused to be a

mere vehicle for communicating the “enunciated discourse” and acquired characteristics of a

self-realizing vocal gesture. Seeking the theatricality of material presence rather than the logic

of representation, Futurists started to explore non-semantic, acoustic properties of voice/speech

in performance. They eschewed conventional verbal content, radically shifting focus from the

word’s meaning to its sounding.

Steve McCaffery sees this tendency as the essential tenet of the avant-garde sound

poetry that executed “a full scale revision of the word as a desired destination when purified of

its cultural bondage to meaning. As part of this complex transformation of the semantic

paradigm, the materiality of the sign emerged as a central, almost primitivistic

preoccupation.”106 Recognizing the materiality of voice/sound and reaching for the intrinsic

performativity of words locked in their oral/aural potential, sound poets paved the way for

“performative generation of materiality” (Fischer-Lichte) in theatre. As this extends further

toward the understanding of sound’s ability to materialize onstage to participate in “moto-

rumorist” scenography, a new theatrical idiom independent of traditional narrative or dramatic

text can be considered as evolving from Futurist concepts of poetry and performance. Opposing

a mere transfer of textual content and repelling discursive language, Futurists resurrected sound

in/by the words of poetry and restored its materiality in/by the vocal performance/oral gesture

and the creation of an aural stage structure in theatre.

SEMIOTICS AND THE POSTMODERN RENEWAL OF AURALITY

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Human culture forever lives in between the non rational, destabilizing power of sound and the

clarifying, analytic predisposition of vision. While the indigenous oral cultures continue to

provide human connection with the world through ritual practices of chant and dance, a “sound

alignment” of language and nature, and the sound symbolism of ideophone words,107 the

Apollonian dream of clarity and vision came to dominate Western civilization in opposition to

the Dionysian inebriation with music. Our culture of work, trade, clear-cut communication, and

state authority almost exclusively believes in visual certainty and graphic encoding of printed

words and signs. However, in the age of simulacra, hungry for the authenticity and identity that

is no more, we witness “the postmodern renewal of aurality.” This is how Martin Jay terms a

contemporary philosophical trend described in his study Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of

Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. The book scrutinizes critiques of vision’s

allegedly superior capacity to provide access to knowledge by a number of influential French

thinkers. In their work Jay discovers the focus on aurality as a critical probe into metaphysical

schemes of discursive language and big narratives of dominant culture that, relying on sight,

which is intrinsically less temporal than hearing, “tend to elevate static Being over dynamic

Becoming.” Henri Bergson’s discussion of Zeno’s paradox and the ensuing concept of spatio-

temporal continuity make the initial link here. However, Jay allows a plurality of “scopic

regimes” that flow parallel to anti-ocularcentric discourse. Besides Bergson, among the main

proponents of this train of thought are Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray,

and Emmanuel Levinas, and, particularly important for this research, Roland Barthes, Jacques

Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard, whose writings on voice, language, and theatre have

greatly informed my study of the avant-garde and the postdramatic dramaturgy of sound. Jay’s
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diagnosis of the“postmodern renewal of aurality” in contemporary philosophy points to the

interconnectedness of ideological development (in cultural studies of the postmodern condition)

and artistic methods (in postdramatic theatrical practice). His argument encourages the formal,

aesthetic analysis of the aural aspect of postdramatic theatre as an essential factor of the overall

cultural change.

Steven Connor situates the beginning of the postmodern mistrust of the signifying

process and its replacement by the hearing process in the historical avant-garde struggle against

the closure of the sign in discursive language. “The auditory or acoustic has often been

experienced and represented, not as a principle of strength, but as a disintegrative principle,”

asserts Connor. “Indeed, it was precisely this aspect of the aural which may have recommended

it to the arts of dissolution practiced by Futurism and Dadaism.”108 Futurist and Dadaist practice

in poetry, visual art, and theatre was certainly a source of the postmodern subversion of an

authoritative visual paradigm by a destabilizing aural paradigm. Thomas Doherty asserts that

the “prioritization of the aural over the visual” introduces in postmodern thought “a mode of

hearing, of entendre, which will not allow for an easy slippage into understanding.”109 He

deliberately uses a pun with the French word entendre, which might denote “to hear” but also

“to understand,” to describe the subversive cultural impact of the aural paradigm of thought on

contemporary philosophy.

In the same vein, the antitextual gesture that caused a shift in avant-garde artistic

focus from the meaning to the sound of words can be seen as both expressive and a cultural

disturbance in theatre practice. Erika Fischer-Lichte maintains: “The revolution of the theatre

can only occur as cultural revolution if it succeeds in developing a ‘language of the theatre’

with which no messages are formulated but rather reactions evoked and provoked -- in other
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words in which not the semantic but rather the pragmatic dimension dominates.”110 The avant-

garde theatre’s switch between the semantic and the pragmatic, between the language of

literary drama and the idiom of theatre performance, is clearly concurrent with its turn toward

an orality/aurality of performance and a materiality of sound. For this reason Pavis discusses

the increasing concern for voice/sound in theatre as a cultural necessity: “At a time when

technology and Western civilization have attained a perfection in writing and in space

conquered by the gaze and by signs, there no longer remains but the invisible refuse, difficult to

locate and to notate, of the voice, of which we are incapable of grasping visually, thus

systematically, the ‘grain’ (Roland Barthes) or the pulsion. By insisting on the vocal signifier,

on the orality dimension in theatrical practice, theatre is less interested in the utterances

(visible, comprehensible and made concrete in a scenic space) than in the enunciation (place of

the enunciating subjects, noises and failures of their production). Theatre thus has a voice at

court.”111

However, most theatre historians and critics have not addressed the unique role of

voice (oral expression) and sound (aural structuring) in the field of stage performance incited

by Futurists and Dadaists. Up to now, only theoreticians of sound poetry and acoustic art have

paid close attention to it. Investigating the path from “phonic to sonic” in the development of

contemporary poetry that extended vocal gestures into acoustic ones, McCaffery alleges that

Futurist and avant-garde sound poets and performers “freed the word from semantic mandates,

redirecting a sensed energy from themes and message into matter and force.”112 This conception

of sound as “matter and force” of performance poetry easily translates into Lyotard’s notion of

theatre as the confluence of a libidinal traffic of energies or “pulsional displacements” instead

of the production of representative replacements.

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“The radical redefinition of the theatre, which the avant-garde began at the turn of the

century, fundamentally transformed the two categories ‘text’ and ‘performance’ and thereby

produced a new, highly charged dynamic between them,” maintains Fischer-Lichte. “The

history of European theatre can be understood as a record of shifting dominance between these

two competing dramatic categories.”113 Concurrently, Christopher Innes wonders whether “the

central issue in studying drama today is how we evaluate physical aspects of performance:

theatre as bodily expression, as opposed to the presentation of written words.”114 Extremely

defiant toward the written word, the Futurists transformed their vocal performance into bodily

expression, a vocal gesture that questioned the limits of the performer’s physicality. Marinetti’s

onomatopoetic mimesis of the noise of exploding shells, whistling shrapnel, or heavy engine

roar, for example, replaced the verbal description of the events. The ensuing non-verbal idiom

adhered to Artaud’s proposition for a sign language that consists of noises, cries, gestures,

poses and signs: “Abandoning Occidental usages of speech, it turns words into incantations. It

extends the voice. It wildly tramples rhythms underfoot. It pile-drives sounds. … It liberates a

new lyricism of gesture which, by its precipitation or its amplitude in the air, ends by

surpassing the lyricism of words.”115

Analyzing the avant-garde theatre’s return to primal ritual forces, Christopher Innes

discusses a particular use of incantatory language by Balinese dancers that “gave Artaud a

working example of the concrete language, intended for the senses and independent of speech,

which has been such an influential concept in avant-garde theatre.” In Balinese dance, Artaud

saw a theatre that not only “eliminates words but expresses a state prior to language,”

presenting a sacred physical impulse that is before words: “What little dialogue Balinese

spectacle contained was in an archaic tongue that apparently neither performers, nor the
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Balinese audience (let alone the French spectators), nor even priests understood. It thus became

an incantation. The only other vocal communication was on the level of pure sound, so that

meaning was transmitted on a physical level through attitudes.”116

One cannot underestimate the role of switching channels from a logical and

understandable wording to an alogical and incantational voicing in the formation of the new

theatre idiom. Futurist poetry and performance practice is full of such examples. The

onomatopoeia of Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tumb, the grotesque vocalizations of Cangiullo’s

Piedigrotta, the quasi-liturgical rendition of Ball’s Gadji beri bimba, and the alogical speech

of Balla’s theatrical synthesis To Understand Weeping exhibited the same pre-semantic

qualities of vocal performance. Kruchenykh utilized an example of ritual incantation --

“noskontos leskontos” -- provided by Varlaam Shishkov, ethnographer, writer, and

practising member of the Khlysty flagellants’ sect, as a model for the zaumnyi yazyk of

Futurist poetry.117 It was a chant of the sect members who repeated “verses” in unknown

tongues to the point of physical exhaustion to attain mystical ecstasy. Their glossolalia

represented a ritual language that appears as a rhythmical, albeit incomprehensible, verbal

response to the mystical power of unknown archetypal forces. Accordingly, Khlebnikov’s

Zangezi, a speechmaker and human interpreter of birds, insects, gods, and stars, spoke with

natural powers in a concrete idiom of pre-textual vocal incantation. Aimed at a “practical”

re-animation of certain spirits, shamanic incantation -- alongside magic, often

onomatopoeic, words -- contained cries, groans, laughs, or chants articulated in the living

body in order to disarticulate conventional communication. This practice influenced the

avant-garde theatre’s adoption of vocal performance as a carnal manifestation, a non-

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referential utterance that communicates the performer’s body rather than a lexical message

of the script.

In his reappraisal of the Italian Futurist theatre, R.S. Gordon puts forth a similar

argument for the antitextual return to the primal state of thesign as its substantial feature.118 He

suggests that Derrida’s analysis of Artaud’s theatre, in which “gesture and speech have not yet

been separated by the logic of representation,”119 can be applied to the study of Futurist theatre.

Without pretensions of drawing big conclusions about Futurist influences on Artaud, Gordon

points to the significant coincidence of the two theatrical poetics, particularly tangible in regard

to voice/sound, since Derrida formulates atheatre of cruelty as “a speech that is a body, of a

body that is a theatre, of a theatre that is a text because it is no longer enslaved to a writing

more ancient than itself, an ur-text or an-ur-speech.”120

After analyzing major changes in writing/performance/production proposed in

Futurist theatre manifestos -- from the repudiation of dramatic technique (in the 1911

“Manifesto of Futurist Playwrights”) through a performative turn to body madness as a

replacement for psychology (in the 1913 “Variety Theatre Manifesto”) to the proposition of

anti-dramatic theatrical structures (in the 1915 “Futurist Synthetic Theatre”) -- Gordon

concludes that the Futurists developed a “theatrical theatre” in opposition to the illusionistic

message of dramatic theatre. This proximity of Futurists to postdramatic principles, initiated by

their recognition of themateriality of thetheatrical sign (which followed their experiments with

pure sound in poetry), seems to be in complete accord with Derrida’s description of Artaudian

non-representational theatre, which resides “in theatrical illegibility, in the night that precedes

the book, [where] the sign has not yet been separated from the force. It is not quite yet a sign, in

the sense in which we understand sign, but is no longer a thing, which we conceive only as
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opposed to the sign. ... It is neither a book nor a work, but an energy, and in this sense it is the

only art of life.”121 More specifically, accepting Artaud’s/Derrida’s notion of theatrical sign as a

valid descriptor for Futurist performance, one should acknowledge that this stems from the

legacy of their sound poetry methods and dramaturgy of sound. Therefore Gordon’s reappraisal

breaks ground for further exploration of the orality/aurality embedded in the non-

representational character of Futurist theatre.

It is vocal sound that brings a pure energy to the Futurist theatricality of presence. It

acquires materiality and earns dramaturgical currency exactly by dissociating itself from mere

meaning and turning text into performance just to the extent that it succeeds in betraying its

denotative function and developing an energetic field of perpetual becoming. Furthermore,

since sound is a temporal event that can never be repeated in the same shape twice, it shapes

nothing but a non-representational performance. So far, this all conforms to avant-garde theatre

theory and practice, but now the question arises whether to approach sound on the stage as an

act of theatrical semiosis or a mere performance device. The semioticians of theatre faced this

issue when examining a non-textual idiom based on the synergy of sound, light, movement,

objects, and people on the contemporary stage. Since the communication of meaning is here

seriously put in question, they came up with the notion that such a theatre idiom was, so to

speak, a cloud of “floating signifiers.” (The term “floating signifier” was coined by Claude

Lévi-Strauss to denote “mana,” a magic force known from the pre-religious beliefs of

indigenous tribes of the Pacific Islands -- “neither object nor sign but a force,” Derrida would

put it.) Whether this cloud was drifting toward any signification was left to the theatre audience

to decide.
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In his discussion of the relationship between avant-garde and contemporary semiotics,

Pavis argues: “the present success of performances can be explained by the rediscovery of the

temporal ‘event’ aspect unique to the theatre.” In that respect, as the historical avant-garde

theatre practitioners discovered, its inner material qualities make sound ideally suited to carry

the performance as a temporal and immediate event. Sound is temporal by nature; it lives as

long as it sounds and it literally does not point to any meaning outside itself. As poet

McCaffery claims: “sound -- the event and not the servant of semantics -- becomes a possible

antidote to the paradox of sign. That a thing need not be a this standing for that but

immediately a that … [that is, sound] free of the implications of the metaphysics of linguistic

absence.”122 Similarly to sound poetry, the avant-garde performance by its eventness and

temporality follows an aural paradigm that stands in contrast to the visual, textual, and rational

Cartesian concept of the world. This opposition is crucial for the understanding of the crisis of

the sign born from the controversy between the discursive language of written text and the

performative idiom of the theatre. Our understanding of the aural and the temporal, as

distinguished from the visual and the spatial, in theatre may be liberating, proposes Pavis. “If

the concept of language, sign or specificity is thus in a state of crisis, crystallizing, but also

blocking avant-garde thought, this is probably because it has linked its fate too closely to the

notions of mise en scène and spatiality. ... A domination of another avant-garde, that of time,

rhythm and voice, is seeking to break. Perhaps one should see in this mutation the failure or at

least the limits of semiology based solely on a Cartesian examination, measurable, geometric

and in a word, spatial, of the theatrical performance. ... Insistence on stage visuals as opposed

to text too hastily dismissed the temporal, continuous and pulsional aspect of the theatrical

performance.”123 Clarifying that the discourse that followed the avant-garde shift from text to
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performance, apparent in the spatial field of the mise en scène, too hastily dismissed the

theatricality of rhythm, voice, and sound, Pavis opens a possibility of a renewal of an

oral/aural approach to theatre. It would put, as he says, “a voice at court” and, especially when

extended to abstract sound structures of postdramatic stage, make a case for the examination

of the dramaturgy of sound in contemporary theatre.

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DRAMATURGY OF SOUND IN THE AVANT-GARDE AND POSTDRAMATIC THEATRE

Third Chapter -- Sound Poetry and Bruitist Performance: Words-in-Freedom

ORALITY AS THE THEATRICAL SUBSTANCE OF FUTURIST SERATE

In the period from 1910 to 1914, with the belief that “only theatrical entertainment is worthy

of the true Futurist spirit,” Marinetti and friends started an intense campaign of staging their

evenings (serate) in grand theatres all across Italy, from Politeama Rossetti di Trieste and

Teatro Lirico di Milano to Teatro Costanzi di Roma, Politeama Garibaldi di Palermo, and

Galleria Futurista di Napoli. Futurist mixtures of poetry declamations, conferences, concerts,

exhibitions, and performances toured Europe as well; the ‘eroice serate’ stirred audiences in

London and Paris in 1912 and in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Berlin in 1914.124 A typical

Futurist serata would begin on a serious note with hymns like Inno alla vita -- sinfonia

futurista del maestro Balilla Pratella or Inno alla poesia nuova by Paolo Buzzi. But its

celebratory note would not last long; through loud manifestos in praise of the self-professed

revolutionary art, it would soon deteriorate into the public denigration of establishment and

passéist art. The evening would then continue with the declamation of chains of

incomprehensible words resembling Russian zaum (beyond sense) poetry like clof, clop,

cloch… of Aldo Palazzeschi’s poem La fontana malata.

The initial seriousness of a serata, already shaken up by manifesto readings and poetry

declamations, would thus inevitably turn into a radical form of variety cabaret, replete with

ludic provocations and the free-word novelties of Buzzi, Luciano Folgore, Auro d’Alba,

Francesco Cangiullo, and others. No doubt most irritating for the audience were absurdist,
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parodic, and circus-like group recitations like Discussione sul Futurismo di due critici

sudanesi (Discussion between Two Sudanese Critics on Futurism) by Giacomo Balla and

Piedigrotta and I funerali di un filosofo passatista (Funeral of a Passéist Philosopher) by

Cangiullo. Here is, for example, how Balla’s two imaginary Sudanese critics talked about

Futurism: “Farcionisgnaco gurninfuturo bordubalotaompimagnusa …”125 The culmination

would be reached by the cacophony of the most celebrated example of onomatopoeic

declamation, the sound poem of the battlefield Zang Tumb Tumb, performed by the

orchestrator of all the ado, Marinetti: “zang-tumb-tumb ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta stop …

uuuuuuuurlaaare degli ammalati nel crrrrrrrrrpitare delle palle …”126 This type of nonsense

tended to catch audience members off guard and induce stupor, which often caused their

belated and angry reaction. Futurists’ declamation of coarse words and sound clusters, put in

place of conventional literature’s appeals to empathy and reason, was a part of their strategy

for the renewal of sensibility; it served to jolt audiences from complaisant listening. Their shift

of focus from benign entertainment and education to subversive ridicule was deliberately

designed to provoke a violent response in the stalls; they welcomed the audience’s animosity

as a rewarding experience and delighted in the “pleasure of being booed.” Besides heating up

the atmosphere with noisy declamations and manifesto readings, Marinetti would sharpen the

antagonistic attitude toward the public by scolding local passéist practices, as is known from

his addresses in Venice, Florence, and Rome. Naturally, the crowds erupted with hostility.

Lacerba, 15 December 1913, reported on the Grande serata futurista held at the

Florentine Teatro Verdi, publishing a poster with the subtitle Resconto sintetico (fisicale e

spirituale) della battaglia (A Synthetic (Physical and Spiritual) Description of the Battle) on

the front page. It presented two antagonistic camps graphically in two parallel columns. On
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the stage side are two poets (Marinetti and Cangiullo), three painters (Boccioni, Carrà, and

Soffici), one anti-philosopher (Papini), one immoralist (Tavolato), and one occasional

volunteer. On the hall side are 5000 enemies: clerics, bourgeois, students, liberals, aristocrats,

the virtuous, journalists, policemen, and commoners. Two additional columns list arms, states

of mind, allies, wounded, and the results of the battle on both sides. Symptomatically, the list

of enemies is exhaustive; it includes even students and liberals, who could be considered as

possible supporters of Futurist ideas, since according to the Futurist performance strategy an

arte-azione event could win people over only by confrontation.

A bellicose attitude obviously became integral to the Futurist theatricalization of the

act of reading poetry and manifestos. The unnerving cacophony of the poetry and the

aggressiveness of the manifestos, usually inadmissible in bourgeois theatre, marked the

oral/aural performance at the serate. Günter Berghaus emphasizes: “The futurist declaimer

now served as an object the audience could react against. The reading set in motion a

mechanism that went far beyond the appreciation of an artistic creation. The text functioned as

a score, the reciter as a conductor, and the audience as the orchestra. The main task of the

declaimer was to challenge the spectators and to provoke them into reactions of an

unpremeditated kind.”127

The Futurists’ choice of performance space was made with the same conflictual

attitude. Big theatres were not randomly chosen as functional venues for the staging of the

serate; they were singled out as the architectural and cultural sites of an antagonistic art

tradition that needed to be demolished. For the Futurists there was nothing more passéist than

a Belle Époque theatre hall and its applauding public. At the same time, aware of the

popularity and the tangible social and political impact of Giuseppe Verdi’s and Gabriele
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D’Annunzio’s theatre, Futurists proclaimed that “it is not possible today to influence the

warlike Italian soul, except through the theatre.” Consequently, they orchestrated a rebellion

by introducing an unconventional form of site-responsive performance. Futurists used the

theatre as a topical resource of their disdain, and its physical space (stage and auditorium) as a

playing area of their totally non-illusionistic, hybrid performance. They played with its

institutional character and manipulated spectators into participating in an anti-theatrical

environmental event or happening. Therefore the serate can be considered embryonic of

avant-garde environmental theatre.

The antagonistic tone of manifesto readings, according to Michael Webster, is a sign

of the intrinsic orality of Futurist performance: “In this [oral] context ‘stirring the audience up’

by direct address, pathetic exhortations, and emotional and humorous exaggeration is not at all

uncommon. Such a practice has the immediate character of an event, is descriptive and

propagandistic rather than narrative, and leads naturally to the theatricality of the futurist

manifestos and the deliberate audience-baiting at the serate futuriste.”128 His argument derives

from distinction between orality and literacy established by Walter Ong who claims that while

orality retains the confrontational attitude as its genuine characteristic, “writing fosters

abstraction that disengages knowledge from the arena where human beings struggle with one

another.”129 Hence oral cultures situate knowledge within a context of struggle, where

language is a mode of action rather than a countersign of speculative thought. Ong provides a

substantial number of examples of such verbal practice in folk riddles, counting exercises, and

tongue-twisters, together with exhorted confrontations in ancient rhetoric and classic literature

such as the Iliad, Beowulf, the Old Testament, or medieval European romance. In all of these,

words are taken as actions or oral events whose truth has to be tested through antagonistic
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performance acts. Ancient orators, poets, and minstrels often competed publically in angry but

eloquent exchanges of insults called flyting. Panegyrical exultations, victory odes, or funeral

speeches are of the same kind of oral practice that, in this case, exaggerates the positive side of

its subject. The use of the psychodynamics of orality, as Webster posits, places Futurist

manifestos in the wider genre of oral literature.

Marinetti considered manifesto writing a special verbo-vocal art form, as his letter to

Gino Severini demonstrates: “I have read your manuscript […] it has nothing of manifesto in

it. … I advise you to … rework it … recasting the whole new part in the form of manifesto. …

I think I shall persuade you by all that I know about the art of making manifestos, which I

possess, and by my desire to place in full light, not in half light, your own remarkable genius

as a futurist.”130 When advocating “the art of making manifestos,” Marinetti had in mind his

own uncompromisingly emphatic style of manifesto writing: “We make use of every ugly

sound, every expressive cry from the violent life that surrounds us. … We bravely create

‘ugly’ literature. … Each day we must spit on the Altar of Art.”131 Continuing to promote the

manifestos’ succinct style, Marinetti didn’t mince words: “It is stupid to write one hundred

pages where one would do.”132 His arrogant manifestos surely provoked the unassuming

public into open hostility. No less provocative, his sound poetry often constituted a functional

part of those manifestos. “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, 1910,” for instance,

contained an early example of “words-in-freedom,” an extract from the poem BATTLE

(WEIGHT + STINK), full of tactile analogies and onomatopoeic words bursting with mimed

sound: “tuumbtuumb alarms Gargaresch bursting crackling pus Tinkling knapsacks rifles

clogs […] filth whirlwind orange blossoms filigree misery nuts squares maps jasmine +
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nutmeg + rose arabesque mosaic carrion stings bungling ... tatatata rifle-fire peec pac puun

pan pan mandarin tawny wool machine-guns rattles leper’s hovels sores forward ...”133

In “The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells,” Carlo Carrà obviously followed the

art of writing manifestos, relying on the use of expressive onomatopoetic sound adopted from

declamation practice. His theoretical elaboration of colour-sound synaesthesia was enhanced

by the multiplication of letters in the manner of sound poetry. A crescendo of vocal sounds of

vowels and consonants suggested an intensification of colour tone and thickness:

I rossi, rooooosssssi roooooosssissssimi che griiiiiiidano.

I verdi i non mai abbastanza verdi, veeeeeerdiiiiiissssssimi, che striiiiiidono;

i gialli non mai abbastanza scoppianti; i gialloni-polenta; i gialli-zafferano; i gialli-

ottoni.

Reds, rrrrreds, the rrrrreddest rrrrrrreds that shouuuuuuuut.

Greens, that can never be greener, greeeeeeeens, that screeeeeeem;

yellows, as violent as can be; polenta yellows, saffron yellows, brass yellows.134

Presupposing an emphatic rendition, these lines of words-in-freedom represented a

palpable support for the theoretical content of the manifesto. The uneven verbalization of the

hybrid script (sound-poem/manifesto) and its loud vocal performance exposed audience

members to the interpenetration of sensual attractions aimed at the total renewal of sensibility.

Carrà thus pragmatically proved his conviction that “the systematic use of onomatopoeia,

antigraceful music without rhythmic quadrature, and the art of noises were created by the

same Futurist sensibility that has given birth to the painting of sounds, noises and smells.”135
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Marinetti’s famous dynamic declamation of Zang Tumb Tumb at the Doré Gallery in

London, 28 April 1914, exemplifies a further step toward theatrical performance:

Dynamically and synoptically I declaimed several passages from my ZANG TUMB

TUMB (The Siege of Adrianople). On the table in front of me I had a telephone,

some boards, and matching hammers that permitted me to imitate the Turkish

general’s orders and the sounds of artillery and machine-gun fire. Blackboards had

been set up in three parts of the hall, to which in succession I either ran or walked, to

sketch rapidly an analogy with chalk. My listeners, as they turned to follow me in all

my evolutions, participated, their entire bodies inflamed with emotion, in the violent

effects of the battle described by my words-in-freedom. There were two big drums in

a distant room, from which the painter Nevinson, my colleague, produced the boom

of cannon, when I told him to do so over the telephone. The swelling interest of the

English audience became frantic enthusiasm when I achieved the greatest dynamism

by alternating the Bulgarian song “Sciumi Maritza” with the dazzle of my images

and the clamor of the onomatopoeic artillery.136

Marinetti’s description reads like the casebook of a mise en scène. Here, Zang Tumb

Tumb acquires qualities of a straightforward performance text for the staging of a dynamic,

synoptic declamation. Its elaborate blueprint suggests a stage that spills into the audience

space as if it were an act of environmental theatre. The three blackboards, strategically located

at specific places in the hall, worked as blocking points for the choreography, which was

deliberately aimed to disorient the audience by making them turn and follow the performer’s
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abrupt change of pace and direction. From the point of view of physical performance,

Marinetti’s declamation, running, and swift position changes are nothing but fisicoffolia (body

madness) as discussed in his “Variety Theatre Manifesto.” Furthermore, his simultaneous use

of onomatopoeic words-in-freedom and their visual analogies rapidly sketched on the

blackboards transposed the free orthography and the sound content of the poem onto the stage.

The iconicity of the graphic and aural material in the poem provided dramaturgical potential

for theatrical performance. One should not forget that, as the poet reminds us, the piece

achieved its high point musically by the counterpoint of “the dazzle of my images and the

clamor of the onomatopoeic artillery” with the melodic and rhythmic, deep and slow refrain of

a Bulgarian folk song, Sciumi Maritza Okrvavljena (The Maritza River Gurgles with Blood).

Marinetti’s performances of Zang Tumb Tumb at the Sprovieri Gallery in Rome and

his recitations in February 1914 in St. Petersburg and Moscow followed his London

appearance. Accounts of these performances confirm that their dynamic declamation, vocal

onomatopoeia, and accompanying non-vocal sound, together with their spatial presentation,

made the poem fully theatrical. Accordingly, Michael Kirby concludes that Futurist

declamation became an intrinsically theatrical genre in which “words became animated,

poetry became theatre.” Donald Marinelli also acknowledges the role sound poetry played in

later developments of Futurist theatricality. He, for example, finds condensed poetic form one

of the origins of the Futurist synthetic theatre: “Marinetti wanted plays to achieve the dynamic

effect a poem creates in just a few stanzas, just as he wanted poetry to have the immediacy of

theatre. Futurist theatre had to strive for the synthesis inherent in poetry. Since the poem is

supposed to be the innermost, lyrical expression of a poet’s thinking, it is freed from the

demands of technique that Marinetti claims hampers the theatre playwright.”137 Indeed,
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Futurist synthetic theatre pieces strived for the immediacy of a poem. Their extreme brevity

inherited from the aesthetics of poetry was a viable antidote to the naturalist dramaturgy

Marinetti warned against in his address to Futurist playwrights published in 1911. There, after

scolding the stupidity of passéist dramaturgical techniques, he asserted: “Dramatic art cannot

exist without poetry, that is to say, without rupture and without synthesis. [... It is] a synthesis

of life in its most typical and significant tendencies.”138 Although Marinetti used the term

“dramatic art,” it is clear from his next manifesto of synthetic theatre, which “will resemble

nothing but itself,” that the rupture with mimesis and dramatic form was unavoidable. The

Futurist “dramatist” was now supposed to create a theatrical world “made up of colors, forms,

sounds and, noises […] squalls of fragments of interconnected events, mortised and tenoned

together, confused, mixed up, chaotic.”139 Marinetti’s call for a fragmented, hybrid form of

theatre, based on its material structure rather than a text, thus appears as an early postdramatic

venture. It should be noted that it was his sound poetry of “brutal and immediate lyricism” and

its dynamic performance reaching toward “a synthesis of life” that liberated unexpected

verbal/vocal/aural energy and made it available to theatre.

SOUND AND SANE IDEAS OF DADAIST FOLLY AND ABSTRACTIONISM

The formation of a distinct literary genre that includes text-sound art, concrete poetry,

lettrisme, simultaneism, l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e, and verbo-voco-visual art, which together represent a

class of sound poetry, has a long history spreading from Aristophanes and Rabelais to

Christian Morgenstern, Lewis Carroll, and many unconventional modern writers. Sound
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patterning is characteristic of indigenous oral cultures that are concerned more with “sound

alignment” with the phenomenal world than with the cognitive, logical structuring of

perceptions known in the developed languages.140 It marks the “primitive” creation of

euphonic structures, incantations, chants, syllabic mouthing, and lexical distortions taking part

in their sacred and profane languages. One can find unintended sound poetry in popular white

magic, nonsensical children’s rhymes and word games, mnemonic counting aids, and other

rhythmical vocal practices that accompany language acquisition, work processes, shamanic

rituals, or ludic noisemaking at carnivals. Futurist, Dadaist, and Surrealist poets revisited all

these forms in their experiments with sound that broke ground for contemporary poetry

making. Unlike the standard poetry that concentrates on versification, rhythm, rhyme,

euphony, assonance, alliteration, and other literary figures, they explored the way in which

sound can be extended beyond its use as a prosodic device.

As Steve McCaffery asserts, “sound poetry manifested itself in several diverse and

revolutionary investigations into language’s non-semantic, acoustic properties.”141 Luigi

Russolo, for example, who pressed for the enlargement of the scope of music by the inclusion

of noise, envisioned a broad potential of vocal “noise” in poetic expression. “Language has a

richness of timbre unknown to the orchestra, which should prove that nature itself had

recourse to the timbres of noise, when it wished to increase and enrich the timbres of the

magnificent instrument of the human voice. ... For centuries, poets did not know how to derive

from this very effective source of expression in language. ... Only the futurist poets, with their

free words, were able to hear the entire value of noise in poetry.”142 Only when vocal sound

dissociates itself from verbal meaning and through its sensorial-perceptive materiality
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becomes an aesthetic object per se, only then will the vocal utterance become capable of

giving its message a human resonance, argued Russolo.

Another type of incision into the non-semantic, acoustic tissue of poetry comes from

the revelation of “a denial of signification toward an ideal of the unification of expression and

indication”143 in the avant-garde performance idiom, suggests Jon Erickson. Breaking away

from the logocentric orientation of language, the performance poetry of the historical avant-

garde literally brought out the sensory essence of the word -- a sound gesture in which

“expression and indication” became amalgamated. The oral/aural idiom of performance thus

escaped the confines of the text and survived as a vocal action aimed at the co-presence of the

performer and the audience. Taking after Artaud’s idea of a theatre of presence, Erickson calls

the idiom of sound poetry “emotive language or language of presence, as opposed to a

language of signification -- language of absence. … This language should be incantatory,

summoning forth the power of presence within every fiber and organ and nerve of the human

being, uniting the spiritual with the physical, tapping into dormant and primal creative

energies, and emanating outward to connect with the listener.”144

In The Theatre and Its Double, Artaud repeatedly insists on the difference between

Occidental languages (and theatres), in which the word is enslaved by its discursiveness, and

Oriental languages, in which the word is liberated by its gestural power, intonation, and

sonority. For that reason he suggests, “to turn against language and its basely utilitarian, one

could say alimentary, sources, against its trapped-beast origins; and finally, to consider

language as the form of Incantation.”145 Artaud’s case in point is the corporeal and

incantational language of Balinese theatre, able to elicit an immediate, physical response.

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To achieve such immediacy, the painting, poetry, music, and theatre of the historical

avant-garde returned to the “primitive” idioms of non-Western cultures. Its artists, “barbarians

of the twentieth century,” turned inward for the liberation of powers of the collective

unconscious and “backward” to primitive/aboriginal art and culture, looking for a remedy for

the sickness of culture in the age of secular progress. While Pablo Picasso’s Demoiselles

d’Avignon and Béla Bartok’s Allegro Barbaro paid tribute to primitivism in visual art and

music, Kandinsky’s almanac Der blaue Reiter “included, besides Cézanne, Matisse, Gauguin,

and Delaunay,... naïve Rousseau, Russian and German folk art, woodcuts, children’s

drawings, masks, carvings, and votive paintings.”146 In the Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire one could

hear Tristan Tzara’s Negro Chants, Hugo Ball’s Elefantenkarawane, and Richard

Huelsenbeck’s drumming. Huelsenbeck remembers: “With Nietzsche we had learned the

relativity of things and the value of being unscrupulous... we understood the meaning of

primitivity -- Dada, the babblings of children, Hottentottery -- primitivity, of which the age

seemed to be giving signs.”147 Since the avant-garde artists recognized a welcome reminder of

mankind’s infancy in the indigenous cultures, they produced numerous replications of naïve

tribal art and children’s spontaneous creations as an antithesis of the desiccated art of

academies and museums.

Relatedly, American avant-gardist of the 1960s Richard Kostelanetz uses a

children’s tongue-twister to explain the principle of text-sound art in which sounds create their

own coherence apart from the meaning of words:

“If a Hottentot taught a Hottentot tot

to talk ’ere the tot could totter,

ought the Hottentot tot be taught to say

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ought or naught or what ought to be taught ’er?”

commenting, “The subject of this ditty is clearly neither Hottentots nor pedagogy but the

related sounds of ‘ot’ and ‘ought.’ What holds this series of words together is not the thought

or the syntax but those two repeated sounds. Though superficially playful, text-sound art

embodies serious thinking about the possibilities of vocal expression and communication; it

represents not a substitute for language but an expansion of our verbal powers.”148

Such seemingly childish but serious understanding of our verbal powers is found in the

playful sound poems of Futurists Elena Guro and Aldo Palazzeschi and in Dadaist Hugo

Ball’s Verse ohne Worte (verses without words). In fact, the whole Dada owes its historical

formation precisely to this kind of infantile, primitivistic denial of adult logic. The anarchic

childishness of Dada was the only sane reaction against the so-called intelligent and sensitive

mass of people “buried beyond recognition” beneath tons of journalistic lexical garbage that

provided a rationale for the First World War. As a reaction to this historical nonsense, Dada

was born when several young men, mostly draft dodgers, such as Marcel Janko, Hugo Ball,

Richard Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, and Hans Arp, formed the first Dadaist group in Zurich’s

Cabaret Voltaire in 1916. At the time Zurich was an international city of dissent where one

could meet disenchanted modernist writers, refugees, and revolutionaries of various

backgrounds, from Romain Rolland, Frank Wedekind, and James Joyce to Vladimir Ilyich

Lenin and Grigory Zinoviev. Revolted by the slaughterhouse of the Great War and disgusted

by bourgeois culture and the social system that had generated it, Dadaists started organizing

boisterous artistic soirées at the Cabaret Voltaire and publishing the international review,

DADA. In his Dada diary, Ball writes: “Our cabaret is a gesture. Every word that is spoken

and sung here says at least this one thing: that this humiliating age has not succeeded in
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winning our respect. What could be respectable and impressive about it? Its cannons? Our big

drum drowns them.”149 While the childlike syllabic mouthing of ‘da-da’ may have baptized the

movement of political dissent, for Ball children’s playful innocence was serious business: “A

child’s innocence, I mean, borders on the infantile, on dementia, on paranoia. It stems from

the belief in a primeval memory. ... Unreached by logic and the social apparatus it emerges in

the inconsiderate infantilism and madness, where all inhibitions are removed. This is a world

with its own form; it poses new problems and new tasks, just like a newly discovered

continent.”150 Poetry should harvest words from the instinctive and not the rational, thought

Ball. He wanted to destroy language as a social organ and transform it into an idiom capable

of expressing the most profound human experiences. With this idea he started writing poetry

without words, in which he employed sounds as magical incantations capable of forming a

new sentence of an “innately playful, but hidden, irrational character.”151

In addition, Ball frankly admits Marinetti’s influence in his diary entry for 9 July

1915: “Marinetti sends me Parole in Liberta by himself, Cangiullo, Buzzi and Govoni. They

are just letters of the alphabet on a page; you can roll up such a poem like a map. The syntax

has come apart. … There is no language any more. … Disintegration right in the innermost

process of creation. It is imperative to write invulnerable sentences. Sentences that withstand

all irony. The better the sentence the higher the rank. In eliminating vulnerable syntax or

association one preserves the sum of the things that constitute the style and the pride of a

writer - taste, cadence, rhythm, and melody.”152

Marinetti’s destruction of syntax was a pretext for Ball’s composition of a non-

verbal/non-syntactic sentence that remains impervious to logic. Ball praised the circle of poets

around Marinetti because they “nourished the emaciated big-city vocables with light and air
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and gave them back their warmth, emotion, and their original untroubled freedom.”153 He

appreciated Futurists for taking the word out of the frame of the sentence, but, in his view,

Wassily Kandinsky’s theory of inner sound was even more important for the art of sound

poetry. Kandinsky’s belief in the essence of art as a flow of inner sound energy from object

through artist to spectator led many avant-garde artists -- Italian Futurists Carlo Carrà and

Enrico Prampolini, Russian Rayonists Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, and Russian

Suprematist Kazimir Malevich among them -- to approach painting as a vibrational

phenomenon akin to music or sound. “The whole secret of Kandinsky is his being the first

painter to reject -- also more radically than cubists -- everything representational as impure,

and to go back to the true form, the sound of a thing, its essence, its essential curve,”154 wrote

Ball. Consequently, he sought for a poetry that would do away with language the way the

painters had discarded the object, abandoned the figurative, and adopted an anti-

representational stance to connect with art’s innermost source: “the sound of a thing.”

Inspired by The Yellow Sound, a play in which Kandinsky was “the first to discover

and apply the most abstract expression of sound in language, consisting of harmonized vowels

and consonants,”155 Ball launched his own version of sound poetry. In the oft-quoted journal

entry for 23 June 1916, he describes the workings of this new poetry genre and its

performance:

I have invented a new genre of poems, Verse ohne Worte [poems without words] or

Lautgedichte [sound poems], in which the balance of the vowels is weighted and

distributed solely according to the values of the beginning sequence. I gave a reading

of the first one of these poems this evening. I had made myself a special costume for

it. My legs were in a cylinder of shiny blue cardboard, which came up to my hips so
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that I looked like an obelisk; … I was carried onto the stage in the dark and began

slowly and solemnly:

Gadji beri bimba

Glandridi lauli lonni cadori

Gadjama bim beri glassala

Glandridi glassala tuffm i zimbrabim

Blassa galassasa tuffm i zimbrabim156

The poet’s account of his historic recitation at the Cabaret Voltaire was written with

the same awareness and concern for stage effect that Marinetti had expressed in his story

about his London appearance with Zang Tumb Tumb. In both cases the act of performance was

dictated by the poem’s aural content. Ball recounts that “the stresses became heavier, the

emphasis increased as the sound of consonants became sharper,” so that he started to worry

about how to balance his “method of expression” with “the pomp of staging.” ‘Emballaged’ in

an abstract cardboard costume, with no plot or character as a dramaturgical prompt, he had to

rely on the dramaturgy of sound and the balancing of vowels and consonants in his sound-text

poem. Ball continued his recital with two more poems whose rhythm and sound equally

shaped the performance and determined the stage movement -- the Labadas Gesang die

Wolken (Labada’s Song to the Clouds) and the Elefantenkarawane (Elephant Caravan). Here

is his description of the latter: “I turned back to the middle […] flapping my wings

energetically. The heavy vowel sequences and the plodding rhythm of the elephants had given

me one last crescendo. But how was I to get to the end? Then I noticed that my voice had no

choice but to take on the ancient cadence of priestly lamentation, that style of liturgical

singing that wails in all the Catholic churches of East and West.”157
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The arc of the performance, in terms of its musical shape, starts and finishes on a

note of solemnity matching Ball’s intimate predisposition toward Christian mysticism. But

there was something factual in it as well: his “voice had no choice,” as he put it. One could

speculate whether Ball’s moment of doubt about how to finish stemmed from his struggle with

the indeterminacy of acoustic material, or perhaps his performance was in fact already

inscribed in the sound script of the poems - ideally containing a score for technical execution.

Was the poet/performer taken by the sudden realization of the poems’ musicality, or were the

poems already designed to determine his performance style? If we take Ball’s infatuation with

Kandinsky’s theory of inner sound and his experience as a stage director at the Max Reinhardt

School of Dramatic Art in Berlin and the Munich Chamber Theatre into account, the latter

seems to be more likely. Ball’s sound poetry and Dadaist performances at the Cabaret Voltaire

were conscious attempts to build a new style of theatre expression. Formally, they resembled

the Expressionist abstract Geist style of acting later developed by Lothar Schreyer, also a

follower of Kandinsky. Performing Gadji beri bimba, Ball did not care for the portrayal of an

individual psychology, emotions, or a character; he strived to incorporate a “sound figure”

(Schreyer’s term for Geist-style acting). Unlike a dramatic representation or a conventional

poetry reading, a recitation of text-sound poem relied exclusively on phonetic material in

which the performer would immerse himself. A Dadaist poet/performer did not utter lines of

an individual dramatic/literary character but the ambiguous voice of a “sound figure” that still

lives on the postdramatic stage.

Dadaist transformation of the logocentric text into abstract vocalization prepared the

ground for the postmodern renewal of aurality. Steven Connor, in his essay “The Modern

Auditory I,” explains it on the premise of the postmodern disregard of the Cartesian, fixed
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point-of-view perspective: “For, perhaps because of the very dominance of the visual

paradigm in conceptions of the self, the auditory or acoustic has often been experienced and

represented, not as a principle of strength, but as a disintegrative principle. Indeed, it was

precisely this aspect of the aural which may have recommended it to the arts of dissolution

practiced by Futurism and Dadaism.”158 This conscious dissolution, exemplified by the

historical avant-garde’s penchant for the sound of performance, shifted the artist’s orientation

from the static, figurative reassurance of the cognitive eye to the uncertain temporality and

flux of the sensitive ear. Consequently, the postdramatic actor/poet voices, performs in the

domain of aurality, or physically presents on the stage, his, however unstable, self to the

listener’s ear.

The avant-gardes inherited their interest in phonetic ambiguity, a prevalent figure in

postmodern art, from the likes of Paul Scheerbart and Christian Morgenstern, whose enigmatic

sound poems Ball had more than likely heard in the cabarets of Berlin. Morgenstern’s parody

of D’Annunzio was included in the opening night program of the cabaret Überbrettl (1900),

alongside a mixture of short plays, poems, and chansons. His mordant, intriguing, darkly

humorous poems in the collection Galgenlieder (Songs from the Gallows, 1905-1910) belong

to the genre of Dada-like poetry of subversive nonsense and superior sense. As Walter Arndt

claims, “Morgenstern turns language inside out and discovers new shapes and invented

meanings. The procedure often undoes metaphors of millennial standing [… and offers] a rare

insight into that occult interrelation between signifier and signified that has long preoccupied

linguists and philosophers.”159 Some of Morgenstern’s nonsense poems clearly resonate in the

sound poetry of Ball and Kruchenykh. One of them is Das Grosse Lalula that relies solely on

the innovative sound of its vocables.

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Kroklokwafzi? Semememi!

Seiokrontro - prafriplo:

Bifzi, bafzi; hulalemi:

quasti basti bo …

Lalu, lalu lalu lalu la!160

Similarly irreverent toward the semantic value of words was Paul Scheerbart’s

“phone-poem” Kikakoku, composed of sound clusters as one of sixty-six intermezzos in his

train stations narrative Ich liebe dich! Ein Eisenbahnroman (I Love You! A Railway Novel,

1897):

Kikakoku!

Ekorolaps!

Wîso kollipánda opolôsa.

Ipasatta îh fûo.

Kikakokú proklínthe petêh.

Nikifilí mopa Léxio intipáschi benakáffro -- própsa pî! própsa pî!161

Dadaist experimentation with the sound of words, inspired by entirely

incomprehensible verses such as these, stands for more than a mere provocation of

bourgeois audiences. In truth, Dada poets tried to undertake a much more responsible task,

avows Raymond Federman: they tried to enter “the occult interrelation between signifier
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and signified,” which was possible only, if at all, through “a new poetic language -- a true

intermedium of words,” an idiom that lives in the interstice in-between pre-verbal

sign/gesture or vocal utterance and written text and articulated speech.162 Historically,

there was not much novelty in Dada practice: Russian Futurist zaumny yazyk was already

far ahead with its experiments with sound texture and neologisms, while Marinetti’s

program for the poetry of parole in libertà placed absolute emphasis on sound in order to

enter the inner structure of language and break its discursive hold. But furthering their

poetics, the Dadaists totally demystified words/vocables, pushed them beyond any

possible signifying border, and emptied them of all semantic meaning. Theirs was a poetry

that signified nothing but celebrated human presence in “a true intermedium of words.”

Absurd and nihilistic at first glance, “Dada poetry was less a negation than an affirmation.

In it, a new reality emerged, not that of reason, not that of intelligence, not that of

sentiment, but the obscure source of man’s authentic self.”163

Dadaist entry into unknown fissures inbetween words adheres to Artaud’s call for an

authentic language “half-way between gesture and thought” in which incantation, cry, and

vocal gesture would play a pivotal role. “This naked language of theatre (not virtual but a real

language) must permit … the transgression of the ordinary limits of art and speech, in order to

realize actively, that is to say magically, in real terms, a kind of total creation in which man

must reassume his place between dreams and events.”164 According to Derrida, following these

difficult undercurrents of language in theatre performance meant descending “in the night that

precedes the book, [where] the sign is not yet separated from the force. It is not yet exactly a

sign … but it is not any more a thing.”165 That was exactly what the avant-garde sound poets
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strived to do: attempting to express human authenticity, they riched out to a large scope of

poetic material waiting to be unearthed from the intermedium between a thing and a sign.

SYNCRETISM AND SIMULTANEITY OF THE VERBAL AND THE VISUAL

Avant-garde painters and poets explored syncretism and simultaneity between the visual and

the aural, notably between the shapes of letters and words and their sounds. Kandinsky thus

published a book of woodcuts and verses called Klänge (Sounds, 1912). Guillaume

Apollinaire experimented with his ideogrammes lyriques in Calligrammes, poèmes de la paix

et de la guerre 1913-1916 (Caligrams: Poems of Peace and War 1913-1916), an amalgamation

of graphic art and writing that might be considered a verbo-visual composition. Stéphane

Mallarmé tried to set words free from their descriptive function through the typographical

display of his poem Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A Throw of the Dice Will

Never Abolish Chance, 1892), announced the revolution in typography carried on later by

Futurists. All of these experiments with aural and graphical elements of a poem’s structure led

to a verbo-voco-visual play as a significant feature of modern poetry. In Un coup de dés, for

example, Mallarmé created a verbo-visual flow of words subsumed to a spatial, visual syntax

instead of a grammatical one: simultaneous verses, individual words, or lines of different

lengths slide up against each other, set in motion by a non-linear typography. His audatious

removal of words from their usual position in the verse, established a great precedent for

Futurist tavole parolibere and Dadaist poèmes simultanés that were conceived as visual

counterparts of their sound experiments.

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The term simultanéisme was originally coined by Henri-Martin Barzun in “The

Aesthetics of Dramatic Poetry,” an essay on the musical technique applied to his literary and

dramatic work in the book Voix, rhythmes et chants simultanés (1913). Barzun’s notion of

polyrhythmic and simultaneous “chant,” which replaces a set of monadic verses in a poem,

was integral to his polyphonic poetry that celebrated the dramatic synthesis of individual and

universal forces. His simultaneous poems, or dramatismes, as he called them, were composed

of different verbal, vocal, or musical elements played against one another. In print some of

them were typographically aligned as chorus scores. When performed at contemporary

Parisian soirées, these polyphonic poems/pieces required a composite form of declamation and

vocal chant that was, on occasion, heightened by the use of phonograph music or another

sound accompaniment. At about the same time Apollinaire started to use the term

“simultaneity” in reference to the visual arts when describing the Prose du Transsibérian

(1913) by poet Blaise Cendrars and painter Sonia Delaunay-Terk.166 In Cubist circles, this

hybrid text-painting composition was considered a quintessentially simultaneist work. This

picture/poem consists of an almost two meter long sheet of folded cardboard on which the

written text and a swirl of vividly coloured forms flow in parallel arrangement, depicting a

train ride as an abstract, stream-of-consciousness evocation of travel. Apollinaire praised the

work for allowing the spectator to capture its content the way an orchestra conductor captures

superimposed notes on a sheet of music, deciphering graphic and written elements at the same

time. But while his praise for the simultaneity of the Prose du Transsibérian’s graphic chart

still allowed for the supremacy of sight, Dadaist simultaneous poetry favoured the aural

displacement of any possible chart by chance noise.

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The performative implications of Dadaist simultaneous text-sound poetry were

demonstrated by the 1916 rendition of the poem L’amiral cherche une maison à louer --

Poème simultané par Richard Huelsenbeck, Marcel Janko, Tristan Tzara at Cabaret Voltaire.

This was an energetic performance in which three Dadaist poets simultaneously sang,

whistled, and declaimed verses in German, French, and English. To the verbal delivery of the

text they added the vocalization of non-verbal sounds, coughs, sighs, and grunts in such a way

that the clash of surprising utterances created a cacophony of sound and sense. Fulfilling the

Dadaist aleatoric credo, the numerous possible outcomes of such simultaneous recital made

each performance a singular, unrepeatable play of chance.

HUELSENBECK Ahoi ahoi Des Admirals gwirkles Beinkleid schnell zerfällt

Teerpappe macht Rawagen

JANKO (chants) Where the honny suckle wine twines itself around the door
a sweethart mine is waiting patiently for me

TZARA Boum Boum Boum Il désabilla sa chair quand les grenuilles humides
comencèrent à bruler j’ai mis le cheval dans l’âme du

HUELSENBECK und der Conciergenbäuche Klapperschlagengrün sind milde ach verzert

in der Natur chrza prrrza chrrrza

JANKO (chants) can hear the weopour will arround arrund the hill
my great room is

TZARA serpent à Bucarest on dépendra mes amis dorénavant et c’est

très intéresent les grilles des morsure équatoriales

HUELSENBECK prrrza chrrrza prrrza Wer suchet dem wird

aufgetan Der Ceylonlöwe ist kein Schwan Wer Waser braucht find

JANKO (chants) mine admirably comfortably Grandmother said I love the ladies
I love the ladies

TZARA Dimanche: deux elephantes

Journal de Geneve au restaurant télégraphist assassiné
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HUELSENBECK hihi Yabomm hihi Yabomm hihi hihi hihiiii

TZARA rouge bleu rouge bleu rouge bleu rouge bleu rouge bleu
SIFFLET (Janko) --------. -----------. ---. ---. ------. ---. -----.
CLIQUETTE (Tzara) rrrrrrrrr rrrrrrr rrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrr
GROSSE CAISE (Huels.) OOO OOOOO OOOOO OOOO OO 167

The layout of L’amiral cherche une maison à louer undoubtedly shows that it is a

script to be performed on the stage rather than a poem to be read from a book. It was

originally printed on two pages of an open book with lines running across the whole width to

accommodate a spate of words, syllables, or verbalizations of noise. Visually it is reminiscent

of a musical score with staved notation; the parallel graphical flow of its word/sound verses

determines a sound structure to be conveyed by a simultaneous recitation. The cacophonic

tone of the poem is emphasized by the aleatoric combinations of words arranged in sliding

lines with irregular beginnings. Its musicality is additionally stressed by the notes for various

levels of loudness and tempi underneath the lines of the noisemakers: a whistle, a cliquette,

and a “big box.” A similar attempt to apply musical principles to poetry making by using a

score-like graphic layout is evident in Francesco Cangiullo’s poems in his book Poesia

pentagramata. Their text is set out on five-stave sheet paper, while some, like Canzone

pirotecnica, include actual musical notation.

THE VERBO-VOCO-VISUAL FORM OF ZANG TUMB TUMB AND ITS PERFORMANCE POTENTIAL
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Marinetti’s sound poem Zang Tumb Tumb represents one of the boldest experiments in

Futurist poetry. The poem was executed in the newly invented writing technique called parole

in libertà (words set free), aimed at the poetic expression of ‘an intuitive psychology of

matter’ that had to be achieved through onomatopoeia, destruction of syntax, imagination

without strings, and freely expressive orthography. Traditional poetic prosody including vers

libre, which Marinetti had practised earlier in his French-language poetry, seemed insufficient

for such an ambitious task. After 1909, when he wrote “The Founding and Manifesto of

Futurism,” which represents a watershed in his literary output, Marinetti began to aggressively

promote a new movement, write mainly in Italian, and experiment with new means of

expression, particularly with onomatopoeic sounds and iconic typography. He rejected vers

libre, convinced that it “pushes the poet fatally towards facile sound effects, a banal playing

with speech, monotone cadences, [and] foolish rhymes.”168 The Futurist words-in-freedom, on

the other hand, strive for dynamism, simultaneity, and compenetration unattainable by free

verse. The new method of poetry writing, Marinetti professed, would dynamite the chains of

logical speech and syntax and, by doing so, bring the poet closer to the raw poetic material

(words/sounds) and allow him to challenge the dichotomy of art and life. Here is how

Marinetti summarizes the poetics of parole in libertà in an ‘allegorical’ novel about his

Futurist life, Gli indomabili (The Untameable, 1922): “Words-in-freedom are an absolutely

free expression of the universe beyond prosody and syntax, a new way of seeing the universe,

an essential estimate of the universe as the sum of forces in action [motion] that intersect at the

threshold of consciousness of our creative ego, and are recorded simultaneously with all the

expressive means at our disposal. … Words-in-freedom orchestrate colors, noises, sounds;

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they mix the materials of language and dialect, arithmetic and geometric formulas, musical

signs, old words, altered or recoined, the cries of animals, wild beasts, and motors.”169

Liberated from prosody and syntax, words-in-freedom stood for the world of

phenomena as sound-images, aural icons, or ideograms. They were supposed to orchestrate

colours, noises, and sounds in the synaesthetic oneness of a sound poem. As an intuitive

insight into the modern world of swift change and constant flux of an always/already present

future, poetry of parole in libertà was an expression of a poet’s involvement in the world’s

dymamics rather than his fixed point of view. Undoubtedly, the medium of sound, temporal in

its essence, was a proper conduit of the immersion in life forces that Futurists sought.

Zang Tumb Tumb is a sound poetry report of a month-long siege of the Turkish city

of Adrianople by Bulgarian troops in 1912, a bloody episode of a conflagration between

Balkan nations that served as a prelude to the First World War. Marinetti witnessed it as a war

correspondent for the French newspaper Gil Blas. Returning to Milan, he began to put

together the poem using free expressive orthography and synoptic free-word tables, iconic

displays of the battle details made of printed words dispersed on oversized, foldable pages. In

1913 Marinetti started publishing excerpts from the poem in Lacerba and performing dynamic

declamations of “Bombardamento,” its especially noisy fragment that soon became a main

attraction of Futurist serate. Finally, in 1914, the 159-page book Zang Tumb Tumb,

Adrianopoli ottobre 1912, parole in libertà appeared in Milan, published by Marinetti’s

Edizione futuriste Poesia.170 It is worth noting that during the same approximately two-year

period Marinetti published his three major poetry manifestos: “Technical Manifesto of Futurist

Literature,” “Destruction of Syntax -- Wireless Imagination -- Words in Freedom” (which he

included together with Zang Tumb Tumb in a later publication of the book Les mots en liberté
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futuristes, 1916), and “Geometric and Mechanical Splendor and Numerical Sensibility.” The

poem and the three manifestos demonstrate a parallel development of Marinetti’s poetics and

its practical application.

The book is printed in a dramatic page layout with letters of different typefaces,

some designed by hand, increasing or decreasing in size and boldness and surging unevenly

along horizontal, vertical, diagonal, and curved lines. The text bursts before the reader’s

eyes as a rich and diverse visual offering that is, at the same time, material for vocal

performance. Reading the text makes it clear that the page’s iconic composition, facilitated

by a new typographic technique, was intended for an oral stage performance. Apparently,

the poem’s graphic layout and typeset indicated its noisily vocal interpretation. Hence,

McCaffery describes it as “the earliest successful, conscious attempt to structure a visual

code for free kinetic, and voco-phonetic interpretation.”171 This technique provided the score

for Marinetti’s bruitist declamation of Zang Tumb Tumb, a poem with the title borrowed

from the noise of howitzer fire, one of the main attractions, or disturbances, of the Futurists’

tours throughout Europe. Saved as a recording, “Bombardamento di Adrianopoli” still

circulates among poets as an inspirational and influential source of concrete poetry, sound-

text art, lettrisme, and graphic design.172

There is no doubt that Zang Tumb Tumb’s non-linear, explosive typography and

aural richness, expressed by the multitude of new vocables intuited or invented to mime the

noises of war: artillery shelling, commands, shouts, destruction, and death, made the poem

an absolute novelty. In a dynamic declamation motivated by its sound material, the poem

depicted the battlefield of the besieged Adrianople as a sound-image of metal and human

forms shattered by a huge explosion. Marinetti remembers: “I finished that short [sic!]
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synthesizing noise-making poem while witnessing the machine-gunning of three thousand

horses ordered by the Turkish general who was the governor before the fortress fell.”173 By

virtue of its verbo-voco-visual complexity, the fragmented, deformed, exploding sound-

picture of Zang Tumb Tumb has been acknowledged among text-sound poets as an epochal

achievement in much the same way that Picasso’s Guernica has been singled out in the

history of avant-garde painting. Recognizing the different attitudes of Marinetti and Picasso

toward war(s), I dare to compare these two works on formal, innovative, aesthetic grounds

alone and not politically. Perhaps breaching the confines of political correctness, my

comparison goes to the artistic fields of contemporary sound-text poetry and painting, not to

the diametrically opposed ideological content of these two artistic presentations of war

theatre. Unexpected, and in that way quite Futurist, the comparison suggests a re-evaluation

of theformal aesthetic merits of Marinetti’s art in spite of the stigma he brought to himself

by his later Fascist engagement.

Zang Tumb Tumb consists of ten segments, beginning with the poet-reporter’s high-

speed travel by train and car through the catastrophic post-earthquake landscape of Calabria174

and ending with an aurally captured aerial view of the front line in the Balkans. It was

designed as an ear-witness’s telegraphic account of the grand panorama of the first battlefield

to deploy an air force. Marinetti here observed the theatre of war as a collision of elementary

physical forces rather than as a human affair with which the reader-listener might empathize.

Accordingly, he eschewed the passéist burden of human psychology to dissect the battle more

in the manner of modern physicists who enter the domain of the infinitesimal to explain the

material nature of things: “We systematically destroy the literary ‘I’ in order to scatter it into

the universal vibration and reach the point of expressing the infinitely small and the vibrations
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of molecules. E.g. lightening movements of molecules in the hole made by a howitzer (last

part of the ‘Fort Cheittam Tépé’ in my Zang Tumb Tumb). Thus the poetry of cosmic forces

supplants the poetry of the human.”175

In the same manner Marinetti remembers his earlier war-report poem, La Bataille de

Tripoli (Battle of Tripoli), when he “observed in the battery of Suni, at Sid-Messri, in October

1911, how the shining, aggressive flight of a cannonball, red hot in the sun and speeded by

fire, makes the sight of flayed and dying human flesh almost negligible.”176 Marinetti’s

fascination with the speed and shimmer of a cannonball typifies Futurist lyrical intoxication

with matter that replaces the sentimental and human compassion of passéist literature.

In “Treno di soldati amalati” (Train of sick soldiers), a segment of the book written

while the poet’s impressions were still hot, almost immediately after his return from war, and

performed at a serata in Florence, Marinetti shows much more human involvement. The

segment begins with a mixture of hyperbole and medical pedantry in a chain of analogies

depicting a bout of dysentery: “an avalanche of milk 6000 lactic ferments in the tumultuous

onslaught of the visceral battle … a furnace insurrection of putrefying microbes … sane or

dead,” only to continue with a counterpoint of rhythmical onomatopoeia of mechanical train

noise:

Tlactlac ii ii guiii

Trrrrrrrtrrrrr

Tatatatôo-tatatatôo

(WHEELS)

cuhrrrrr

cuhrrrrr
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guhrrrrr

(ENGINE)

fufufufufufu

fafafafafafa

zazazazazaza

tzatzatzatzatza

40 km per hour 45 km = rising pressure …177

The tactile intensity of his language, as was paramount for Futurist sound poets,

vacillates between the lyricism of verbal analogies to human desire and pain and

onomatopoeia of the heavy noises of the train ride and artillery shells. The inner clash of these

two different textures apparently evolves, designed by a dramaturgy of material that builds on

tension between the visual features of the printed text and the aural features of its suggested

declamation. So the next page displays the word cluster “a dream of 1500 sick men,” printed

in large block letters, running parallel with a separate, smaller-lettered column that lists a

chain of analogies of pleasant, tactile sensations like “leisure elegance travel speed … rain

nets … freshness station bed sheets… [and] fresh frozen orange juice.” An adjacent column

lists a chain of opposite sensory attractions intensifying the analogies to pain: “fecal odor of

dysentery + mixed stink of plague sweats + tanfo [touch/smell?] of cholera ammoniac.” This

segment clearly follows the prescription of “The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature,”

which made these demands of poets:

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To capture the breath, the sensibility, and the instinct of metals, stones, wood, and so

on, through the medium of free objects and whimsical motors. To substitute for

human psychology, now exhausted, the lyric obsession with matter. …

Three elements hitherto overlooked in literature must be introduced:

1. Sound (manifestation of the dynamism of objects)

2. Weight (objects’ faculty of flight)

3. Smell (objects’ faculty of dispersing themselves) …

Deep intuitions of life joined to one another, word for word according to their

illogical birth, will give us the general lines of an intuitive psychology of matter.”178

Marinetti’s intention in Zang Tumb Tumb was, he makes clear, to open “attentive ears

eyes nostrils” to the piercing notes of the battle by the use of parole in libertà. The poem

reaches the apex of onomatopoeia and verbal sonority in “Bombardamento” (Bombardment),

a segment most often declaimed by the poet himself. A few lines below, kept here in Italian so

that the original sound is maintained, highlight the sound of artillery:

zang-tumb-tumb tata-tatatata stop

uuuuuuuurlaaare degli
ammalati nel crrrrrrrrrpitare delle palle fischi schianto di vetri rotttttti sportelli

bersagli Adrianopoli interamente accerchiata treno abbandonato dai meccanicci e dai

soldati rabbbbia degli shrapnels bulgari 179

Here the text verbally denotes and onomatopoetically revives the hiss of the

projectiles, the crackling of bullets, and the crash of shattered glass, mixed with the screams of
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the sick in the train abandoned by mechanics and soldiers under the hail of Bulgarian shrapnel.

This kind of a brief, onomatopoeic sound score, which with variations reappears several times

throughout “Bombardamento,” undoubtedly presents an additional physical challenge for the

performer. As the war onomatopoeias intensify and the poem moves toward the final act of

bombardment, the performer’s larynx, vocal cords, and entire speaking apparatus must be put

under extreme stress to resonate and produce the mimetic vocalization of inanimate sounds.

This bodily investment in declamation, Marinetti confirms, comes from “the growing love for

matter, the will to penetrate it and know its vibrations, the physical sympathy that links us to

motors, and pushes us to the use of onomatopoeia.”180 The Futurist poet, then, intentionally

evokes the dynamism of the world through onomatopoeia of its sounds, while the performer,

most often the poet himself, turns into a miming sound machine to reproduce worldly noise.

In another fragment of “Bombardamento,” a chain of abstract nouns -- analogies of

the basic features of the fighting: “violence ferocity regularity fury breathlessness” - paves the

way for the sounds of the battle to be heard, but the crescendo comes when they get amplified

by the layout of the page. This treatment of the printed words leaves no doubt that Marinetti’s

typographical innovations were intended to provide for an oral performance of the poem. We

can see it in a fragment of the text transposed here as truthfully as possible:

3 Bulgarian battalions in march croock-craaack [SLOW TWO TEMPI]

Maritza River gurgles with blood croock craaack shouting of officers

slamming like brass plates pan here paak there ching

buuum

ching chaak [PRESTO] chiachiachiachiachiaak

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down there up there all around watch out high up above the head

chiaack beautiful Flames

flames

flames flames

flames flames

flames destruction of the forts beh-

flames

flames

hind that smoke Shukri Pasha communicates by te-

lephone with 27 forts in turkish in german hallo Ibrahim Rudolf Hallô Hallô 181

“The text activates the acoustic dimension of language with the buzzing of

explosives, while the blank spaces represent a pause, a moment of silence for the eye and for

the ear,”182 comments Clara Orban. The white gaps on the page, otherwise saturated with bold

letters of different type and size, are not only empty spaces, when read in the visual/spatial

mode, but also silences, when read in the aural/temporal mode. The clash of counterpointed

sounds and images makes these conventionally separate sensations vibrate together. Thus the

interplay between a scarcity and a redundancy of signs at the interstice of the temporal and

spatial axes of the poem dictates the rhythm and sonority of its declamation. Since a theatrical

performance also evolves along these two axes, the structural principles applied in Zang Tumb

Tumb can be said to convey principles of Futurist theatre still influential in contemporary

experimental theatre, happenings, and performance art.

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In Vision in Motion László Moholy-Nagy illustrates the constant efforts on the part

of the avant-garde “to liberate literature from the disparateness of the eye and ear,” quoting

liberally from Zang Tumb Tumb. Moholy-Nagy praises Apollinaire and Marinetti as

“tradition-breakers which freed experimenters to create quick, simultaneous communication of

several messages.”183 First, he credits Apollinaire with breaking new ground by the

superimposition of variously sized words and letters that made them almost audible: “These

ideograms ... actually dynamited convention. Apollinaire introduced the ‘annoyance-use’ of

words with physiological connotation. He also scoffed at normal syntax, discarded

conventional printing with the horizontal-vertical axis ... The eye-ear sensation (about 1913) is

only one of his innovations ... he also introduced the poetry of ‘simultaneity’, meaning

synchronization - happening at the same time -- a time coordination of space and action, ...

cubist collage and film montage.”184

Apollinaire’s experiments with verbo-visual correspondences in his calligrammes

and ideogrammes concur with Marinetti’s exploration of a “free expressive orthography” in

parole in libertà. Their mutual influence cannot be ignored, for, although Futurists considered

Apollinaire a revered member of the inimical Cubist camp and a mouthpiece of Cubist

ideology in frequent public polemics and controversies, a translation of his L’antitradizione

futurista earned a place in the collection of Futurist manifestos published in 1914 by Lacerba.

Moholy-Nagy further credits Marinetti with the invention of “an acoustic collage

(onomatopoeia)” in which he included “a great number of new elements to contemporary

poetry; sound effects; verbalization of sound and sight correspondences; sound collage, etc.”185

While Moholy-Nagy’s mention of correspondences alludes to the Symbolists’ or Kandinsky’s

synaesthesia, his reference to Marinetti’s technique as collage suggests the link with Cubism
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that no longer looked into the mystical or spiritual nature of sound, light, and colour but into

their formal and material features. Futurists juxtaposed elements of poetry, painting, and

theatre following their understanding of the concrete/abstract nature of aural and visual forms

appearing in a dynamic temporal flux. Zbigniew Folejewski therefore regards Futurist tavole

parolibere as a creation of “a potent, dynamic, multilevel, multi-color, multi-letter expression

of what Moholy-Nagy later termed a new vision of the world, a vision in motion.”186

Consequently, Marinetti’s dynamic verbalization and free typography may be considered one

of the sources of Moholy-Nagy’s own concept of a synoptic, synergetic, and synacoustic art

form typical of the Bauhaus theatre.

ANALOGY, ONOMATOPOEIA, ICONICITY: FROM SOUND POETRY TO ABSTRACT THEATRE

The principles of parole in libertà were laid out in the 1912 “Technical Manifesto of Futurist

Literature.” They required the poet to destroy syntax, scatter words randomly, “just as they are

born,” and remove the punctuation and linear narrative that stands in the way of spontaneous

vocal expression. Analogy was pronounced the main device of a new literature that was to be

written in chains of unexpected analogies corresponding with each other through the remote

associations brought about by the unfettered imagination. “Analogy is nothing more than the

deep love that assembles distant, seemingly diverse and hostile things. An orchestral style, at

once polychromatic, polyphonic, and polymorphous, can embrace the life of matter only by

means of most extensive analogies,”187 Marinetti pointed out, giving a comparison of a

trembling fox terrier and a little Morse code machine as an (obviously aural) example. The

extensive analogies were to be mostly made of nouns; adjectives and adverbs were supposed
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to be abolished (although they still appeared in the text of Zang Tumb Tumb); and verbs were

to be used sparsely, solely in their infinitive form. Marinetti saved the infinitive mode of the

verb from his cleansing because of its ability to provide “the elasticity of the intuition that

perceives it.” Futurist poet Luciano Folgore even suggested that if verbs were abolished

altogether, physical sensations would inevitably dominate poetry. In the poetic expression of

an intuitively perceived reality driven by physical sensations, there would be no need for a

strict substantive or verbal denotation. That is where onomatopoeia, as another major device

of Futurist poetry, comes into play. Futurists believed that onomatopoeia, as a sound-image of

physical action, could replace the infinitive verb and thus enliven lyricism with the crude

elements of reality. A sentence with an inflected verb determining a noun’s action, Marinetti

held, limited the poetic expression to the representational mode. He was convinced that an

unmodified noun, with or without a verb in the infinitive, was less restrained. Therefore, he

advised Futurists to use chains of bare nouns whose dynamic attributes were to be attained

through their aural shape rather than through their semantic denotation. In BATTLE (WEIGHT

+ STINK), for instance, the parole in libertà included nouns whose phonetic structure already

contained the onomatopoetic sound of their actions: “Gargaresch bursting crackling pus

Tinkling knapsacks rifles clogs nails cannon horses.”188 Similarly, in “Bombardamento,” the

onomatopoetic mimesis of actions replaced the verbs that would denote them: “wagons pluff-

plaff … horses flic flac zing zingshaaack … battalions marching croooc-craaac.”189

Onomatopoeia became a source of the further disruption of language, as the

manifesto “Destruction of Syntax -- Wireless Imagination -- Words Set Free” prescribed: “Our

lyric intoxication must freely deform, reshape words, cut them, stretch them, reinforce their

centers or their extremities, augment or diminish the number of their vowels and
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consonants. ... This instinctive deformation of words corresponds to our natural tendency

toward onomatopoeia. It matters little if a deformed word becomes ambiguous. It will marry

to the onomatopoetic harmonies, or the summaries of noises, and soon will permit us to reach

the ‘onomatopoetic psychic’ harmony, the sonorous but abstract expression of an emotion or

pure thought.”190

Marinetti proposes here that words be treated not as fixed grammatical units,

morphemes, and lexemes that participate in the language encoding, but as malleable material

that can be reshaped into ‘summaries of noises.’ He does not care for the possible ambiguity

of reshaped words; what matters is the onomatopoetic ‘sonorous but abstract expression’ of

the human perception of reality, emotion, or thought. For Marinetti, onomatopoeia stood for a

sound mimesis of the world. This idea of onomatopoeia as an aural reference (or sound mime)

of the phenomenal world coincides with later attempts to establish a phenomenology of sound

as a philosophical discipline. Don Ihde, for example, pleads for a phenomenology based on

our “desire to hear the voiced character of the world: [since] all sounds are in a broad sense

the voices of things,” and the auditory dimension of our experience is “a listening to the

voiced character of the wordless sounds of the world.”191 That is precisely what the Futurist art

of onomatopoeia, as an expression of the intimate relation between the aural world and its

mimetic rendition, does. It sets words free by returning them to themselves, that is, to their

primal oral/aural expressive function as opposed to their enslavement by verbal logic and

psychology.

Walter Benjamin had a similar idea of the phenomenal world speaking to us in a

wordless language decipherable by onomatopoeia. According to Benjamin, onomatopoeia is a

primal source of linguistic meaning that was formed by a human mimetic alignment with the
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world. “The context of meaning veiled in the phonetic elements of a sentence,” he wrote,

“represents the basic resources in which, in a flash-like instant, something mimetic can reveal

itself out of a sound.”192 Onomatopoeia is not directed at the name of an object, at a

signification of a referent, but it echoes its sound substance by a playful or terrifying

incantation. It is a not-yet-coded signifier unmistakably linked to its object but a pure sound

that participates in forgotten “primitive” correspondences between man and nature. For

Benjamin, modern language, although encased in Cartesian logocentrism and colonized by the

arbitrary coupling of words and objects later decribed by de Saussure, represents “the most

accomplished archive of insensible mimesis,” that is, one should add, a massive graveyard of

“dead” onomatopoeias.

The phenomenon of onomatopoeia has been explored in linguistics from the aspect

of the relationship between the sound and the meaning of the linguistic sign. According to

Ferdinand de Saussure, the linguistic sign does not link a thing and its sound but rather a

concept and an arbitrary acoustic image that is used to denote it. Saussure’s conception of

language as a codified nomenclature of terms that signify as many things as they denote grants

motivation a limited role. In denotative language the relationship between signifier and

signified is always arbitrary. Consequently, Saussure regarded onomatopoeia as a marginal

case in language practice. In contrast, Raymond Chapman asserts that onomatopoeic words,

which imitate the sound of the object or of the action they denote, represent a powerful

expressive means: “There is one area of language where the relationship between the word

and the auditory experience is close by nature rather than by conscious artifice. Some words

have been formed by an attempt actually to represent the sounds which they describe. They

come nearer than other words to being the thing represented, as well as being a referential
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signal. Sounds here correspond to meaning by imitation and not because of a common

agreement within a speech community that they will so correspond. There is a sense of ‘cat’ in

meow which is not found in the word cat itself.”193

The meaning of words brought about by the aural mime in such cases is not obtainable

by the ordinary signifier-referent relation. The onomatopoeia reincarnates something essential

in the thing, being, or action it refers to. In this case that is what ‘meow’ does to ‘cat.’ In other

words, what is communicated here does not require a linguistic codification/decodification

loop to be understood. The onomatopoeic word, in terms of Charles Peirce’s logical semiotics,

represents an icon referring to its object as something that at once looks/sounds like a thing

and is used as a sign for it. The iconicity of the word “meow” comes from the fact that the

uttered sound-picture aurally exhibits the referred object, denoting it at the same time. In such

an onomatopoeic utterance, there is no name coinage, as the original Greek word

“onomatopoeia” suggests. Chapman therefore proposes the use of the term “echoic”194 for this

kind of word formation based on its aural iconicity.

The iconicity and phonosymbolic organization of poetic language, as Patricia Violi has

suggested, “brings us right to the heart of one of the most controversial, yet central, questions

for any linguistic and semiotic theory: the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. … Iconicity

seems to be at work any time language is ‘reinvented’ or ‘created’, either consciously, as is the

case in poetry and literary texts, or unconsciously, as in children’s acquisition, language

change, creolisation of pidgins. … Analogy and iconicity appear to be crucial elements for the

remotivation of the linguistic sign.” 195 Iconicity gains its power to remotivate language as a

way of perception that adheres to Peirce’s phenomenological category of Firstness, a mode of

being that is without reference to any subject or any object manifested by quality, feeling,
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freedom, or multiplicity. Peirce’s Firstness is the medium of the primordial unity of Dionysian

music that survived in Futurist lyrical intoxication and artistic immersion in the swirl of life

forces. The onomatopoeia in Futurist poetry and fisicoffolia (physical madness) in Futurist

theatre thus may be described as an intuitive “return” to iconicity and Firstness. It is at that

point, as poet and painter Ardengo Soffici envisions in his “First Principles of a Futurist

Aesthetics,” that “the word would no longer be a mute symbol of convention, but a live form

among live forms, one that becomes one with the material of representation.”196 Marinetti and

Futurist sound poets strove for the primordial word in which sound and sense would still

resonate without being alienated by a rational concept. Intensifying their verbo-vocal practice

on these precepts, they eschewed mediation of the Cartesian concepts and arbitrary naming

that would stand between the thing and its acoustic image. In their poetry of parole in libertà

and zaumny yazyk, the word directly corresponded to the thing as its acoustic icon.

Besides the primitivistic rejuvenation of language by onomatopoeia, Futurist

dealings with sound bore an optimistic projection of the new expressive means for the new

century. Marinetti announced: “A new beauty is born today from the chaos of the new

contradictory sensibility … that I call Geometric and Mechanical Splendor.”197 It was in this

identically named manifesto that Marinetti declared that it is the Futurists’ “growing love for

matter, the will to penetrate it and know its vibrations, the physical sympathy that links us to

motors, push us to the use of onomatopoeia.” Miming the “noise of rubbing or striking rapidly

moving solids, liquids or gases,” a sound poem cracked open a new abstract structure that was,

for the Futurists, far more interesting than human psychology. Similarly, scattering letters,

numbers, and mathematical symbols like mechanical particles, molecules, and atoms in
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“synoptic tables of lyric values and graphic analogies” they pulverized the literary “I” that

served as the subject of passéist poetry.

Words-in-freedom not only directly mimed natural and mechanical sounds but also

created more abstract sonorous sensations. In the context of performance, a poem of the kind

was perceived as a sound object or sound event par excellence, and the audience listened to it

as they would a musical piece. Marinetti’s instructions for a dynamic and synoptic

declamation: “Metallize, liquefy, vegetalize, petrify, and electrify voice grounding it in the

vibrations of matter itself as expressed by words-in-freedom! Gesticulate in a draughtsman-

like, topographical manner, synthetically creating in midair cubes, cones, spirals, ellipses,

etc,”198 further pushed toward abstract sound performance. What the audience was left to

consider, then, was an abstract performance of “geometrical and mechanical splendor,” that is,

a poem as an aural, kinetic hieroglyph.

Marinetti’s 1914 manifesto, “Geometric and Mechanical Splendor and the Numerical

Sensibility,” defined four types of onomatopoeia: (1) direct or imitative, (2) indirect, complex,

or analogical, (3) abstract, and (4) composite. The concept of onomatopoeia here clearly

progresses from its primary role of miming natural or mechanical sound to its detachment

from mime and creation of an abstract composition. Ideas of “geometric and mechanical

splendor” and “dynamic and synoptic declamation” developed in sound poetry reached out

toward the poetics of other artistic media. Thus Balla, Cangiullo, and Carrà, inspired by the

synoptic tables, created dipinto parolibero, a new kind of collage painting consisting of letters,

numbers, and graphical symbols. In the performing arts these ideas gave impetus to the

Futurist synthetic theatre and Futurist dance of the shrapnel, of the machine gun, and of the
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aviatrix. Finally, following the same path of abstraction, the concept of the moto-rumorist

complex marked the Futurist scenography of the 1920s.

As Marinetti famously said, “dramatic art without poetry cannot exist, that is,

without intoxication and without synthesis.”199 His dictum points to two aspects of the Futurist

dramaturgy of sound built on the premise of their sound poetry: the intuitive return to the

primal power of sound in onomatopoeia (intoxication) and the abstract structuring of distant

analogies (synthesis). In his comprehensive study of Futurist theatre, Giovanni Lista describes

the dramaturgy of Futurist synthetic plays as an assemblage, a process that caries legacy of the

principles of analogy and dispersal of words into autonomic sound units initiated by Futurist

poets: “By replacing the unitary logic and narrative structure of the naturalist drama, the

assemblage of futurist syntheses followed the same vitalistic intentions. Now, to the word set

free the scene set free (la scène en liberté) had to correspond, that is, theatrical kernels (nœuds

théâtraux), the most intimate constitutive elements of the dramatic and theatrical language,

had to be presented in their autonomy. The elementarization of stage signs came to abolish all

principles of conceptual finality of the play in order to affirm the continual and indiscernible

flow of reality.”200

The atomization of artistic material into a number of elemental nœuds théâtraux

undoubtedly follow Futurist poetic principles of analogy and iconicity: the dramaturgy of la

scène en liberté, based on the structural assembly of these fragments, finds its precedent in the

poetics of parole in libertà. Lista thus appropriates the verbal structure of Futurist poetry,

realized in chains of unexpectedly analogous elementary words (nouns in the nominative and

verbs in the infinitive) to his vision of Futurist theatrical structure and establishes a theoretical

parallel between Futurist sound poetry and theatre, that is, between liberated words and the
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elliptical, brief scenes of Futurist synthetic pieces now connected by the sudden spark of

analogy.

In addition, if the analogy serves as a principle of the collage of theatrical kernels, it

is the iconicity, that makes them almost tangible. The recognition of the materiality of

theatrical signs/sounds and power of onomatopoeia to remotivate signs contributed to the

iconicity of Futurist sound poetry, which provides a concrete language for theatrical

performance. More specifically, the fluidity, temporality, and immediacy characteristic of

sound poetry induce the “indiscernible flow of reality” in theatre and prevent its closure into a

fixed textual representation. As the revitalized word was wrested from its logocentric matrix

and became part of the flux of performance, Futurism offered a language based on the

materiality of the sign/sound and its own particular dramaturgy as a contribution to the avant-

garde legacy still viable in postdramatic theatre.

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DRAMATURGY OF SOUND IN THE AVANT-GARDE AND POSTDRAMATIC THEATRE

Fourth Chapter -- Zaum: Form a “Beyonsense” Language to an Abstract Idiom of Theatre

THE WORD-AS-SUCH: SOUND VERSUS MEANING AND CONTENT VERSUS FORM

The groundbreaking changes in the poetics of Russian Futurists -- literally, people of the

future (budetlyanskye) -- such as poets Velimir Khlebnikov, Alexei Kruchenykh, Vasily

Kamensky, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, preceded or ran parallel to a revolution in painting,

music, and theatre of the historical avant-garde that, by resorting to the tactile elements of

art, abandoned the transcendental aspirations of bourgeois poetics. The revival of elementary

artistic materials -- be they words, sounds, painterly/sculptural masses, or colours -- was the

flywheel of that revolution. This change was already in the air at the turn of the century

when Symbolists, followers of the spiritual in art, started exploring the musicality of verse

and its synaesthetic potential to reflect ‘correspondences’ of senses, while Impressionists,

followers of the scientific in art, discovered that fragmenting light into coloured dots allows

for a painterly rendition of nature approximate to the retinal perception. The main concern of

the artists in both movements was the immediate impact of the artistic material -- that is,

sound and colour -- on our senses. By focusing on what we literally hear and see in the work

of art, they shifted from figurative and narrative methods to concrete features and forms.

Anna Lawton acknowledges this shift in focus as typical of the works and theoretical

writings of the Cubo-Futurists, Rayonists, Neo-primitives, Suprematists, and Constructivists,

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whose “search for the essence of things generated a specific concern with form and

produced a heightened awareness of the given medium and its potential.”201

Thus in their very first manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (1912), the

Russian Futurist poets envisioned the glimmer of “the Summer Lightening of the New

Coming Beauty of the Self-sufficient Word (samovitoye slovo)”202 and opted for the ‘word-

as-such’ as the exclusive material of their art. The word-as-such, in their view, being

liberated from its syntactic and signifying mandates, could provide a literal, concrete, aural

link to the essence of things. Sound appeared to be the given medium for that task; their

poetry was shaped by play with the verbal textures and phonetic substance of words. The

poets no longer considered the word as a fixed unit of the language’s standard vocabulary

but rather as a unit of sound that reverberates with all other sounds of nature and culture,

from bird calls to astral talk, and from children’s primitive language acquisition, mumbles,

and cries to the ecstatic, religious speaking in tongues. Such a word -- a vocable, a sequence

of sounds and letters (phonemes), a composite of consonants and vowels, syllables and

phonetic roots -- was now recognized and employed as an aural element of language rather

than a signifying one. The new play of words-sounds was independent of the habitual

linguistic communication and the external, referential meaning of the text. A Futurist poem

was, first and foremost, an oral/aural composition of sound-images that was meant to replace

the Symbolist weaving of text.

Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh created an idiom beyond sense by fashioning

neologisms from sound clusters, which would survive their intentional decomposition of

existing words by a morphological and, more often, phonetic shift (sdvig). Adopting a

process of sculpting or constructing new forms based on the intrinsic oral/aural qualities of
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verbal material, they proudly called themselves word makers -- rechetvortsi. Their kind of

poetry-making was diametrically opposed to the Symbolists’ use of poetic images -- made of

words that carry a metaphorical charge -- favored by leading Russian philologist Alexandr

Afanasievich Potrebnya (1835-1891). A representative of the psychological school of

linguistics, Potrebnya theorized poetic language as a special mode of perception and

expression attainable via the metaphorical process of “thinking in images.” His view was

widely accepted by the Symbolists and prevailed in literary theory until the Futurists and

their theoretical counterparts, the Formalists, threw it “overboard from the Ship of

Modernity.” Completely in keeping with the Futurists’ line of thought, young linguistic

scholar Victor Shklovsky renounced the poetics of Symbolism and instead promoted the

literalness of Futurist zaum poetry and “the palpability of the word” in opposition to

Potrebnya’s authoritative theory of “thinking in images.” On 23 December 1913, at the Stray

Dog cabaret, notorious for Futurists’ brawls with the audience, Shklovsky delivered a lecture

entitled “The Place of Futurism in the History of Language.” His academic text established a

“connection of the devices of Futurist poetry with the devices of general linguistic thought-

processes”203 and acknowledged the materiality of the linguistic sign embedded in its aural

substance.

Shklovsky’s lecture, published a few months later in St. Petersburg as a pamphlet

called The Resurrection of the Word, is today considered a fundamental text of Formalist

linguistic, literary, and art theory. It justified the Futurist use of difficult, semi-

comprehensible language as an artistic demand for the “resurrection of things” by returning

the true sensation of the word/world to man. In addition, he pointed to the diachronic

correlatives of zaum poetic practice in the incantations found in the old Yakut Turkic or
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Slavonic languages and the ancient oral production of words that strike the ear. Shklovsky’s

evidence, extracted from a wide range of poetry and language development, proved that the

genuine value of today’s words eroded by everyday use can be redeemed by the sensuous

quality of sound. These linguistic findings, which implied the possibility of the revival of

words by their concrete sensory form/content, made a case for his theory of “‘artistic’

perception in which the form is sensed (perhaps not only form, but form as an essential

part).”204 Shklovsky thus, by acknowledging the emergence of a unique form of Futurist

poetry from its aural content, introduced the notion of equivalence between form and content

in any work of art, a pivotal concept in the development of Formalism, preceding

Structuralism, Post-structuralism, and their postmodern art theory derivates. Krystyna

Pomorska, who sees Russian Futurist poetry as “the creative ambience of Formalist theory,”

alleges: “The material itself plays the expressive role in poetry; consequently, there is no

opposition between material and form, hence material is equated with form. Instead, the

opposition which occupies the Futurists in their polemics is that of the pair: mimetic

(imitative, ‘objectful’) as opposed to non-mimetic (‘objectless’).”205

The dichotomies of material versus form and mimetic representation versus formal

abstraction were relentlessly discussed in theories of both Futurist poetry and Futurist plastic

arts. Similarly to the poets, Futurist visual artists focused on the materiality of their means

and eschewed figural and representational modes in their works. Thus, Futurist/Formalist

ideas figured in the painterly theories of Rayonism, Suprematism, and ‘objectless’ art

advanced by Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Gonchareva, and Kazimir Malevich. As we shall

see, they further influenced the shape of Russian Futurist theatre works, especially Victory

over the Sun and Zangezi, where a dramaturgy of independent materials -- sound, colour,
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and sculptural mass, and their kinetic relations -- replaced a dramaturgy of plot and

representation.

AURAL RESOURCES OF WORD-MAKING (RECHETVORSTVO)

The Cubo-Futurists published their first poems in a time when their Symbolist and

Impressionist predecessors, followers of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, had already

mastered a style of poetry-making that employed the imaginative and creative potential of

sound. Crucially important to note, however, was that the Futurists started to create a

different, sound based poetic idiom that would not communicate by syntactically ordered

phrases but rather by phonetically sculpted words. Thus The Tangled Wood, a Khlebnikov’s

poem published in the almanac Studiya Impresionistov (The Studio of Impressionists, 1910),

still retains conventional syntax but, at the same time, timidly turns toward the sensual ties

of words with natural sounds:

The tangled wood was full of sound

the forest screamed, the forest groaned

with fear

to see the spear-man beast his spear 206

Paul Schmidt’s congenial English translation based on the phonetic principles

employed by Khlebnikov demonstrates how the sonority of these verses has been built. In the

second verse, for example, disquieting onomatopoetic consonant clusters in the words forest,
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scream, and groan reverberate against the traditionally silent backdrop of a mystical forest

while the sound of long vowel ‘ī’, repeatedly echoing in the words fear, see, spear and beast

intensify the forest’s silence. Playing with such pure sound patterns already existing in

language, Khlebnikov made his poem resonate with nature; he literally invoked Symbolist

“correspondences” by the affinity between the sounds of human language and the speech of

the universe. Similarly, in another of his poems whose verses contained no semantically

disengaged words, that is, which were not yet transrational, we can hear the predominance of

pure sound patterning. Listen!

Kogda umirayut koni, dyushat,

Kogda umirayut travy, sokhnut,

Kogda umirayut solnci, oni gasnut,

Kogda umirayut lyudi, poyet pesni

When horses die, they sigh,

When grasses die, they shrivel

When suns die, they flare and expire

When people die, they sing songs 207

Here, each of four verses begins with two identical words, the second one

(umirayut) finishing with ut. Additionally, in the first three verses, this middle rhyme is

maintained by a final rhyme on at/ut, implemented to lull the reader with its steady,

repetitious rhythm. A break comes with the fourth verse, in which two words at the same
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positions (lyudi and pesni) rhyme in a completely different tune. The translation follows the

same principle when the soft melody of “die, flare and expire” gets changed into the ringing

of “sing songs.” This is an aural shift (sdvig, as Russian Futurists called their main poetic

device) which abruptly erases the poem’s initial rhythmic and phonetic scheme and brings a

new “meaning” that can only be sculpted and communicated in/by sound. It emerges that

Khlebnikov probed his material resources to discover a new idiom; he used sound repetition

in an almost abstract/concrete manner, one that would later be developed in “beyonsense”208

poetry.

Analyzing use of repetition in Russian verse, prominent Formalist critic Osip Brik

found that “sounds and sound harmonies are not merely a euphonic extra but are the result of

an autonomous poetic endeavor.”209 Underneath prosodic devices like assonance and

alliteration, masculine and feminine rhyme, rhythmic structure and metric scheme, Brik

revealed dominant, independent features of sound composition. His exploration of the

phonetic devices used in poetry-making corroborates the idea of autonomous sound

material’s potential to construct something beyond the poetic image: “However the

interrelationship of sound and image may be regarded, one thing is certain: the orchestration

of poetic speech is not fully accounted for by a repertoire of overt euphonic devices, but

represents in its entirety the complex product of the interaction of the general laws of

euphony. Rhythm, alliteration, and so forth are only the obvious manifestations of particular

instances of basic euphonic laws.”210

Brik’s concept of the autonomy of euphonic devices was amply proved by Futurist

poetic practice. Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, Vasily Kamensky, Elena Guro, Vasilisk Gnedov,

and others transgressed the boundaries of versification and rhythm with their aural sculpting.
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Acknowledging the material features of sound that go beyond its prosodic value, they

introduced ‘arbitrary’ and ‘derived’ words-sounds and released the energies hidden in

words’ primordial, transrational connections with things, nature, and culture. Their genuine

form of sound poetry beyond the rational, combined with the interrelated phenomena of

avant-garde abstract painting and atonal music, awakened similar tendencies in

contemporary theatre, where stage material performs its own story and generates its own

sense.

The Futurist concept of an independent sound structure of poetic language can be

traced back to the Symbolist poet Andrei Belyi, who in his essay The Magic of Words

(1909) claimed that when “the musical force of sound is resurrected in the word, we are

once again captivated, not by the meaning, but by the sound of words.”211 Poets and people

in general use words to name things, but first of all they utter sounds/words that convey

signs of human presence in the world. Belyi sees the powerful creativity of sound in the

“imaginative speech … of words that express the logically inexpressible impression I derive

from the objects surrounding me. Living speech is always the music of the inexpressible.”212

In addition, Belyi conceives of poetic speech as an independent structure whose significance

“lies in the fact that it does not actually prove or demonstrate anything with words. In poetry

the words are grouped in such a fashion that their totality gives the image. The logical

significance of this image is entirely indeterminate.”213

One of the main Cubo-Futurist programmatic texts, “The Liberation of the Word”

by Benedikt Livshits, also discusses indeterminacy as a feature of poetic language: “Our

poetry is free, and for the first time we do not care whether it is realistic, naturalistic or

fantastic; except for its starting point, it does not place itself in any relationships with the
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world and does not coordinate itself with it; all other crossing points of this poetry with the

world are a priori accidental.”214 But although Livshits still stops short of defining poetic

indeterminacy as a leap toward a deliberately abstract and alogical beyonsense idiom, he

furthers the notion of the autonomous word in terms grafted from the contemporary

discourse of music and plastic arts. He proposes the poet’s involvement in the materiality of

the word driven “by plastic affinity of verbal expressions, by their plastic valence, by verbal

texture, by rhythmic problems and musical orchestration, and by the general requirements of

pictorial and musical structure.”215 The multidisciplinary wording of Livshits’s poetry

manifesto is symptomatic of all Futurist art theory. This kind of cross-referential

terminology derives from the fact that the Russian avant-garde scene was a mélange of

artists, poets, scientists, and critics who typically transgressed the borders of their

disciplines. Their artistic merger was essential to the spread of Futurist poetic principles of

the ‘word-as-such’ and its reliance on sound resources into the concepts of other arts.

VERBAL ART: VOWELS AND CONSONANTS IN THE FRAGMENTED WORDS OF ZAUM

Poet Aleksei Kruchenykh was first to use the term “transrational” (zaumnoe) in Novye puti

slova (New Ways of the Word: The Language of the Future, Death to Symbolism, 1913):

“Before us there was no verbal art. There were the pathetic attempts of servile thought to

present everyday reality, philosophy and psychology… but the art of the word did not exist.

… The word (and its components, the sounds) is not simply a truncated thought, not simply

logic; it is first of all the transrational (irrational parts, mystical, aesthetic).”216

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Kruchenykh distinguishes between the principles of a discursive logic of language

and the material aesthetic of words/sounds that poetry should follow. He calls for a

rupture with practical language and envisions a new poetic idiom beyond rational

concepts, no longer under the yoke of philosophy and psychology. Thus, zaumnyi

yazyk (beyonsense language) became the widely accepted name for this new poetic

idiom and poetry-making. As such, the first example appeared in Khlebnikov’s

experimental verses, written in the period from 1906 to 1908, but the new style was

officially launched a few years later by Kruchenykh’s poem Dyr bul shchyl

(Pomada, 1913). Although the two poets are equally credited for its invention, there

was a substantial difference between their approaches to zaum. While Khlebnikov

sought a universal language based on phonetic roots beyond the limits of a

particular tongue, Kruchenykh fought tirelessly for an innovative sound poetry that

often transgressed into proto-Dadaist, alogical, and absurdist word creation. Or,

more specifically, whereas Khlebnikov tended to capture an elevated sense of

language’s oldest phonetic roots, Kruchenykh tried to release language from the

entanglements of signification through irregularity and primitive coarseness. Their

joint theoretical elaboration of the new poetics in the fifteen-page pamphlet Word

as Such, published in Moscow in 1913, claims: “The Futurian painters love to use

parts of the body, its cross section, and the Futurian wordwrights use chopped-up

words, half-words, and their odd artful combinations (transrational language) thus

achieving the very greatest expressiveness, and precisely this distinguishes the swift

language of modernity, which has annihilated the previous frozen language.” 217
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The pamphlet contains several illustrative examples of zaum poetry, the main

piece of evidence being Kruchenykh’s Dyr bul shchyl:

dyr bul shchyl

ubeshshchur

skum

vy so bu

r l ez 218

The poem consists of elementary phonemes, that is, vowel and consonant clusters,

irreverent of syntax, versification, or any kind of prosody. Its five verses remain endlessly

quoted and analyzed in critical literature, from contemporary Futurist manifestos and

Shklovsky’s Formalist essays to the literary studies of today. The roughness of sound texture

in the poem can be directly connected to Kruchenykh’s own preferred use of consonants

meant to signal masculinity and strength in all zaum poetry. His counterpart, Khlebnikov,

also relied on consonants; the shift (sdvig) of the initial consonant of the word represented

the main source of his new coinages.

Kruchenykh explains his option: “In art, there may be unresolved dissonances --

unpleasant to the ear -- because there is dissonance in our soul by which the former are

resolved. … All this does not narrow art, but rather opens new horizons.”219 It was as if he

had been choosing the dissonant sound clusters of Dyr bul shchyl by following Marinetti’s

call to “make use of every ugly sound, every expressive cry from the violent life that

surrounds us,” and to “bravely create the ‘ugly’ literature” in which sounds/words,
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“according to their illogical birth, will give us the general lines of an intuitive psychology of

matter.”220 Certainly, there was an affinity between Russian and Italian Futurists emerging

from their use of raw sound in poetry. Nilsson even connects the mushrooming of word-as-

such manifestos and zaum poetry in 1913 with the appearance of the Russian translation of

Marinetti’s “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Writers” in 1912. He asserts that “the poem

[Dyr bul shchyl] could be read as an interesting illustration of the ... idea of Marinetti and

Soffici: the final goal of art is to lose itself in life, the sounds of poetic language become

congruent with sounds of life.”221 Nevertheless, Kruchenykh, in a manifesto published that

same year, “The New Ways of the Word,” clearly rejects the mechanical use of

onomatopoeia associated with his Italian colleagues: “Our goal is simply to point out

irregularity as a device, to show the necessity and the importance of irregularity. Our goal is

to underscore the great significance for art of all strident elements, discordant sounds

(dissonances) and purely primitive roughness. ... The Italian ‘amateurish’ Futurists, with

their endless ra ta ta ra ta ta ... mechanical tricks -- soulless, monotonous -- lead to the

death of life and art. ... Our verbal creativity is generated by a new deepening of the spirit,

and it throws new light on everything.”222

Admittedly, the primitive roughness of Dyr bul shchyl, dug up from a deep, aural

substratum of language, contradicts the mimesis of modern, industrial, urban noise prevalent

in Marinettian onomatopoeia. Kruchenykh’s poem, textured by its cacophonic consonant

instrumentation (containing more Russian spirit than in all of Pushkin, the author boasted),

replaced the euphonic beauty and smoothness of Symbolist poetry. Pomorska links the

poem’s harsh sound with the aesthetics of the ‘rough surface’ and the surprising perspective

of Cubist painting. It is by the use of the ‘heavy sounds’ of ‘difficult’ consonants like r, sh,
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and shch, preferred by Mayakovsky, she claims, that “Futurists began to copy the sound

patterns of Turkic languages.”223 Believing in the expressive power of the oral idiom of the

Central Asian Steppe, in which a tribal, ‘pagan’ sound remained connected with life,

Kruchenykh aimed at an Ur-Sprache (proto-language) that would tear through the ear like ‘a

formidable chant,’ as he called Dyr bul shchyl. For Futurists, to be authentically Russian was

to embrace the oral poetry practice and harsh melody of the language’s pagan, Scythian,

Asiatic roots.

PRIMORDIAL INCANTATION IN THE ROOTS OF ZAUM

Khlebnikov’s poem Zaklatje smehom (Incantation by Laughter, 1910) invigorates the

Futurist contention that a single word, a word-as-such, can produce yet unknown poetic

effects. Here the root of word smekh (laugh) explodes into a multitude of expressive forms:

O, razsmeytes’, smekhachi!

O, zasmeytes’, smekhachi!

Chto smiyutsya smekhami, chto smeyaitvuyut smeyalno,

O, zasmeytes’ usmeyalno!

O, rasmeshishch nadsmeyal nykh smekh usmeynykh smekhachey!

O, issmeysya rassmeyalno smekh nadsmeynykh smekhaczey!

Oh, laugh forth, laugh laughadors!

Oh, laugh on, laugh laughadors!

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You who laugh in laughs, laugh-laugh, you who laughorize so laughly.

Laugh forth, laugh laugh belaughly!

Oh, of laughdom overlaughly, laugh of languish laughadors!

Oh, forth laugh downright laughly, laugh of super laughadors! 224

The sound of laughter bursts forth from the newly coined words that stem from just

one root: “laugh.” The poem feels as if cracked by a fairground jester who is trying to find

ever funnier derivates of a simple Slavic word, smekh, extended by his jolly recollection of all

its possible and impossible prefixes and suffixes. Paul Schmidt describes it as ‘permutations of

the word laugh into a weird scenario full of prehistoric chortles.’225 Its unbridled verbal

variation goes on and on like a competitive word game played at an ancient popular carnival.

This verbo/vocal technique “mainly alludes to the folk incantation, of which the important

property is that language in it becomes both the tool and the object -- two functions

concentrated in one act,” finds Pomorska.226 Her interpretation follows Formalist doctrine that

proposes an amalgamation of the prosodic device (the tool) and verbal/aural material (the

object), in a union of sign and sound that would make the word palpable. Besides, quite in

tune with the avant-garde fight for a new artistic idiom, the poem’s restless verbal inventions

function as an antidote to the trimmed language of unilateral signification. In that manner

Khlebnikov also initiates carnivalesque “heteroglossia” in place of literary “monologism” in

light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of this dichotomy in Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Nils Åke Nilsson thoroughly analyzes Incantation by Laughter in comparison with its

historical counterparts.227 He rejects its similarity to Marinettian ‘integral onomatopoeia’ or

Dadaist aleatoric poetry, suggesting instead that Hugo Ball’s Lautgedichte (sound poems) are
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more comparable to Khlebnikov’s poems. It is the incantational attitude that allies Ball’s and

Khlebnikov’s sound poems, alleges Nilsson. According to Ball’s description, his shamanistic

performance of Gadji beri bimba at the Cabaret Voltaire aimed to put the audience into a

trance; the powerful cadence of words/sounds turned him into ‘a magic bishop.’ Certainly,

there are similarities between Khlebnikov’s incantation and Ball’s quasi-ritual chant. Both

poets shift sound patterns of words, mischievously flirting on the line between surprise and

recognition; they take on the roles of a folk jester or shaman delivering verbal riddles and

chanting hypnotic tunes. Incantation by Laughter sounds like a shamanistic chant whose

power relies on its “primitive” sound and rhythm, regardless of Nilsson’s claim that

Khlebnikov wrote the poem to encourage the verbal creativity of his friends, the Futurist poets

-- smekhachi. It represents a sound poem from the mouth of a person of oral culture whose

only means of expression is vocal performance.

Khlebnikov’s “laughadors” spoke in the tradition of verbal games and the exchange

of proverbs and riddles as discussed by Walter Ong. According to Ong, these forms of oral

folklore “are not used simply to store knowledge but to engage others in verbal and

intellectual combat: the utterance of a proverb or riddle challenges the listeners to top it up

with an opposite or contradictory one.”228 The notion of challenging the audience was to

become an exquisite weapon of the entire Futurist poetry and theatre. Futurists tended to

vocally assault the audience to motivate its members to participate in the theatrical event.

Their attitude, deeply rooted in so-called ‘“primitive” oral cultures, is a component of the

ritualistic and participative nature of the historical avant-garde theatre. Christopher Innes

admits: “Perhaps paradoxically, what defines this avant-garde movement is not overtly

modern qualities, such as the 1920s romance of technology: George Antheil’s ‘aeroplane
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sonata’, Carlo Govoni’s ‘poesie elettriche’ or Enrico Prampolini’s ‘theatre of mechanics’ --

but primitivism. […] Focus on myth and magic, which in theatre leads to experiments with

ritual and ritualistic patterning of performance. ... In theatrical terms this is reflected by a

reversion to ‘original’ forms: the Dionysian rituals of ancient Greece, shamanistic

performances, the Balinese dance-drama.”229

The incantatory character of Balinese theatre, its semi-comprehensible chant and

codified dance movement, incommensurable with ordinary behaviour, fascinated Antonin

Artaud. It inspired his search for an idiom that would “consist of noises, cries, gestures,

poses and signs which would only include words as incantations.”230 Undoubtedly,

Khlebnikov embraces such an idiom in My churaemsya i charuemsya (We Enchant and

Recant, 1914):

My churaemsya i charuemsya

Tam charuyas’, zdes’ churayas’,

To churakhar’, to charakhar’,

Zdes’ churil’, tam charil’.

Iz churni vzor charny. 231

The entire poem is based on the sound play between the two juxtaposed, antonymic

phonemes char (enchantment, allurement, captivation) and chur (limiting, warding off,

protecting). Its repetitive mantra of two contrasting, similar-sounding words endows the

poem with its particular dramaturgy. The minimal phonetic variation of the two phonemes

char and chur stimulates the reader/performer to exaggerate the pronunciation, pitch,
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loudness, and rhythm to make their verbal opposition active. He or she needs to execute a

“performative utterance,” in terms of Austin’s speech-act theory, so that the words become

deeds. But the reader/performer’s authority is not embedded in the social hierarchy or

symbolic meaning of the word; he or she has to earn it by the utterance of the word or the

performance of its sound. Thus the sound structure of My churaemsya i charuemsya,

situated halfway between a poem and a score for a theatrical event, reveals its intrinsic

performative potential. Reminiscent of a pre-rhetorical oral performance, a shamanic

mantra, or a child’s game, it is executed by a rhythmical, repetitive vocalization that pulsates

between redundancy and sparseness of sound signals. Like a “primitive,” who through

ritualistic sound repetition participates in an eternal cyclical cosmogony, our poet chants and

un-chants, charms and un-charms, through the magic of sound. It is from this same field that

a new prosody or dramaturgy of sound arises in the historical avant-garde. Futurists,

Expressionists, Dadaists, and early twentieth-century avant-gardes strove for a ritualistic

inclusion of the performer and the audience in the theatrical event that could be achieved by

the dramaturgy of sound. A dynamic interaction with the world by means of orality/aurality,

impossible in an explanatory and representative idiom, was integral to their artistic practice

and a programmatic goal of their theatre manifestos.

THE ARTICULATORY ASPECT AND PERFORMANCE POTENTIAL OF ZAUM POETRY

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In his essay “On Poetry and Trans-Sense Language,” Shklovski cites German psychologist

and physiologist Wilhelm Max Wundt (1832-1920), who examined the links between

sounds and words, notably onomatopoeia, a form that he considered to be the source of all

language. Wundt found that in the development of its cognitive power, humanity encounters

things and represents them in iconic pictograms and ideograms, but after the pictorial

elements disappear, the meanings of words remain solely linked to their sounds, that is, their

“sensual tonality.” Adopting Wundt’s notion of “sensual tonality,” which, as he claims,

represents the substance of language Futurists were searching for, Shklovsky theoretically

assesses zaumnyi yazyk as a consequence of linguistic development. Hence, Futurists’

creation of words/sounds beyond logic and syntax can no longer be regarded as an eccentric

discovery of rebellious poets, but rather as an expansion of the linguistic practice already

extant in the “sensual tonality” of language: “It appears to us that the closest neighbors to

onomatopoetic words are ‘words’ without concept and content that serve to express pure

emotion, that is, words which cannot be said to exhibit any imitative articulation, for there is

nothing to imitate, but only a concatenation of sounds and emotion -- of a movement in

which the hearer participates sympathetically by reproducing a certain mute tensing of the

speech organs.”232

Shklovsky’s belief that the listener sympathetically participates in the original

verbal gesture by his own “mute tensing of speech organs” opens a wide field of speculation

about the performativity of the voice and the articulatory aspect of zaum poetry. Kruchenykh

might have had this in mind when providing the phonetic structure of Dyr bul shchyl as a

locus for a new, vocal play based solely on the physicality of the utterance, that is, the

articulation of sounds. The poem’s articulatory dimension is embedded in the explicit

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disposition of consonants, which determines the particular speech pattern of its vocal

rendition. Kruchenykh’s intentional variation of the vocal energy of individual verses, from

the explosive cluster shchyl at the beginning to the flattening hiss ez at the end, finds

Nilsson, dictates “an oral rendering [that] requires full exploitation of the speech apparatus

and a constant changing from one position to another. It reminds one of the ‘speech

mimic.’”233 In other words, there is performative potential incorporated in the very phonetics

of the poem. It adheres to Shklovsky’s earlier discussion of speech articulation as inherently

performative: “In the enjoyment of meaningless trans-sense language the articulatory aspect

of speech is undeniably important. It may even be that in general the greater part of the

pleasure in poetry is to be found in the articulations in the original dance of the speech

organs.”234

For Shklovsky the dance of the speech organs is the speech of the performer’s

body offered to the audience; it is a carrier of “the grain of the voice,” a substance of vocal

performance, later theorized by Roland Barthes. Barthes writes of “the grain of the voice …

a very specific place in which a language encounters a voice … a double production of

language and of music,” and argues that “every relation to a voice is necessarily erotic.”235

Barthes’s thinking has remained particularly relevant in contemporary theatre studies.

Performance art theorists often rely on his notion of “the grain of the voice” when they

discuss the bodily and erotic aspect of the performer-audience relationship. According to

Barthes, there is always something more than a recited verse or a sung air in the vocalization

of speech or music, “something non-spoken which designates itself: the voice.” He finds it

always/already inscribed in the musicality of the text -- one need only “pronounce” it, not

“articulate” it as a part of a speech.

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To avoid terminological confusion, we should understand that Barthes, unlike

Shklovsky and most theoreticians, uses the term pronunciation for the physical act of

vocalization as opposed to articulation that strives to appropriate the meaning of speech

following its syntactical order. “To articulate is to encumber meaning with a parasitical

clarity ... [while] the pronunciation maintains the perfect coalescence of the line of meaning

and the line of music,”236 suggests Barthes. Regardless of terminology, both Barthes and

Shklovsky agree that vocal utterance is an act of performance, not an act of representation.

As a vocal gesture, a breath, a cry, a physical action of the tongue, and a production of

words/sounds, it confirms a carnal presence of the performer here and now, rather than a

meaning of words/concepts that resides elsewhere.

The Futurist idiom of the self-sufficient word, then, recoils from meaning. It is not

meant to make a statement; it is meant to perform a vocal gesture. It follows that zaum

poetry resides somewhere between the lexical, on one side, and the aural, the musical, and

the performative, on the other, heavily leaning toward the latter. This interrelationship

between language and music/sound/voice was quintessential to the Futurist idea of making

poetry. It was precisely by escaping the pretense of meaning that Futurist poets were able to

liberate words. The fresh ‘pronunciation’ of zaum words -- phonemes stripped bare of their

signifying fetters -- conceived things anew. Thus the innovation of sound poetry participated

in the process of Shklovsky’s ostranenie (defamiliarization), a poetic device that seeks fresh

insight in the essence of things. It can also be considered a gateway to new possibilities in

the performing arts. Bertolt Brecht’s distancing of illusionist and psychological theatrical

techniques, for example, used this same method of making things strange to see them in a
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new light. Even though its essence was no longer mystic and sensual but rather scientific

and socio-political, Brecht’s move followed this Futurist/Formalist shift.

AURAL PRINCIPLES OF ZAUM IN FUTURIST MUSIC, PAINTING, AND THEATRE

The recognition of the materiality of sound/paint/sign migrated among the Futurist and

avant-garde art disciplines of music, poetry, painting, sculpture, and theatre. As Pomorska

has suggested, Russian Futurist poets, under the influence of Cubist painters, celebrated the

word from the perspective of sound as the only material and theme of poetry: “The sound is

equated to paint, geometrical lines and figures, and it becomes an independent phenomenon

to be experienced and enjoyed as the only poetry, real and pure. Thus the Futurists fought

for the ‘pure word’, not loaded with any referential or symbolic function with respect to the

object. ‘The word at liberty’ was supposed to operate with its own structure, and the

associations between sounds should evoke ‘new objects’, sometimes called ‘zvuko-obrazi’

(sound-images).”237

Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh admitted in their initial word-as-such manifesto that

Futurist rechetvortsi (word-makers) used chopped-up words in their artful combinations in

the wake of Futurist painters who used body parts in their broken perspective. In 1913’s A

Trap for Judges, a manifesto that tries to pronounce a method of evocation of ‘new objects’

or sound-images by phonetic means, eight undersigned Futurist poets further proclaimed:

“We have begun to see in letters only vectors of speech. … We started to endow words with

content on the basis of their graphic and phonic characteristics. We for the first time

brought to the fore the role of verbal mass and made it perceivable. … We understand
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vowels as time and space (a characteristic of thrust), and consonants as color, sound,

smell.”238

The terms such as ‘vectors of speech’ and ‘verbal mass’ conceptually linked the

sound of words with painting material. Apparently, the manifesto builds on the theoretical

scaffolding from the discussions of plastic dynamism and synaesthesia by Wassily

Kandinsky, Nikolai Kublin, and the Burliuk brothers. This interdisciplinary discourse was

extended to the domain of music in Kublin’s and Aleksandr Scriabin’s theories of

synaesthesia that followed Kandinsky’s elaborations of ‘inner sound’ and ‘stage

composition.’ Kublin, who was the leading impresario of the Russian avant-garde and a

promoter of important trends of avant-garde music and sound creation such as microtonal

music (Pratella), atonal composition (Schönberg), and the art of noise (Russolo), envisioned

a single art that would encompass poetry, music, and the plastic arts. In an essay that

appeared in the Blaue Reiter Almanac (1912), Kublin advocated a music liberated from its

conventional five-line notation and the prescriptions of tonality and metre, a music as

unencumbered as natural sound. He also called for the use of smaller harmonicintervals in

musical composition, such as quarter, eighth, and sixteenth tones, alongside Pratella’s and

Russolo’s endeavours to introduce the enharmonic music and the art of noise. In his word-

sound manifesto “What Is the Word” (1914), Kublin even devised a synaesthetic alphabet

where he assigned to each vowel its own pitch and to each consonant its own colour. On the

synoptic table of these colour-sound correspondences, the phoneme G, for example, matches

a Yellow-Black colour and denotes Selfishness, while K matches Black and denotes Hate.239

Aleksandr Scriabin, the renowned pianist and composer of the turn of the century, devised

an even more detailed colour-sound scheme and a notation for audio-visual compositions
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meant to be played on a specially constructed colour/light organ (clavier à lumière).

Following Scriabin’s code, the musical note C matches the colour Red and represents

Human Will, C-sharp is Violet, representing Creative Spirit, D is Yellow, representing Joy,

and so on.240 Transposed to theatre, Kublin’s and Scriabin’s ideas resound in Matiushin and

Malevich’s work on the score, sets, and lighting for Kruchenykh’s zaum opera Victory over

the Sun.

This mutual reflection of sound and colour was also fundamental to Mikhail

Larionov’s and Natalia Goncharova’s Rayonism. Their theory of painting can be considered

typically Futurist, especially when compared to Umberto Boccioni’s ideas about plastic

‘dynamism’ and fluidity of atmosphere on a canvas as a result of simultaneous exertion of

centrifugal and centripetal forces. Rayonist paintings showed objects reverberating in the

environment, emanating and reflecting rays back and forth in a dynamic interplay of light

and colour. Rather than representing objects, they presented the play of light, colour,

saturation, mass, depth, texture, and so on. In his essay “Pictorial Rayonism,” Larionov

describes his painting free from concrete forms and ‘scientifically’ justifies the links

between sound and colour: “Obviously, a blue spread evenly over the canvas vibrates with

less intensity than the same blue put on more thickly. Hitherto this law has been applicable

only to music, but it is incontestable also with regard to painting: colors have a timbre that

changes according to the quality of their vibrations, i.e., of density and loudness. In this way,

painting becomes as free as music and becomes self-sufficient outside imagery.”241

Liberated from any signifying and figural baggage, and in this way similar to

words in poetry or sounds in music, objects in the plastic arts reacquired their sensorial

potential and tactility. Thus, musical and painterly theories reflect the issues of zaum poetry.
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They correspond to the Burliuk brothers’ proposal for “roughing up the texture of the text to

make it ‘palpable’ through an unorthodox use of the verbal material”242 or Kruchenykh’s

effort to reclaim the tactile quality of words through the orchestration of the “various

textures of words (faktura slova) -- tender, heavy, coarse, dry, and moist […] by rhythm,

semantics, syntax, and graphics.”243

VICTORY OVER THE SUN: A CASE STUDY OF THE THEATRICALIZATION OF ZAUM

Victory over the Sun, a Futurist opera written and staged by Alexei Kruchenykh with music

by Mikhail Matiushin, prologue by Viktor Khlebnikov, and sets, costumes, and lighting

design by Kazimir Malevich, was originally performed only twice on alternate evenings

with Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy. Ambitiously announced as the “First Ever Staging

of Futurist Theatre, December 2-5, 1913,” the event came at the summit of the richest and

most tumultuous season of Futurist experimentation in Russia. It appeared after an exciting

autumn on the St. Petersburg art scene: in October, almost all of the zaum poets (the brothers

Burliuk, Kruchenykh, Livshits, Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, and Malevich) participated in

“An Evening of (Rechetvortsev) Speech-Creators;” in November, David Burliuk gave a

lecture, “On the Futurists,” containing his critical observations on Marinetti; and in

November and December, the Union of Youth mounted its last art exhibition.

Robert Benedetti, who staged the 1980 reconstruction of Victory over the Sun in

Los Angeles, describes the 1913 zeitgeist this way: “These were times when traditional

boundaries and conventions in art were being destroyed and new forms being developed.

Victory over the Sun, in fact, may have been the first example of what we now call
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Performance Art. It was certainly one of the earliest instances of serious multidisciplinary

collaboration.”244 To put it bluntly, the contemporary press hated it, as is evident in the

acerbic comment in St. Petersburg’s New Time, 3 December 1913: “FUTURIST

PERFORMANCE. IN -- brr! ... SOL! -- brr ... ENCE! -- brrrr. This is futurist language.

They will understand me. The public also. [Undersigned:] P.K-di.”245 But, regardless of its

initial failure or success, it holds true that the production premiered “three and half years

before Satie and Picasso’s Parade … [and] was one of the first totally modern pieces of

twentieth-century performance art … [where] performers in stylized geometric costumes

danced and sang absurdly before proto-abstract backdrops.”246

The plot of the opera depicts a rebellion against the sun -- the capture, killing, and

burial of the sun by the Strong Men of the Future -- exhibiting ideas that run parallel with

the Futurist divorce from a rational and signifying language in zaum poetry. The work calls

for the denial of Apollonian clarity and the practical rationality of the Cartesian world and a

return to Dionysian primordial chaos and darkness. Hence the characters of the play, the

Strong Men of the Future, sing disrespectfully: “We pulled the sun out with its fresh roots;

they’re fatty, smelled of arithmetic,”247 echoing Kruchenykh’s declaration in a manifesto of

zaum: “We do not serve as the reflection of some sun.” In an interview for the St. Petersburg

newspaper Day, 1 December 1913, Malevich and Matiushin frankly stated the subversive

intention of the play: “Its meaning is to overthrow one of the greatest artistic values -- the

sun, in the present instance. ... Futurists want to break free of this regulated world... to

transform the world into chaos... to smash established values into fragments... to create new

values out of these fragments... discovering new, unexpected and unseen links. So then, the

sun -- that former value -- cramps their style and they feel like overthrowing it. ... It is, in
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fact, the plot of the opera. The cast of the opera should express this in both language and

sound.”248

Kruchenykh’s mise-en-scène centred on the interplay and actions of symbolic

figures, rather than dramatic characters, who recited, sang, and moved encased in their

Cubist costumes speaking an alogical, often semi-comprehensible dialogue. Even more, it

could be described as a staging of the kinetic clash between sculptural and painterly masses,

exaggerated light changes, and atonal musical punctuations. It looked as if Edward Gordon

Craig’s übermarionetten moved and produced sounds in Kandinsky’s abstract audio-visual

ambience, where moving screens reflected the chromatic and tonal changes of light and

music. The staging demonstrated the authors’ predilection for a non-mimetic (objectless)

rather than a mimetic (objectful) art method, an attitude that figures in the whole spectrum of

Futurist theories from the concept of zaumnyi jazyk (beyonsense) in poetry to Larionov’s

and Gonchareva’s Rayonism and Malevich’s Suprematism and abstraction in plastic arts.

These ideas shared in Futurist poetry and painting -- the rejection of the representational

mode in favour of immediacy, iconicity, literalness, and abstraction -- determined the

theatricality of Victory over the Sun. Designer Malevich wrote to composer Matiushin: “We

have come as far as the rejection of reason because another reason has grown in us which

can be called ‘beyond reason’ and which also has law, construction, and sense.”249 Writer

and director Kruchenykh disclosed: “The stage was set up the way I expected and wanted it

to be. The blinding spotlights. Malevich’s sets consisted of large planes -- triangles, circles,

and parts of machines. The cast was in masks resembling gas masks of the period. ‘Likari’

(actors) were like moving machines. The costumes, designed by Malevich again, were cubist

in construction: cardboard and wire. This altered the anatomy of a person -- the performers
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moved as if tied together and controlled by the rhythm of the artist and director. … What

shook the audience particularly were the songs of the Coward and the Aviator (in consonants

only) ... [and] the chorus of Undertakers, built on unexpected disruptions and

dissonances.”250

Victory over the Sun was both conceptually and pragmatically a multimedial work

of art. Its cacophonic consonant vocalizations, disruptive and dissonant choruses, and

geometrical movements of performers in sculptural costumes on a visually fractured stage

explored the possibilities of kinetic sculpture and total theatre. Although the better part of

the language of the script can hardly be called zaumnyi yazyk -- it is used only sporadically,

taking place in the two short arias by the Young Man and the Aviator -- the piece’s

philosophy and performance method were undoubtedly derived from Futurist zaum poetry.

Matiushin’s role in the development of the performance style of Victory over the

Sun surpasses the significance of his mere twenty-seven bars of the play’s original score.

Matiushin was unyielding about the zaum character of Futurist theatrical presentation in St.

Petersburg. As Susan Compton points out, he disapproved of Mayakovsky’s language in his

tragedy because he “never divorces word from its meaning, he does not recognize that the

sound of a word is priceless in itself.”251 Accordingly, in the First Journal of Russian

Futurists, Matiushin wrote: “Russian youth, without any knowledge of the new theatre

experiments abroad presented the first performance on a stage in St. Petersburg of the

disintegration of concepts and words, of old staging and of musical harmony. They

presented a new creation, free of old conventional experiences and complete in itself, using

seemingly senseless words -- picture-sounds -- new indications of the future that leads into

eternity and gives a joyful feeling of strength to those who will lend an ear and look at it.”252
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Later in the article Matiushin thanks the student-performers who, “according to our

decisions, spoke the words without music, pausing for long intervals between each word. In

that way, a word, alienated from its meaning, gave the impression of great strength.”253 The

poster that called for the audition had been clear: “Professional actors please do not bother to

come.” The unsuspecting president of the Union of Youth later complained that the actors,

instead of playing their roles before the spectator, were addressing the audience directly the

way an orator from the rostrum would. Clearly the performance style of Victory over the

Sun was an attempt to enact a goal of Futurist sound poetry, that is, to disintegrate concepts

and words and to produce picture-sounds instead.

The zaum concept of picture-sounds was of utmost concern in the anxious

correspondence between Matiushin and Malevich about the coming production. The latter

wrote: “Arriving at the idea of sound, we obtained note letters expressing sonic masses.

Perhaps in a composition of these sound masses (former words) a new path will be found. In

this way, we tear the letter from a line, from a single direction, and give it the possibility of

free movement. … Consequently we arrive at a distribution of letter and sonic masses in

space similar to painterly Suprematism. These masses will hang in space and will provide

the possibility for our consciousness to move farther and farther away from the earth.”254

For Malevich, new potentials of picture-sounds (letter/phonemes) lay in abandoning

the linearity of former words, which would allow for their spatialization. Subverting the

temporality of sound into the spatiality of physical objects, Malevich even comes to envision

an art of the stage dealing with sonic masses hanging in space like aural sculptures. But

these masses that stand, hang, move, and flow on the stage are not only masses of sound but

also of light, kinetic scenery, objects, and performers. This was the underlining idea of
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Malevich’s approach to the lighting orchestration of Victory over the Sun. The venue for the

opera’s opening night was St. Petersburg’s Luna Park Theatre, formerly Vera

Komissarzhevskaya’s Dramatic Theatre, well-known for its staging of the experiments of

Meyerhold and the Symbolists. The theatre had been thoroughly renovated with the hope of

attracting an audience to American-style entertainment. It featured a state-of-the-art lighting

system with a sophisticated central console and movable spotlights that proved to be very

helpful in the execution of Malevich’s lighting design. Livshits, one of the organizers of the

event, described the show under the ‘tentacles of the spotlights’ as an outgrowth of

Malevich’s unscrupulous destruction of forms: “Turning [shapes of light and objects] from

the square and the circle to the cube and the sphere with the mercilessness of Savanarola, he

proceeded to destroy everything that fell outside the axes that he had designated. This was a

zaum of painting, one that anticipated the ecstatic non-objectivity of Suprematism. …

Bodies were broken up by the beams of light, they alternately lost arms, legs, head, because

for Malevich they were only geometric bodies yielding not only to decomposition into

elements, but also to complete disintegration in the pictorial space.”255

It seems that the switch from a painterly surface to the sculptural volume of the

stage additionally motivated Malevich. His Rayonist lighting of performers encased in

voluminous Cubist costumes aimed at the disintegration of the stage into a kinetic sculpture

characterized by the fluidity of light and sound. This was not just a designer’s whim but a

deliberately executed transposition of the poetics of Kruchenykh’s zaumnyi yazyk into the

theatricality of his opera. The poet, who also directed the piece, required a juxtaposition of

sound, colour, and sculptural mass, which, under light shifting from sombre blue to fiery

red, and then to green and dark, looked like a montage cut between independent textures of a
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Cubo-Futurist collage. It becomes clear that the authors of Victory over the Sun utilized the

ideas and practices waiting to be further developed in the Bauhaus’s theatre of totality,

Italian Futurists’ concept of the scenic “plastic moto-rumorist complex,” and Artaud’s

“hieroglyphic” performance/staging that reinstates the volume of space up until then

flattened by words/concepts of the dramatic text. Their kinetic sculptural dramaturgy was

the epitome of the dramaturgy of sound, which after being conceived in the sound poetry of

the historical avant-garde, transcended it into a dramaturgy of a ‘sound-image complex that

is constantly communicated’ (Kostelanetz), revamped in the theatre of mixed-means of the

1960s, and became a viable source for the ‘scenic dynamics’ of ‘postdramatic’ theatre. All

of what was seen and heard in Kruchenykh, Malevich, and Matiushin’s Victory over the Sun

grew from the verbal texture of zaum poetry, whereby word-sounds became the picture-

sounds of the Futurist theatre.

ZANGEZI: AN ANTI-BABEL SOUND SCULPTURE

Zangezi: A Supersaga in Twenty Planes was Velimir Khlebnikov’s most serious elaboration

of the links between sound, colour, word, image, and structure. Intended to elucidate human

life and history, the supersaga follows the quasi-scientific calculations of time and space of

his large prophetic prose work The Tables of Destiny published in 1922. It represents the

author’s ambitious attempt at theatrical use of zaumnyi yazyk born from a mixture of his

interests in the primordial roots of language and modern scientific speculation. Besides a

quest for a universal idiom, Zangezi offers Khlebnikov’s picture of the world influenced by

current discoveries such as Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity and Nikolai

Lobachevski’s concept of non-Euclidian geometry. In spite of the fact that Khlebnikov’s

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script exhibits a much richer use of zaum than Kruchenykh’s Victory over the Sun, its

staging was less theatrically and visually attractive and, as a result, less enthusiastically

received.

Taking place in May 1923, just a few months after Khlebnikov’s death, the

premiere of Zangezi was designed, staged, and performed by his friend Vladimir Tatlin,

known for his grandiose, never-executed Bauhaus-style sculpture-building of the Monument

to the Third International. Tatlin, a central figure of the Russian avant-garde alongside

Malevich, built on the stage a constructivist sculpture made of variously textured materials

and geometrical shapes that replicated the structural principles of Khlebnikov’s supersaga. A

performance at the Museum of Artistic Culture in Petrograd was a hybrid of zaum

composition (words/sounds, colour, light) and a constructivist set, objects, and costumes.

Like Malevich in Victory over the Sun, Tatlin was primarily interested in the sculptural

aspect of the staging in Zangezi. He used zaum poetry as his inspiration for the piece’s

kinetic sculpturing and multimedia production. Paul Schmidt describes Khlebnikov’s

supersagas as texts “intended, in some sense, as librettos for operas that had yet to be

imagined, but can be guessed at today in the work of artists like Robert Wilson or Philip

Glass.”256 Indeed, it is the interest of the neo-avant-garde performance artists for such pieces

that has led to a few revivals and reconstructions of Zangezi. Peter Urban, for example,

adapted Zangezi as an acoustic art piece for a broadcast directed by Heinz von Cramer for

WDR Studio Akustische Kunst (1972), while Peter Sellars directed an American version in

1986, co-produced by the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York and the Los Angeles

Museum of Modern Art.

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A short introduction to Zangezi reads: “A story is made of words, the way a

building is made of construction units, minute building blocks. ... A superstory, or

supersaga, is made up of independent sections, each with its own special god, its special

faith, and its special rule. ... Each is free to confess its own particular faith. ... Thus we

discover a new kind of operation in the realm of verbal art. ... Narrative is architecture

composed of words; an architecture composed of narratives is a supersaga.”257

Following the logic of a language constructed of self-sufficient words, the

supersaga moves to the next level of composition; it comprises different, self-sufficient

narratives, each keeping its own form. In this way Khlebnikov juxtaposes various forms of

texts, many of them previously written for some other purpose, as building blocks of a new

structure. Thus he creates a counterpart to beyonsense language, a “beyondstory” that stands

between drama, poetry, and a theoretical script. The single narratives, blocks of different

verbal textures juxtaposed in unexpected, alogical, and abstract ways imported from

beyonsense poetry, together constitute the foundation of the supersaga’s unique edifice.

In several of his short stage scripts, Khlebnikov had already attempted a zaum

subversion of literary drama. His monodrama Mrs. Laneen, for example, explores the

possibility of the application of mathematical division to artistic language. The protagonist,

Mrs. Laneen, is literally fragmented into a number of voiced, sensual perceptions.

Paradoxically, the cast of characters for the monodrama [sic!] includes several speaking

parts for sight, hearing, recollection, terror, etc. Instead of hearing Mrs. Laneen’s voice,

then, we hear a dialogue between her senses speaking for themselves. In another of

Khlebnikov’s plays, Worldbackwards, we retrace the internal path of a man, Olly, who has

just been buried by the method similar to mathematical substracion. As Olly escapes from
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his coffin, the timeline of the plot gets reversed so that the man and his wife, Polly, live

backwards from the moment of his funeral to their happy days in baby strollers.

Worldbackwards can be regarded as Khlebnikov’s effort to achieve one of his programmatic

goals -- the reversal of unidirectional time that would allow man to control his destiny.

These two short plays are remarkably similar to Futurist synthetic theatre pieces and index

the kinship between Russian and Italian artistic endeavours that has so often been denied.

Zangezi was Khlebnikov’s experimental test of the idea of the universal power of

sound in zaum language. Behind this power was the theory that a phonetic shift not only

radically changes the word and its meaning but also alters the world and its structure. His

principal intention was to construct the supersaga as a counter-Tower of Babel based on

mudrost jazyka (the wisdom of language) that would uphold the myth and history of the

universe. Through the ten acts of the piece, people follow the prophet Zangezi, who climbs

the tower of knowledge constructed on ten planes. On Plane Six, the believers ask Zangezi

to recite his “self-sounding poems:

Belivers: Describe the horrors of our age in the words of Alphabet! So that

never again will we have to see war between peoples; … instead let us hear the

crash of Alphabet’s long spears, the fight of the hostile forces R and L, K and G. …

Alphabet is the echo of space.

Tell us! …

Zangezi: … when K resounded in Kolchak.

K was knotted a whiplash

of shackles, decrees, kicks, commands and rocks. 258

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This play of the consonants R, which “rips, resonates, and forms rivers,” and K,

which “kicks and rocks,” was meant to reincarnate historical reality by a phonetic play

similar to the ritual invocation of good and determent of evil spirits in oral cultures. By

invoking the sound-icon of a phenomenon, tribal man hoped to appease and tame inimical

natural forces. Belyi’s example of the role of sound symbolism in the formation of the word

grrrom [thunderrr] is a case in point. The magic spell of onomatopoeic words enables

Khlebnikov’s universal alphabet of the mind to reconcile man with nature and history. On

Plane Seven, for example, Khlebnikov even envisions a solution for Russia’s endless wars

by the elimination of the letter/phoneme R in the country’s name: “Imagine the nation

become like a stricken deer … whose wet black muzzle nudges at destiny’s gates -- it begs

for lightness and laughter, for like-mindedness. … A tired body longing to be lulled by

harmony.”259 Khlebnikov’s free verses, ingeniously translated by Schmidt, create a

symbiosis of poetic images and contrastive sounds of the two interchangeable liquid

consonants, R and L. The fluid L takes over from the more rapacious R and “lulls the roar

of terror, mends the riven tear.”260

At first glance similar to Ferdinand de Saussure’s case in point of the arbitrariness

of the verbal sign (a dog is not a hog precisely because the word/signifier is changed by the

switch of the initial consonants ‘d’ and ‘h’), Khlebnikov’s phonetic sdvig has a completely

opposite sense -- it does not allow random attribution, it sticks with essential unity of verbal

sign locked in its sound. He pleads for a living language -- not a codified communication

system -- in which word-making “allows form to form itself, [while it] moves freely in

search of its own sense.”261 This search, for Khlebnikov, should follow traces of the
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prehistorical roots of language that correspond with natural laws neither fully

understandable nor arbitrarily codified but awaiting rediscovery by phonetic exploration.

The motivated connection between sound and its meaning, albeit lost in human history, will

be reestablished when the separate sounds of language are naturally linked with units of

thought in an “alphabet of sounds” that leads to an “alphabet of the mind” (azbuka uma).

The genealogy of the language in Zangezi is demonstrated by the use of seven

levels of idiomatic expression. These are the languages of birds (1), gods (2), and stars (3)

followed by a language beyond sense (4), the decomposition of words and new coinages (5),

sound-image idioms (zvukopis) (6), and finally, the language of madness (bezumnyj jazyk),

found in oral folklore, incantations, conjurations, and glossolalia (7). Zangezi, the sage who

represents Khlebnikov’s alter ego and is fashioned after Nietzsche’s Zarathustra,

understands and speaks all these languages and unites them all in a language of the world

(mirovoy jazyk). The Afro-Asian roots of the prophet’s name, a combination of the names of

the rivers Zambezi and Ganges, highlight Khlebnikov’s interest in the cradles of civilization,

which can also be found in his supersaga Asia Unbound.

In Zangezi, we climb from plane to plane, from the onomatopoeia of the bird calls

(such as a replication of the yellow bunting call, Kree-tee-tee-tee-tee-ee -- tsuey-tsuey-tsuey-

sssueyee) to the languages of gods and stars. The language of stars connects abstract

mathematical principles of the motion of cosmic bodies with concrete manifestations of

human life -- both of them, of course, contained in the sound of words whose meanings we

have forgotten. Khlebnikov’s reading of and listening to the stars is not a simple guessing

game. Its “scientific” foundation is contained in the “alphabet of the stars” and in the

mathematical calculations of time that interconnect past, current, and future historical
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events, wars, catastrophes, triumphs, and defeats. Therefore, Zangezi’s prophecies are first

of all set up on his mastery of language: “He has learned to control not destiny itself, but the

sounds of destiny. And to the extent that sound and meaning are in perfect accord, he can

control the world.”262

His chant in “Plane Nine: Thought” provides a perfect example of this confluence

between meaning and sound. Here shaman and seer Zangezi reaches out for the power of

thought and universal meaning through the rich tonality of an ancient ritual call to prayer. In

a Hindu-sounding mantra, he cyclically repeats the syllable OOM, a vocable that in Slavic

languages denotes “mind.” The message, feeling, or meaning of OOM gets instantly

delivered to the senses of the listener through its musical and rhythmic features:

Sound the alarm; send the sound through the mind! Toll the big bell, the great

tocsin of intelligence! All the inflections of the human brain will pass in review

before you, all the permutations of OOM! Look up and see! Join us now, all of you,

in song!

GO-OOM

OUR-OOM

OOW-OOM

FAR-OOM

WITH-OOM of me

And those I don’t know

OM-OOM

DAL-OOM
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CHE-OOM

BOM!

BIM!

BAM! 263

In a zaum poetry manner, different phonetic roots are prefixed or suffixed to the

dominant one-syllable phoneme OOM, reshaping its sound and shifting its meaning. The

basic syllable OOM is known from the Indian oral tradition of the Upanishads as an

expression of the original pre-lingual sonority of divine presence in the acoustic sphere of

language. The recurring musical and rhythmical pattern of a mantra in a proto-language (or,

in this case, a repetition of the Russian word um) taps directly into the subconscious spheres

of the individual human -- be it a member of a tribe participating in a ritual or a spectator at

an avant-garde theatre event. Thus the onomatopoeia BOM / BIM / BAM echoes the bell

ringing and causes ripples of air or aural sensation by the spatial thrust of reiterated vowels

and consonants. The energy of the sound released by the explosive bilabial consonant B,

carried on by vowels, becomes almost tangible. Additionally, the protracted articulation of

the deep vowels O and U titillates our hearing and speech organs and adds sensual weight to

the performance. Anyone who has ever listened to a Russian male choir’s rendition of the

folk song Vecherniy zvon (Evening Bell) will no doubt immediately recognize and feel the

sound of Khlebnikov’s zaum chant of OOM. Interestingly enough, it was the chant of a

Russian church bass that inspired Roland Barthes to talk about “the grain of the voice,”

which reveals not only the depth of the human body but also the depth of human language

itself: “Listen … something is there, manifest and persistent (you hear only that), which is
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past (or previous) to the meaning of the words, … something from the depths of the body

cavities … and from the depths of the Slavonic language, as if a single skin lined the

performer’s inner flesh and the music he sings.”264

That same “single skin” lines Kruchenykh’s poem Vysoty (Heights) and the

Russian church singing of Symvol veri (Credo) as well. Kruchenykh’s soulful poem,

included in the Declaration of the Word as Such (1913) as an example of the language of the

universe (vselenskii yazyk), was composed exclusively of vowels that show “the strange

wisdom of sounds,” as Khlebnikov would put it. Kruchenykh needed no consonants but only

the vowels of the Orthodox liturgical chant to revive its sound-spirit:

Veruyu / e u yu

v yedinogo / i a o

boga / o a

otza vsederschitelya / o a e e i e ya

tvortza / o a

nebu i zemli / e u i e

i i y i e i i y 265

However, the sonority of these vowels was nothing like the soothing musicality of

Symbolist verse; it was a dramatic testimony of the poet’s introspection and search for the

aural roots of his own poetic idiom in the collective, Russian spirit. Kruchenykh wanted to

enter “a very specific place in which a language encounters a voice … a double production

of language and of music,”266 and express something past (or previous to) the meaning of the

words. Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov believed in an idiom of sounds that would voice the
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truth of the body and thetruth of the world and immediately communicate both the sensory

experience of the human body and the deep mysticism of nature embedded in the roots of

language and culture.

One can now more easily understand how Kruchenykh dared to claim that his Dyr

bul shchyl had more Russian soul than Pushkin’s poetry. The use of harsh consonants and

affricates in this poem did not mean only the poet’s return to the articulation of words that

give “the pleasure… in the original dance of the speech organs,” as Shklovsky asserts, but

also a homecoming to Slavic spiritual roots. Khlebnikov’s return to the primordial vocal

sound of the word oom (mind) and Kruchenykh’s vocalization of the Orthodox chant clearly

share a common origin. A mix of carnality and spiritualism reflected in zaum poetry was a

part of the Russian avant-garde’s inclination toward the pagan and mythical sources of art.

Its evident parallel was the return of Larionov, Gonchareva, and Malevich to the visual

simplicity of peasant icons and woodcuts (loubok) in their early neo-primitive painting.

THE CORPOREAL AND ABSTRACT SOUNDS OF ZAUM ON: TOWARD THEATRE PERFORMANCE

The last of Khlebnikov’s seven linguistic categories mentioned in Zangezi was bezumnyj

jazyk (language of madness), found in the speech of people who are intoxicated, enraged, or

under emotional stress. The language of madness, used in zaum together with poetic

incantations, conjurations, or glossolalia, represents the most effective scenic aspect of

Futurist sound dramaturgy. Kruchenykh’s textbook for acting students, Fonetika teatra

(Phonetics of Theatre, 1923), represents its direct application: “In the presence of strong
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emotions the meaning (concept) of the word is not that important, it is even forgotten; a

person in a state of emotion mixes up words, forgets them, says others, distorts, but the

emotional side of them is not destroyed (the zaum part); on the contrary the sound image and

the sound (phoneme) live as never before, and the more unusual and expressive they are, the

better material they are for expressing intense emotions!”267

Here Kruchenykh manages rather ingeniously to compress the poetics of zaum into

a practical tool for actor education. He instructs actors on how to liberate the energies of

words (and their own energies) and to utter expressive sound images that need not be

equated with their textual concepts. The interconnectedness of states of heightened emotion

and inspiration lies in the foundation of Italian Futurist lyricism as well. Marinetti, who

demanded that poets intoxicate themselves with life, describes the urgency of speech under

stress as a powerful and liberating poetic device in the same way: “Suppose a friend of yours

endowed with this lyric faculty found himself in an area of intense life (revolution, war,

shipwreck, earthquake, etc) ... He would begin by brutally destroying the syntax of his

speech. ... The rush of steam-emotion would burst the sentence’s pipeline, the valves of

punctuation and adjectival clamps. … The narrator’s only preoccupation is to render all the

vibrations of his ‘I.’”268

Malevich follows suit by advocating a wordless dialect of sound poetry in which

‘demented’ words, accessible neither to the mind nor to reason, rush from the poet’s mouth. “I

weep or I grieve cannot express anything,” argues Malevich in his essay “On Poetry” (1913).

“Words are merely distinguishing signs and nothing more. But if I hear a groan, I neither see

nor sense it in any definite form. I recognize pain, which has its language -- a groan -- and in

the groan I hear no word.”269

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Obviously, Futurist poets’ main concern was not to deliver a syntactic message to the

audience but to render the sound of all the vibrations of an “I” intoxicated with life. Their

attitude encouraged avant-garde actors to express their own rhythms, sounds, and vocal

gestures, in other words, to perform themselves, to be themselves on stage. The poetics of

zaum and parole in libertà thus join together, carrying bodily impulses in the matrix of their

sound-text inscribed with an emotive, pulsional, and performative potential that unmistakably

lends itself to theatrical use. Both Marinetti’s intoxication with life/matter and Malevich’s

wordless dialect of poetry can be seen as steps towards the physical idiom of presence in the

theatre of the historical avant-garde. Artaud, a leading figure of physical theatre, describes one

of the faces of his theatre of cruelty quite aurally, in the shape of a cry. “Intellectual cries,” he

writes, are “cries born of the subtlety of the marrow. This is what I mean by Flesh. I do not

separate my thought from my life. With each vibration of my tongue I retrace all the pathways

of my thought in my flesh.”270 The performance that comes from the wisdom, pain, and joy of

the flesh is not separated from thought and emotion but lives in a physical or vocal gesture of

bezumnyj jazyk (language of madness) spoken by an intoxicated “I.” By stretching beyond

representation toward a performance act, a vocal gesture “inscribes the occurrence of a

sensory now” that, as Lyotard alleges, marks the whole of avant-garde theatre as its distinct

quality.

The wordless expression of sound poetry and objectless painting of Russian avant-

garde proved mutually contagious. In his “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The

New Painterly Realism” (1915), Malevich wrote: “The most precious things in pictorial

creation are color and texture: they form the pictorial essence which the subject has always

killed. … Painters should abandon subject matter and objects if they wish to be pure
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painters.”271 In the same way the poets of zaum turned to sound and beyonsense words

displaying an a priori, accidental relationship with reality, Malevich turned to abstract form,

colour, and texture. “In the art of Suprematism, forms will live,” reassures Malevich.

“Hitherto there has been realism of objects, but not of painterly, colored units. … Any

painterly surface is more alive than any face from which a pair of eyes and a smile

protrudes.”272 The zaum words and Malevich’s painted, ‘living’ surfaces were counterparts

on the path to the supreme abstraction that revolutionized the arts in the twentieth century.

But they were not detached from human life and reality. Explaining why people’s faces are

painted green and red in pictures, Malevich commented: “Painting is paint and color; it lies

within our organism. Its outbursts are great and demanding. My nervous system is colored

by them. My brain burns with their color.”273 Here Malevich comes close to Marinetti who

found the rarest faculty of intoxicating oneself with life the ultimate resource of poetry.

Likewise, he finds poetry to be “the expression of form, subject to rhythm and tempo … [so

that] the poet is compelled to create poems devoid of natural forms by the storm of pure and

naked rhythm rising within him.”274 The energetic, pulsional power of such poetry is an

outcome of the performative potential of words-sounds which are able to release something

that cannot be told by words-concepts. Hence, Malevich listens to a groan not as a word in

the semantic or syntactic sense of the statement “I groan,” but as the sound of a groan that

reveals a word in statu nascendi, a pre-textual sound/word being born as a physical gesture.

The concept of a vocal gesture that is not yet a word became a significant element

of the understanding of the physicality of theatre language. Helga Finter, for one, locates its

origin in the historical avant-garde’s growing interest in the theatricalization of the voice and

Artaud’s belief that language, and consequently the idiom he wanted to develop in his
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theatre, “springs from the NECESSITY of speech more than from speech already formed.

But finding an impasse in speech, it returns spontaneously to gesture.”275 Artaud’s departure

from the text for the sake of incantation or vocal gesture, understood in terms of Derridean

escape from the closure of representation toward an idiom of presence, inspired the physical,

ritual, and carnal theatre of the 1960s avant-garde, including performances of the New York

Living Theatre, Peter Brook’s Theatre of Cruelty season at the London National Theatre,

and Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in 69. Equally important to his insistence on a pre-

linguistic idiom of theatre as a call for bodily presence is Artaud’s notion of a hieroglyphic

sign as a composite of stage sound, image, space, and action: “It can be said that the spirit of

the most ancient hieroglyphics will preside at the creation of this pure theatrical language.

… The overlapping of images and movements will culminate, through the collusion of

objects, silences, shouts and rhythms or in a genuine physical language with signs, not

words, as its root.”276

Richard Foreman, Meredith Monk, and Robert Wilson, for example, draw their

poetics from Artaud’s genuine notion of a theatre idiom built in the spirit of hieroglyphs.

Their abstract, mixed-media theatre, alleges Finter, “disarticulates the logocentric

domination which governs the relation between the different signifying systems

(verbal/visual/auditory) in our culture and thus brings the signifying process to light at the

expense of our fixation on meaning.”277 Or, as Derrida explains Artaud’s hieroglyphics,

words cease to flatten theatrical space and to lie out horizontally, as in logical speech; rather

they reinstate the volume of theatrical space. Instead of instituting a hierarchy of sign

systems participating in textual/dramatic representation, the verbal, visual, and auditory

elements of postdramatic performance slip against each other, creating a fluctuating and
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immediate theatrical event, a happening in-between the media: “Experimental theatre begins

with another distribution of the two audio-visual unities of the sign: it centers its

preoccupation not on the text, but on the orality which, on the one hand, takes the written

(the seen) as spoken sounds and transforms sight into hearing and kinesthesia and, on the

other hand, takes tone and sound as spatially written, thus transforming hearing to sight.”278

In the way of thus understood orality, words and vocal and non-vocal sounds

acquire their own theatricality that replaces a habitual transliteration of textual meanings into

dramatic representation and expands into an intermedial sign structure, providing for a

hieroglyphic stage performance long ago proposed by Artaud. They transform drama into an

audio-visual form of theatre which does not represent a plot, characters, and actions or, as

Futurist poets would put it, does not mime anything outside itself but assumes an ‘a priori

accidental relation to reality.’ Thus the performance-oriented, anti-textual, and hybrid

theatre of intermedia we witness today comes into view as a continuum of the battle against

logocentric language, dramatic literature, and figurative painting fought by the historical

avant-garde.
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DRAMATURGY OF SOUND IN THE AVANT-GARDE AND POSTDRAMATIC THEATRE

Fifth Chapter -- The Dramaturgy of Sound at Work: From Futurist Serate to Sintesi

PIEDIGROTTA AND GALLERY PERFORMANCES: VARIETY THEATRE GOES SYNTHETIC

Francesco Cangiullo’s Piedigrotta, which premiered on 29 March 1914, at Gallery Sprovieri

in Rome (and, in the next two months, was repeated once in Rome and three times in Naples)

was a significant sign of change in Futurist aesthetics and theatre practice. It coincided with a

strategic move from arte-azione events for general audiences at theatre halls, called serate

futuriste (Futurist evenings), to performances for more sophisticated audiences at exhibition

galleries, called pomeriggi spettacolari (theatrical afternoons). Cangiullo conceived

Piedigrotta prior to its performance at the site of a permanent Futurist exposition as a verbo-

voco-visual poem consisting of a few synoptic free-word tables (tavole parolibere). He named

the poem after an ancient Neapolitan carnival that traditionally takes place in September of

each year. On these festive days, the entire city of Naples erupts with exuberance; throngs of

people sing and dance on the cobblestone streets and in the piazzas, accompanied by noisy

tarantella tunes played on primitive folk instruments. Futurists embraced the chance to

celebrate this upsurge of folly and absolute reversal of taboos and sanity; this carnivalesque

rebellion against the bourgeois order was ideal material for the Futurist subversion of passéist

literary and artistic rules. Giuseppe Sprovieri, a gallery owner, impresario, and participant of

the 1914 event, describes Piedigrotta festival as “a navy bugle drowning the voice of the
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individual in the roaring and shouting of the masses … a primordial expression of an innate

musicality brought back to life each year and refined into a ‘song.’”279

Piedigrotta earned fame as a popular number in the repertoire of Neapolitan café-

chantants. Its cabaret version, known for an explosive mixture of onomatopoetic noise, free

words, and strains of folk music, was no doubt proto-Futurist. Before entering Futurist circles,

Cangiullo, amply experienced as a musician, composer, and orchestra conductor of variety

shows in the provincial towns of Italy and southern France, certainly participated in different

cabaret performances of the Piedigrotta scenario. Armed with this experience, Cangiullo,

together with his Futurist friends, seized the opportunity to show off and mock the audience in

the Italian capital. There were seven performers in all: Marinetti and Cangiullo declaimed the

poem, accompanied by the chords of an out-of-tune piano, while a troupe of “very famous

dwarf artists, Miss Tofa (Sprovieri), Mr. Putipù (Balla), Mr. Triccabballacche (Radiante), Mr.

Scetavajasse (Depero), and Mr. Fischiatore (Sironi),” as the poster reads, played music,

danced, and chanted in the crowd. The dwarfs took their names from the instruments they

were playing. For the young Fortunato Depero, the event was an initiation into Futurism that

took place in front of grotesque, abstract backdrops, painted by his teacher, Giacomo Balla,

accentuated by the light of red lanterns.

Making theatrical performance out of sound poetry, the procession of dwarfs, in

grotesque costumes and hats, with hair made of tissue paper, roamed through the gallery

gesticulating provocatively, chanting, yelling, and playing noisy tunes à la tarantella on their

bizarre instruments. Sprovieri, whose role included blowing into a big conch shell (tofa),

remembers that they also intended to carry pizzas on their heads, the way local pizza-bakers

did, to add smell to the show’s array of sensory attractions. “The greatest surprise,” he wrote,
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“came with the explosions [and smoke] of tricchetracche [firecrackers] between the legs of

the audience.”280 Marinetti recounted that the audience responded with fireworks of their own:

shouts, cheers, cries, and a whole spectrum of unbridled vocalizations of joy in an

onomatopoetic fusion with the boisterous interjections of the Futurist troupe: “And the chaotic

orchestra of sounds, colours, forms, smells, tastes, touches, convulsions, laughter, joy in

explosion, boiling, flames, eruptions, grows, grows, grows, until the demoiselles Tofa, Putipù,

Triccabballacche and Scetavajasse come out from their infernal circle and give by means of

their sound the sensation of their triumphant, foolishly entertaining, intoxicating, blinding,

suffocating, noisy and deafening festival of Piedigrotta.”281

In that sense the performers/declaimers achieved the ideal compenetration with the

spectators, who became the equivalent of their orchestra; a declaimer became the orchestrator

of the cacophony of sounds and actions onstage, mixed with the booing from the stalls.

Additionally, in Piedigrotta, the orchestrators mixed with the orchestra. The performers

physically intruded into and disturbed the audience space, creating environmental theatre.

Before the performance started, Marinetti introduced the public to four obscene and

vulgar-sounding instruments, adding an ironic reading to the details of their legendary

provenance: “A tofa: a big shell from which the kids draw a tragi-comic monotonous chant …

a ferocious satire of mythology and all the sirens, tritons and sea shells inhabiting the passéist

gulf of Naples. … A scetavajasse: a genial parody of the violin as an expression of inner life

and sentimental anxiety. … A putipù: a violent irony with which a young and sane race correct

and fight all nostalgic venoms of the moonshine. … A triccabballacche: a satire of sacrosanct

Greco-Roman processions.”282
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Besides a depiction of the mythological roots of noise music, Marinetti gives every

instrument its colour; the tofa emits a deep blue sound, the putipù orange, the scetavajasse

pink and green, and the triccabballacche red. He thus establishes a sound-colour analogy that

Cangiullo accepted and emphasized in both his Roman performance and later print of the

synoptic score. This tendency toward synaesthesia became a crucial factor of Futurist and

avant-garde theatricality, whose literal application would reach its apex in Depero’s Colori, an

abstract theatrical sintesi that turned performance into a pure moto-rumorist sculpture.

Tofa, putipù, triccabballacche, and scetavajasse -- the primitive contraptions of

wood, clay, tin rattles, cans, and shells -- were actually noisemakers of a kind that might be

considered idiophone-style musical instruments. Idiophones, per definition, are self-sounded

musical bodies unable to produce refined and clear harmonic tunes; they create sound by the

vibration of their own bodies without the help of strings or membranes. Such instruments were

used in Piedigrotta precisely because of their non-harmonic sound and impure rhythms and

cadences, appropriate for both Futurist noise music and the rustic tarantellas of the Neapolitan

festival. The choice of instruments played at the Gallery Sprovieri demonstrates the Futurist

“love of essence’; their raw sonic texture was closer to enharmonic noise than musical tones.

Futurist tarantellas sounded like bruitist, onomatopoetic mimes of “real” tunes; their unrefined

sonority was close to Russolo’s noise music for intonarumori (noise intoners), which benefits

from the instrument’s timbre rather than its tonality.

When published in 1916 as a booklet, Piedigrotta displayed a masterful graphic

design in the manner of the legendary Zang Tumb Tumb. The poem, imagined first as a tavola

parolibera and developed in a series of energetic gallery performances, achieved an even

more sophisticated and vivid life in print. The booklet laid out the rich iconography of
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onomatopoetic effects by the revolutionized typography; its newly designed, different-sized

letters visually unleashed a celebration of noise in the carnival crowd at Naples.

The poem’s first page is transformed into fireworks of letters and words like

“PIEDIGgRrOoTtTtAesco,” in which all kinds of “TROOOMBE, trooombetoooni,

trooombeteeeellle and trooombettiiiinne” sound. On the second, from a huge cone of letters

rising in size: “CONOSSUOOOOOO ONO” springs a chain of deminutives for stars:

“stelline, stellette, stellucce” whose delicate sound ends with a harsh consonant cluster,

“KAISERKAZZ.” Underneath, “TARANTELLA,” a word reiterated in various forms

throughout the text, is shown as an extension of “TUTTA ITALIA.” Many lines which

appear later in the poem are written in the manner of the poesia pentagramata, another of

Cangiullo’s inventions, in which musical signs were applied to poetry: “(prestissimo)

ujsciujsciujsciujsci~~~~~~~ Ò scelto un nome eccentrico… éppà >>> (LOIE FULLER

VIOLA).”283

Loie Fuller’s name appears several times in the text, each time linked to a different

colour, from violet to orange, graphically emphasizing the fireworks of the Piedigrotta. A

famous American cabaret and ballet dancer, Fuller had set Paris ablaze as she danced draped

in huge, flying silk sails that under an array of lights of different colours produced incredible

forms. A pioneer of modern free dance, she was the one who introduced Isadora Duncan to

European audiences. Her appearance, enthusiastically received in Futurist circles, significantly

influenced Futurist dance and stage design, especially Prampolini’s ideas of luminous

scenography. In performing her abstract dance figures, Fuller shared affinities with the

Futurists, who desired to remove all intricacies of personal human psychology and emotion
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from the stage. It was as if the dancer disappeared in the virtual, as Futurists would call it,

“moto-rumorist complex” of her robe, propelled by her movement. Cangiullo’s emphatic

repetition of Fuller’s name linked to different colours in the final print of Piedigrotta suggests

that the locus of his performance moved from the body madness (fisicoffolia) of variety

theatre to the synergy of sound, movement, and colour of synthetic theatre. It signalled the

change of the Futurist performance and production technique, which earlier had maintained a

largely synaesthetic approach to theatre, into a synthetic one.

It is worth noting here that the manifesto La declamazione dinamica e sinottica

(Dynamic and Synoptic Declamation) was published as a preface not to Marinetti’s Zang

Tumb Tumb, as one would think, but to Cangiullo’s script. Evidently it was devised to

announce a performance style at the next stage of development, leading from parole in libertà

toward synthetic theatre. Ever aware of practicalities, Marinetti outlined: “Gesticulate in a

draughtsman like, topographical manner, synthetically creating in midair cubes, cones, spirals,

ellipses, etc! […] Make use of a certain number of elementary instruments such as hammers,

little wooden tables, automobile horns, drums, tambourines, saws, and electric bells, to

produce precisely and effortlessly the different simple or abstract onomatopoetic

harmonies!”284

The small group of Futurists enacting Cangiullo’s Piedigrotta who followed these

directions were forerunners of the more abstract style of Balla’s Machina tipografica and

Depero’s Colori. “Attempting to give the audience the sound and visual emotion of the

Neapolitan crowd that fills streets and alleys and saturates the environment with its obsessive,

rampant presence,” they physicalized a “synoptic table” of free words set in “a pyrotechnic

explosion of flashing images and bits of sounds, voices and onomatopoeia.”285

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The next few pieces performed at Futurist gallery afternoons in 1914 also relied on the

dramaturgy of sound derived from parole in libertà. Balla’s Discussione di due critici

sudannesi sul Futurismo (A Discussion between Two Sudanese Critics on Futurism), for

example, was performed by the author, Marinetti, and Cangiullo, who used their oral mimicry

skills to interpret a grotesque African-sounding dialect. Balla and friends’ speech not only

ridiculed the exotic, primitive version of the understanding of Futurist art but were a jab

intended for the contemporary Italian public and critics as well. The genuine sound structure

of Balla’s piece allowed it to be more than a practical joke without losing its humorous,

playful note. The complex vocalizations accentuated by his guitar produced not a mockery but

a surprising, cacophonous cantata:

Farcionisgnaco gurninfuturo

bordubalotaompimagnusa

sfacataca snimitirichita

plucu sbumu farufutusmaca

sgacgnacgnac chr chr chr

stechestechetechetetere

maumauzizitititititititi ... 286

Balla’s invention of a gibberish idiom of Sudanese critics and his performance falls in

line with attempts at rejuvenation of pre-logical, savage, primitive, and naïve art forms that

spread in avant-garde circles, such as Tzara’s and Ball’s recitations of Negro Chants and

Elefantenkarawane in the Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire. His disrespect was not aimed at
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“primitives” and it would be misleading to connect his use of quasi-African dialect with the

Eurocentric exploitation of exotic topics or white men’s fantasy of power that fuelled later

colonial invasions of North African countries by Fascist Italy. The eldest among the Futurist

painters and actually, for many in the group, their former teacher, Giacomo Balla was known

for his inventiveness, bold abstractionism, and encouragement of radically innovative ideas in

the younger members of the movement. Although in his own formative years he studied music

and became a proficient guitar player, Balla often preferred to use his instrument in the

manner of a sound intoner (intonarumore). Bruno Corra remembers: “From the guitar he

draws forth landscapes, burlesque scenes, protesting crowds, rains, hail storms, battles, etc.

Mixing dialogue with sound and with noises of the mouth, he has created such prodigious

fantasies as the Lezione di equitazione (Riding Lesson) and the Vignaiolo dopo il temporale

(Winegrower after the Storm).”287 Similarly sound-effective was Cangiullo’s Serata in onore

di Yvonne (An Evening in Honour of Yvonne), a musical/recitative piece in which the author

and Sprovieri declaimed nonsensical parole in libertà accompanied by an onomatopoetic

orchestra -- two professional singers producing vocalizations of orchestral instruments

conducted by Balla.

Cangiullo’s piece, I funerali di un filosofo passatista (Funeral of a Passéist

Philosopher), was performed during the Free International Futurist Exhibition in April 1914 at

the Sprovieri Gallery in Rome. With this Grand Guignol event, Futurists launched a mordant

attack on Benedetto Croce, the illustrious philosopher and aesthetician who was emblematic of

Italian classical idealism. An enormous clay model of the philosopher’s head was carried in

procession by poet Radiante [Revillo Cappari] and painter Depero before being placed on a

catafalque to the tune of Cangiullo’s “heartbreaking” funeral march, played on an out-of-tune

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piano. The solemn ceremony was chaired by Marinetti, who delivered a eulogy about the

putrid potatoes, onions, and feathers that crowned the philosopher’s head. He ended the

speech by reciting Luciano Folgore’s incomprehensible free-word poetry. Balla, who walked

in front of the stretcher, provided the appropriate background by murmuring mournfully,

hitting a huge cowbell with a painting brush, and repeatedly chanting the Russian word no:

nieeet-nieeeet-nieeeet-nieeet. The Futurists’ gallery protest-meeting against “the solemn, the

sacred, the serious, and the sublime in art” thus turned into a full-fledged variety performance.

Cangiullo’s and Balla’s proto-theatrical works combined onomatopoetic declamation

(rumorismo) and body madness (fisicoffolia) with other poetry techniques -- such as a parallel

use of aural and visual structures in place of syntactic language and an extreme condensation

of expressive means in place of dramatic development -- that would come to characterize short

Futurist pieces (sintesi). Their performances at theatrical afternoons (pomeriggi spettacolari),

besides being a hybrid of the serate and variety theatre, doubtless heralded the more abstract

artistic form of synthetic theatre.

L’ARTE DEI RUMORI: A NEW MUSICAL REALITY

Luigi Russolo’s subversion of tonal music by the art of noise was a consequence of a chain

reaction sparked by Marinetti’s liberation of words. Following Marinetti’s impassioned call to

replace the revered Winged Victory of Samothrace with the race car, Russolo issued a

similarly urgent appeal in his 1913 manifesto: “We must break out of this limited circle of

sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds. … We delight much more in

combining in our thoughts the noises of trams, of automobile engines, of carriages and
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brawling crowds, than in hearing again the Eroica or the Pastorale.”288 He believed that

conventional orchestral music left the sea of sound that surrounds us unexpressed; reduced to

tonality and harmonics, such music robbed sound of its ability to reflect life in its entirety and

to arouse true emotions. For him the time was ripe for “a new musical reality with a generous

distribution of resonant slaps in the face, discarding violins, pianos, double basses and

plaintive organs.”

Unhappy with the limited variety of timbres that a music orchestra offers (with its

groups of bowed instruments, metal winds, woodwinds, and percussion), Russolo proposed an

art of noises based on microtonal and improvisational sound structures, composed and

performed with the help of special instruments called noise intoners (intonarumori). He also

developed a new graphic notation technique that would free music composition from its

traditional harmonic rules. Although viewed in his time as an eccentric, Russolo has been

credited since with the introduction of several new aesthetic concepts still relevant for avant-

garde music and the art of sound: atonal and microtonal (enharmonic) structure, musique

concrète, sound environments, and the soundscape. His endeavours came as an answer to the

dilemma that Ferruccio Busoni expressed in his 1907 Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Music: “In

what direction shall the next step lead: to abstract sound, to unhampered technique, to

unlimited tonal material?” While Arnold Schönberg’s atonal works from 1909 offered one

possible answer, Russolo reached for an expansive array of noise and sound and silence which

would allow for a full reflection of the din of the modern world: “The great drive of the

musical avant-garde in the twentieth century has been towards the liberation and

autonomization of noise from the formalizations of musical sound. Perhaps the great initiator

of this tradition, which runs through the work of Edgard Varèse, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre
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Boulez and John Cage, was the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo, who called, in his manifesto of

March 1913, for an art of noises which would liberate the musical possibilities of noise in

general, especially the diverse and unsynthesizable complexity of sound in the city.”289

The exploration of the “unsynthesizable complexity of sound” as artistic material

also changed the contemporary approach to the relationship between music and the

performing arts. Erik Salzman and Thomas Desi, in their 2008 book The New Music

Theater: Seeing the Voice, Hearing the Body, propose an alternative to the customary

critical treatment of opera and musical comedy. For them, the most recent music theatre

“came to designate a kind of instrumental or instrumental/vocal avant-garde performance

associated with composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Mauricio Kagel. … [It] is music

driven (i.e., decisively linked to musical timing and organization) where, at the very least,

music, language, vocalization, and physical movement exist, interact, or stand side by side,

in some kind of equality.”290 It is no longer a music drama that by means of music enhances

a dramaturgy of plot and character; it is a music theatre that encompasses all elements of

stage and performance. Their reasoning is similar to Hans-Thies Lehmann’s proposition for

a postdramatic theatre that operates with a stage/scene dynamic (in the case of music theatre

defined primarily by sound) as a substitute for dramatic (or operatic) development. The

postdramatic and the new music theatre intentionally blur the distinction between

dramaticity (a way of setting up a conflict) and theatricality (a manner of using the stage),

following the trend that Patrice Pavis has recognized as a legacy of the avant-garde.

The new music theatre has been created in the tradition of Russolo, Varèse, and

Cage, a tradition that considers any existing sound as a musical or stage performance

element and cherishes the achievements of concrete music and sound poetry based on the
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historical avant-garde’s de-semiotization of words. To illustrate this trend, Salzman and Desi

offer the examples of an arbitrary word play in Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s Einstein

on the Beach and the oral rendition of language as pure sound in Kurt Schwitters’s

Ursonate. The authors find a vast number of instances of a new approach to music theatre in

the works of Christoph Marthaler, Heiner Goebbels, Jan Fabre, Robert Wilson, and other

proponents of a postdramatic mise en scène, based on musicalization and the aural, not

necessarily only musical, structure of theatre. Clearly, Salzman and Desi’s ideas converge

with the current conceptualization of aurality in the postdramatic theatre. But they omit a

more serious discussion of Russolo’s revolutionary creation of noise-music, without which

the role of music in contemporary theatre cannot be fully assessed.

Luigi Russolo’s 1913 manifesto L’Arte dei rumori (The Art of Noises) proposed

the liberation of artistic sound from the realm of harmonic music as a natural continuation of

Marinetti’s phonic liberation of words from the fetters of syntax in poetry. A pioneering

attempt at establishing an art of sound, the manifesto called for the inclusion of all noises of

the environment -- mechanical, electrical, industrial, and natural -- in the new Futurist

music. To be included were everything from vocal onomatopoeia and the deliberate

production of vocal noise, so-called rumorismo or bruitism, to the creation of noise-music,

always favouring the impure, blurred but highly expressive sound that reflects the dynamism

of modern life. Russolo argues: “Life in antiquity was mere silence. Only with the discovery

of the machine in the 19th Century was noise born. Today noise lays sovereign claim to the

sensibilities of mankind. … Music today strives towards an amalgamation of the most

dissonant, strange and strident sounds. We are approaching a music of noises. … Musical

sound, alien to our life, always musical and a thing unto itself … has become to our ears
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what a familiar face is to our eyes. Noise, however, reaching us in a confused and irregular

way from the irregular confusion of our life … keeps innumerable surprises in reserve. We

are therefore certain that by selecting, coordinating, and dominating all noises we can enrich

men with a new and unsuspected sensual pleasure.”291

Promoting noise as quintessential to artistic expression, Russolo followed Marinetti’s

anti-sentimentalist, brutal lyricism of the most cacophonous onomatopoeias in the poetry of

parole in libertà, which abandoned a passéist longing for beauty in literature, music, and

drama. His decision to use raw sound in place of tonal music represented the realization of the

pronouncement from the “Technical Manifesto of Literature” (Manifesto tecnico della

letteratura) that asked an artist “to capture the breath, the sensibility, and the instinct of

metals, stones, wood, and so on, through the medium of free objects and whimsical motors …

to substitute for human psychology, now exhausted, the lyric obsession with matter.”292 In

L’Arte dei rumori, Russolo therefore liberally quotes Marinetti’s theories and praises the

onomatopoetic declamation of Zang Tumb Tumb, acknowledging that his experiments with

noise were nothing more than “the logical consequence of your [Marinetti’s, Boccioni’s, and

Balla’s] marvellous innovations.”293 Michael Kirby rightly concludes: “certainly there is

literalness about Russolo’s desire to incorporate everyday sounds into music. This literal

approach stems most directly from Marinetti’s parole in libertà.”294

Writing specifically about onomatopoetic sound poetry, Russolo describes

consonants as bearers of noise and vowels as bearers of sound/music. He asserts that pre-

Futurist poets did not know how to use the inexhaustible power of consonant noise that could

provide a human resonance to their message: “No noise exists in nature or life (however

bizarre and strange in timbre) that cannot adequately, or even exactly, be imitated through the
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consonants … This element of language, which had previously remained the slave of vowels

-- the consonant representing noise -- is finally adopted for its own sake; and like music, it

serves to multiply the elements of expression and emotion.”295

On the same premise Russian zaum poets roughed up their poems by amassing noisy

consonant clusters as a counterweight to the musicality of Symbolist verses based on the

sound of vowels. Theirs was another kind of music; emerging from a phonetic interplay of

consonants and vowels, it favoured noisy dissonance over tonal consonance. In the specific

verbal texture of Kruchenykh’s and Khlebnikov’s poems, for example, a naked consonant

becomes the spine for the sound that gets its flesh from the resonating vowel; the whole

endeavour falls more on the side of acoustic art than literature.

When praising the Futurist poets’ preference for consonants, carriers of noise for its

own sake, Russolo was actually promoting his own program for the incorporation of noises in

the art of music. He went even further, stating that “the art of noise must not limit itself to

imitative reproduction. … A tendency toward most complicated dissonances … can be

satisfied only with the addition and substitution of noises for sound.”296 Unlike music, he

affirmed, noise does not illustrate human sentiment or serve as an accidental embellishment of

an action, thought, or emotion in literature or drama, but it “must become a prime element to

mould into the work of art. That is, it has to lose its accidental character in order to become an

element sufficiently abstract to achieve the necessary transformation of any prime element

into an abstract element of art.” 297 In this way, by recognizing the materiality of noise and

making it an abstract element of art, Russolo preconceives a dramaturgy of sound that shaped

Futurist stage performance. In his book on literary Futurism John J. White suggests: “The

interaction between the musicians’ art of noises, on the one hand, … and the large-scale
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exploration of the word’s materiality by the futurist poets, on the other, is certainly not a

matter of a one-way influence but a complex of reciprocal cross-fertilizations. Marinetti’s

importance for Russolo is matched by Russolo’s subsequent influence on Depero and sintesi

playwrights and creators of futurist ballet.”298 Indeed, the Futurist abstract sintesi, as we shall

see later in the book, contained more onomatopoeias or noise than words or music and thus

provided concrete material for the subsequent formation of the moto-rumoristic complex

employed on the stage.

Russolo wrote L’Arte dei rumori in the form of an epistle to a composer, maestro

Francesco Balilla Pratella, the Futurist authority in the field of music, who had already been

advocating a move away from the principles of traditional composition that counts on

dissonance, consonance, and their resolution. In his 1911 “Technical Manifesto of Futurist

Music,” Pratella demanded traditional composition to be replaced by the creation of

enharmonic music based on micro-intervals in pitch and continuous sequential changes in

rhythm. Only that, claimed Pratella, would enable music to adequately express the sounds of

nature and the labour of men and machines participating in the complex din of the modern

industrial city. The radical switch to noise as primary musical material, however, must be

credited to Russolo. It was Russolo who authored first compositions for noise intoners

believing that “sounds and noises produced in nature change pitch by enharmonic graduations

and never by leaps in pitch. For example, the howling of the wind produces complete scales in

rising and falling. These scales are neither diatonic nor chromatic, they are enchromatic.”299

The standard orchestral instruments used to express a windy or rainy afternoon were unable to

produce such sound thought Russolo coming close to Kandinsky’s criticism of Richard

Wagner’s musical motifs for being incapable of expressing concrete noise: in Das Rheingold
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“the hissing of red-hot iron in water, the sound of the smith’s hammer, etc., were still

represented musically.”300

The art of noises came to life when Russolo, together with Ugo Piatti, constructed a

number of special instruments called intonarumori -- noise intoners. 2 June 1913, at a serata

in Teatro Strochi in Modena, Russolo and friends presented a few of them, naming them after

the sound they produced: “a burster (scoppiatore) [making] an automobile engine sound with

changeable pitch over ten whole tones, a crackler (crepitatore) a sparkling sound, a hummer

(ronzatore) an electric motor sound, and a rubber (stropicciatore) a metallic scraping

sound.”301 Marinetti clearly supported Russolo’s ambitious instrumental orchestrations of

noise, which, as he wrote, “are not simple impressionistic reproductions of the life that

surrounds us but moving hypotheses of noise music. By a knowledgeable variation of the

whole, the noises lose their episodic, accidental, and imitative character to achieve the abstract

elements of art.”302 He also kept encouraging Pratella to apply principles of the Futurist

revolution to his theory of music and asked the maestro to enrich the orchestration of his opera

Aviatore Dro (1914) by incorporating a few intonarumori within the symphonic ensemble.303

Pratella acknowledged that the sounds produced by Russolo’s instruments depart from an

objective reality they seemingly imitate and that they, as “an expressive abstract element of

state of mind,” become essentially musical. In spite of his fairly strong support for

intonarumori, Pratella used them only in two of his compositions. At the time, composers

Maurice Ravel, Sergei Prokofiev, Igor Stravinsky, and Ballets Russes impresario Serge

Diaghilev showed a vivid interest in Russolo’s noise intoners but never actually used them.

All of the instruments are completety destroyed in a bombardment at the end of the Second

World War, but their music survived in bits and pieces composed by Futurists Franco
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Casavola, Nuccio Fiorda, Aldo Giuntini, Luigi Grandi, and Silvio Mix. However, interest in

noise music never died, so that today we have several accurate reconstructions of

intonarumori built by contemporary experimental composers, enthusiasts of noise music.

Physically, an intonarumore looked like a sound-box with a large funnel that

amplified the sound mechanically produced in the instrument when the performer cranked it.

The cranked wheel rubbed a string attached to a single diaphragm, stretched on a cylindrical

resonator that sent sound out through the funnel. It created a wide array of sounds which could

be tuned and rhythmically regulated by means of mechanical manipulation. The pitch was

regulated by a lever on top of the box that continually increased or reduced the tension and

length of a vibrating string, allowing for an infinite number of musical intervals divided into

semitones, quartertones, and smaller fractions of the enharmonic scale. Different rhythms and

sound colours (timbres) were obtained by the physical or chemical preparation of parts of the

instrument. The wheel that rubbed the string, as in a traditional hurdy-gurdy, was sometimes

notched with small teeth, while the diaphragm was impregnated with special chemicals.

In his manifesto Russolo defined six families of noises, all of which were to be

produced by noise intoners. They included (1) rombi (rumbles) -- roaring, thundering, and

explosions; (2) fischi (whistles) -- the sounds of whistling, hissing, and puffing; (3) bisbigli

(whispers) -- murmurs, mumbling, and gurgling; (4) stridori (screeches) -- creaking,

squealing, rustling, humming, crackling, and rubbing sounds; and (5) noises obtained by

percussion on metal, wood, skin, stone, pottery, and so on. The list is rounded out by (6)

noises produced by animals and men -- animate sounds like screams, shrieks, wails, death

rattles, and sobs. Russolo boasted that he was able to mechanically produce diverse rhythms

and pitches of thirty thousand different noises “not simply by imitation but by combining
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[them] according to our fancy.”304 Cangiullo, who attended his demonstration organized in

Marinetti’s house for Diaghilev, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev, remembered that a Crepitatore

“crackles with a thousand sparks, like a fiery torrent,” while a Frusciatore “rustles like gowns

of winter silk, like new leaves in April, like the sea rent by summer.”305 In addition, one should

acknowledge that the mechanical contraptions of intonarumori, although they appeared more

than ten years before musicians started to use electrical amplifiers and loudspeakers, made

entirely original abstract sound in a way that qualifies them to be considered the precursors of

today’s electronic synthesizers and samplers.

Luigi Russolo’s first composition for intonarumori, Risveglio di una città

(Awakening of a City), had been announced on the poster for a concert of noise intoners at a

serata at Teatro dal Verme in Milan, 21 April 1914, together with Colazione sulla terrazza del

Kursaal Diana (Breakfast on the Terrace of the Spa Diana) and Convegno di automobili e di

aeroplani (A Meeting of Automobiles and Airplanes). The event ended, in the best tradition of

Futurist serate, with a physical brawl between the artists and the public, including extremely

irritated professors of the Royal Conservatory; eleven wounded spectators were taken away by

emergency vehicles of the Guardia Medica. This did not discourage Russolo from

subsequently presenting his noise orchestra at two concerts in Genoa and starting a European

tour with a dozen performances at the London Coliseum in June 1914, which impressed

Prokofiev and Stravinsky among others. Unfortunately, the outbreak of the First World War

interrupted this exhibition tour, which was supposed to visit Liverpool, Dublin, Glasgow,

Edinburgh, Vienna, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Berlin, and Paris.

Risveglio di una città gave the impression of a musique concrète piece, although it

was not recorded but composed and performed live by the noise intoners. A conglomeration of
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noises thus produced brought to life the soundscape of an industrial city. Risveglio was a

concretization of Russolo’s dream of a music that would include “the muttering of motors that

breathe and pulse with an undeniable animalism, the throbbing of valves, the bustle of pistons,

the shrieks of power saws, the starting of a streetcar on the tracks, the cracking of whips, the

flapping of awnings and flags.”306 Given that most of the vocabulary Russolo uses here to

describe modern noises comes from an anthropomorphic or zoomorphic origin, it is not too

much of a stretch to say that he equates the cacophony of an industrialized city with the

convulsive breathing of a mythical Moloch-like monster that devours people. This sound-

image calls to mind a scene of the German expressionist film Metropolis by Fritz Lang in

which columns of anonymous workers descend into the bowels of such an industrial,

mechanical monster -- the underground factory.

Russolo’s concrete sound composition can also be seen as a prototype of the acoustic

film, a form of radio drama, documentary, or feature program that was a hallmark of German

radio art in the Weimar period. There is a striking similarity between the montage of

environmental sounds in the acoustic film and the concert performance of Awakening of a City

as described by a London Pall Mall Gazette correspondent: “At first a quiet even murmur was

heard. The great city was asleep. Now and again some giant hidden in one of those queer

boxes snored pretentiously; and a new born child cried, … a far-away noise grew into a

mighty roar …[of] the huge printing machines, … hundreds of vans and motor lorries … the

shrill whistling of the locomotives. … A multitude of doors was next heard to open and shut

with a bang, and a procession of receding footsteps intimated that the great army of

breadwinners was going to work. Finally, all the noises of the street and the factory merged
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into a gigantic roar, and the music ceased. … I awoke as though from a dream and

applauded.307

In 1929 Walter Ruttmann, a well-known Expressionist filmmaker, made a similar

collage of everyday sounds for radio broadcast, called Weekend.308 The basis of Ruttmann’s

sound piece was his documentary film Berlin -- Symphony of a Great City (1927), a seminal

work in the aesthetics of montage. In the film, recorded details of the daily cycle of

metropolitan life were put together by the means of montage in a piece that captured

everything from the first, early-morning stirrings of the awakening Berlin to the mounting

industrial, mechanized noises and rhythms of the city and its inhabitants. The film represented

an audio-visual feast of jump cuts, dissolves, and cross fades. The result of this non-narrative

collage of juxtaposed moving images was remarkably similar to Russolo’s sound composition

Awakening of a City. It is important to note here that Ruttmann, unlike the radio artists who

followed him, worked with film stock rather than the magnetic tape used a few years down the

road. As if aware of the aural potential of his material, he saved the optical filmstrip and

returned to it later to create Weekend, a purely acoustic work for radio. Here Ruttmann

employed the same montage principles he had used in the film, introducing a technique that

became common among future radio dramatists, directors, and producers of so-called

“acoustic films.” Thus he contributed directly to German radio-acoustic art and pioneered a

method of parallel acoustic and visual montage still employed in today’s audio-visual art.

Russolo’s two pages of enharmonic notation for Risveglio di una città, published

alongside his manifesto on the art of noises, could be described as a blueprint for a method of

montage and juxtaposition similar to Ruttmann’s, this time in the field of noise-music. Instead

of musical notes the notation shows, on staves of music scoring paper, continuous parallel,
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converging, or diverging lines placed to indicate microtonal changes of pitch. Russolo’s

notation is written on six-staff pages, allowing him to score performances of intonarumori

with different timbres simultaneously. Changes in intensity are noted by the addition of

“forte” and “fortissimo” directions, while the abrupt endings of continuous lines allowed for

montage cuts of the sound material. In terms of Varèse and Cage, all these formal features of

the score point to Russolo’s being halfway between the compositional (albeit microtonal) and

the organizational treatment of sound.

THE ART OF NOISES IN TWENTIETH CENTURY MUSIC AND PERFORMANCE ART

Russolo’s experiments with intonarumori took place in the early days of “Art in the Age of

Mechanical Reproduction,” as the title of Walter Benjamin’s famed essay reads. With the help

of the fast-developing technologies of the microphone and the motion-picture camera, artists

were able to capture the dynamics of an increasingly fragmented world. They would discover

the profane, unattended noises, as Cage later put it, or the ready-made images and objects with

which they could construct radio or film pieces through the art of montage. Still, our

contemporary idiom of audio-visual montage also owes much to the poetics of assembling the

most unlikely word-sound analogies explored in parole in libertà and developed in the art of

noises.

The principles of montage applied by Russolo and Ruttmann have remained vital in

contemporary film art. They reappeared in Koyaanisqatsi, a 1982 film produced by Francis

Ford Coppola and directed by Godfrey Reggio, with music by Philip Glass and
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cinematography by Ron Fricke.309 Life out of Balance (a loose translation of the Hopi-

language title) depicts the apocalyptic collision of two vastly different worlds: one urban and

technological and the other natural and environmental. Their dramatic clash is expressed by a

parallel montage of sound and moving images that meet, twist together, and separate in a

continual flux of aural and visual forms. Six years in the making -- the first three spent on

shooting documentary material and the next three on the musical score and the fusion of sound

and image -- the film achieved cult-like status. It has neither dialogue nor narrative but relies

solely on the rhythmic pulsation of its aural and visual material. The repetition of the word

koyaanisqatsi, sung in basso profundo against the visual background of a slow pan over the

mystical, deep shadows of the Grand Canyon, serves as an oral introduction to the film, while

the choral chant of a Hopi prophecy, “If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite

disaster,” transports the audience onto today’s all too familiar ground.

Filmmaker Reggio describes Koyaanisqatsi as “an animated object, an object in

moving time, the meaning of which is up to the viewer.”310 Its pictures literally move in an

uneven tempo, with slow-downs, speed-ups, time lapses, and cuts emphasizing their structural,

rhythmic, and musical material value rather than their narrative content. Here pictures become

musical elements of a poem made by an art of noise composition. The same could be said of

the structure of Philip Glass’s soundtrack, fashioned in the composer’s recognizable repetitive

and augmentative style and, at places, derived from the musicalization of concrete noise. It is

worth noting that Glass’s contributions to Robert Wilson’s theatre pieces, known for switching

aural and visual channels of the spectator’s perception, can also be seen as the installation of

animated sound objects inserted into the time and space of stage performance. Reggio and

Wilson, artists at the forefront of the liberation of sound and image from narrative, figurative,
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and connotative strings, have clearly added to the process that was initiated by the historical

avant-garde dramaturgy of sound.

A series of avant-garde endeavours in the field of mechanical sound and machine

music have succeeded Russolo’s vision of the art of noises, his construction of intonarumori,

and his concerts of noise. One early example, Charles Bérard’s Symphonie des forces

mécaniques (1908), had already been composed when Russolo first addressed the

musicalization of noise. In his composition Bérard used engine sounds, whistles, sirens, and

electrical rings together with traditional instruments. He later conceived a system of recorded

noises and participated in the orchestration of sound for the Parisian performance of

L’Angoisse des machines by Futurist Ruggero Vasari.

The machine music and noise vocalizations that were part of Italian synthetic theatre

took on a different form in the Futurist and leftist avant-garde works of Russia. During the

1920s Nikolai Foregger explored an original system of physical movement at his Moscow

Theatre Workshop (Mastfor). His 1923 Machine Dances, “a plastic exercise in

constructivism” as he called it, was a human display of the internal workings of an engine:

pistons, flywheels, pumps, and belts. The performers’ rhythmical movements were

coordinated with an off-stage noise orchestra that played on metal sheets, rods, and scraps,

broken bottles, whistles, cans, etc., producing rattles, jangles, shrieks, and other mechanical

sounds. A critic of the time, amazed by the performance of the group, spared no words of

praise for “the divine service of these ‘machine-worshipers’ … a noise orchestra of a crowd of

motors … a complicated signalling apparatus … reckless gymnastics were zealously

performed with chopped movements mechanized as far as possible, on all kinds of gymnastic

apparatus, under, in, on, between, before, and beside various machine structures.”311
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The Futurist love of machine sound, constructivism, and modern dance met in Le

Pas d’acier (The Steel Step), a ballet by Sergei Prokofiev, based on his and Soviet designer

Georgi Yakoulov’s libretto, which echoed Foregger’s exercises. Initially devised for the

Meyerhold Theatre in Moscow in 1925, the ballet was commissioned by Diaghilev after he

heard Prokofiev’s dissonant Second Symphony, described by the composer as “a symphony of

iron and steel.” The Steel Step premiered in 1927 at the Parisian Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt,

performed by the Ballets Russes. Erik Levi finds “the Futurist aspects of this work striking […

including] hammers, revolving transmissions, flywheels, flashing electric signals and

choreography in which the dancers portrayed the communal joy of industrial labour by

copying the movement of machinery against the backdrop of scenery modeled on

machines.”312 The festivity of machines evidenced in this first performance of The Steel Step

has survived through the 2005 “recreation of a lost ballet” directed by musicologist Simon

Morrison at Princeton University, which also featured a reconstruction of the original set.

Another instance of the use of concrete noise sources in Russian avant-garde theatre

is found in monumental proletarian music performance, epitomized by Arseny Avraamov’s

Symphony of Sirens (Symfonia gudkov, 1922), a counterpart to Nikolai Evreinov’s 1920 The

Storming of the Winter Palace. The spectacular celebration of the fifth anniversary of the

revolution took place in the port of Baku and ultimately across the whole city. A dramatic

soundscape for this massive event was provided by the foghorns of the entire Caspian flotilla,

two batteries of artillery guns, machine gun salvos of two full infantry regiments, the flights of

seaplanes, and the sirens of all the factories in the town.

A couple of years later, George Antheil, an American in Paris, already notorious for

his Airplane Sonata and Mechanisms (1921), composed Ballet mécanique as a soundtrack for
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the Dadaist film of the same name, released on 24 September 1924, directed by painter

Fernand Léger and experimental filmmaker Dudley Murphy with cinematography by Man

Ray. The score combined the sounds of the industrial age, with atonal and jazz music

syncopated in a brutal and almost unplayable rhythm. Regrettably, the score could not be used

in the original film because of its complicated orchestration that called for sixteen player

pianos (instruments that execute pre-programmed music operated by a mechanism with

punched-paper roles), two grand pianos, four bass drums, three xylophones, a tam-tam, seven

electric bells, a siren, and three different-sized airplane propellers (high wood, low wood, and

metal). Presented by Frederick Kiesler as a masterpiece, Ballet mécanique premiered without

sound at the 1924 International Exposition for New Theater Technique in Vienna. The music,

in a simplified version that was still thirty minutes in length instead of the seventeen needed

for the film, had to be performed separately. Finally, in 2000, the integrated version of the film

was reconstructed with the help of electronic and digital sound equipment. Antheil, called by

the French un futurist terrible, treated his instruments literally as intonarumori. For instance,

he wanted the piano to be used exclusively as a percussion instrument that sounds

mechanically and captures “the true significance and atmosphere of these giant engines and

things that move about us.”313 His own laconic description of Ballet mécanique reads: “All

percussive. Like machines. All efficiency. No LOVE. Written without sympathy. Written cold

as an army operates. Revolutionary as nothing has been revolutionary.”314

The anti-melodramatic use of noise in avant-garde theatre, celebrated in Futurist and

Dadaist circles, remained sporadic in Surrealism, as the production history of Parade makes

clear. This ballet, with a libretto by Jean Cocteau, music by Erik Satie, and set and costumes

by Pablo Picasso, premiered on 18 May 1917, at the Théàtre du Chatelet, performed by

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Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Parade is distinguished by the fact that in its program notes

Guillaume Apollinaire coined and used for the first time the term surréalisme in an effort to

fully describe the piece’s multimedia nature, which integrated music, ballet, painting,

costuming, and literature. The work’s creators sought to apply a range of innovative, avant-

garde methods in the piece: Cubism’s broken perspective and Picasso’s adoration of circus

characters in the visuals, Dadaist irreverence and Futurist rumorismo in the performance, and

the popular appeal of ragtime and vaudeville in the musical score. Christopher Schiff

describes the aural side of Parade as “a compromise of French theatrical music and Futurist

noise.”315 It seems that the creators from the beginning wavered between two separate scores --

one of music (Satie) and the other of noise (Cocteau). The two approaches clashed, and

compromises plagued the work. In the wake of his and Diaghilev’s visit to Rome and

acquaintance with the Futurists, Cocteau, possibly for the sake of provocation, included in his

script a large number of mechanical noises instead of words. Satie was none too happy to

compose music that would, he thought, serve as a background for a few incidental noises. The

score thus ended as a mediocre achievement, the biggest innovation being its orchestration,

enriched with an assortment of noisemakers such as milk bottles, typewriters, Morse tickers,

airplane propellers, and a foghorn. Unfortunately, not all of these survived rehearsals to appear

on the opening night.

A month after Parade, another surrealist attempt at bruitism, Apollinaire’s Les

Mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias), premiered at the Théàtre Maubelle, directed

by Pierre Albert-Birot. Apollinaire’s inclination toward noise was known from both his verbo-

voco-visual poetry and his 1914 manifesto L’antitradizione futurista, published in Lacerba. In

the play he uses noise mainly through the device of “People of Zanzibar,” a character who also
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acts as the chorus and the commentator and unabashedly counterpoints most of his and other

characters’ actions with the sounds of noisemakers: a revolver, a bass drum, a thunder sheet, a

musette, and sleigh bells -- whatever is handy -- even breaking dishes. Other characters

produce vocal sound effects such as the onomatopoeia of a train ride, sneezes, and cackles.

Clearly, the intention of this play with noise was not illustrative but, as in Dadaist pieces,

ironic and absurd.

Tristan Tzara’s subversive performances at the 1920s Dada soirées in Paris illustrate

another way of using noise. They aimed “to frustrate the passive audition of expected sounds

by the performance of unexpected and usually aggressive sounds. … In Vaseline Symphonic, a

work whose title is more scandalous than its content, twenty people sang ascending scales first

on the syllable cra followed by ascending scales one third higher on the syllable cri… etc. ad

infinitum.”316 The audience responded with chanting in unison, shouts, and whistles, which

only added to the intended cacophonous pandemonium in the theatre. The similarity of these

performance events to the Futurist serate is indisputable. Marinetti, of course, resented the

growing success of Dada, while Dadaists demonstrated their hostility at Russolo’s

intonarumori concerts in Paris, interrupting them: “Kill it! Kill it! … Fiii-Fiii … Frrr-Frrr …”

But, although Dadaists boasted that they, not the Futurists, were now the leaders of the avant-

garde, Hans Richter had to admit: “We had swallowed Futurism -- bones, feathers and all. It is

true that in the process of digestion all sorts of bones and feathers had been regurgitated.”317

Tzara thus wrote some lines of his plays as “noise-musical” verses. His dialogue

was discontinuous; the lines were no longer meaningful exchanges of logical sentences but

rather exchanges of vocal gestures carrying different energies and attitudes shaped in sound.

Characters in The First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine, Fire Extinguisher (1916; a
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second play of the same name was published in 1920), bore allegorical names like Mr.

Blueblue, Mr. Cricri, The Pregnant Woman, Mr. Absorption, and Mrs. Interruption. They

delivered lines made of mixed phonetic material: combinations of logical or pathetic

sentences, abstract vocalizations, onomatopoeias, lyrical verses, manifesto proclamations, and

so on, structured in a theatrical form that, as Tzara envisions, “stands as a metaphor for the

circus.” Like Marinetti in the “Variety Theatre” manifesto, he called for a radical renewal:

“The theatre. Since it forever remains attached to a romantic imitation of life, to an illogical

fiction, let us give it all the natural vigour that it first had: be it amusement or poetry.”318 A

sample of such renewal, utilizing the disruption of traditional dramatic dialogue with the vocal

noise of sound poetry, follows:

Mr. CRICRI: there is no humanity there are the lamplighters and

the dogs dzin aha dzin aha bobobo tyao …

Mr. BLEUBLEU: (incontestably) toubo matapo the viceroys of the nights …

THE PREGNANT WOMAN: a big bird alive tyao ty a a ty a o ty a o

Mr. CRICRI, Mr. BLEUBLEU, PIPI, Mr. ANTIPYRINE:

zdranga zdranga zdranga zdranga

di di di di di di di di di

zoumbai zoumbai zoumbai zoumbaidzi

dzi dzi dzi dzi dzi dzi dzi dzi dzi dzi dzi319

Russolo’s experiments with noise provided the inspirational background for Pierre

Schaeffer’s musique concrète as well. Schaeffer wrote, and his followers continue to write,
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music that relies on recorded sounds, natural environmental sounds, and other noises, that is,

objets musicaux, to structure their compositions. Although the era of electronic and digital

recording, amplification, treatment, and broadcast of sound has brought different issues into

the discourse of musical composition, the basic principles of the art of noise remain viable.

They influenced essential works of twentieth-century musicians such as John Cage, Arthur

Honegger, Krzysztof Penderecki, and György Ligeti. French-American composer Edgard

Varèse, for example, a major figure in early electronic music, has described his music as

“organized sound” based on timbre and rhythm, elements that are more related to noise than to

music and thus more to the art of noise than to the art of harmony. Torben Sanglid asserts:

“Varèse tried to emancipate noise from its mimetic function; abstracting it as purely aesthetic

… He used sirens because of their glissando-possibilities rather than alluding to an

emergency. By shifting the focus from the notes to the sound, by seeing music as layered,

organized sound rather than melodic-harmonic development and by experimenting with

electronic instruments.”320

According to Levi, it is Varèse’s work that is closest to the spirit of Futurism. Varèse

knew Marinetti and Russolo and admired their ideas about the capability of noise to change

listeners’ auditory powers. At one of his 1929 concerts in Paris, he was first to introduce the

russolophone, a newly invented keyboard-operated noise intoner. His piece for percussion

ensemble, Ionisation (1931), outraged the audience by breaking conventional rules of musical

structure; “its scoring, which features writing for mechanical sirens arranged in high and low

pitches, is especially pertinent in that respect, since the division of sonorities appears to follow

the procedure adopted by Russolo in Risveglio di una città.”321 The most interesting argument

for Varèse’s Futurist spirit, Levi attests, lies in musicologist Jonathan Bernard’s suggestion
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that the composer may have gleaned more from the manifestos written by Futurist painters and

sculptors than from those by musicians: “Bernard draws convincing analogies between

Futurist painting and the violent anti-episodic, anti-sentimental, spatial aspects of Varèse’s

work.”322 Here one should recall Russolo’s theoretical dictum: “I am not a musician but a

Futurist painter using a much loved art to project my determination to renew everything.”

Concomitantly, one might also ask whether it is only incidental that Russolo’s first

composition bears a title resembling the name of Boccioni’s famous painting La città che sale

(The City Rises).

Apparently, the most significant Futurist contribution to contemporary music was the

noise-incurred disturbance of its harmonic structure. But the use of noise suggested by

Russolo has not been restricted to orchestral music. It has been freely adopted by innovators of

the electronic media, whose new sonic realities literally include previously undetected

murmurs of the human body and unattended sounds of the environment. Foreseeing these

developments in 1937, John Cage began his Credo -- The Future of Music with these Russolo-

like lines: “Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise ... Whether the sound of a truck at

50mph, rain, or static between radio stations, we find noise fascinating ... [I intend] to capture

and control these sounds, to use them, not as sound effects, but as musical instruments.”323

LA RADIA: A MANIFESTO OF A PURE ACOUSTIC ART

LA RADIA (1933), a manifesto of Futurist radiophonic theatre by Marinetti and Pino Masnata,

was a step toward the synthesis of media and materials in a new technological environment.

Marinetti and Masnata professed that radio, as a novel and superior medium, would transcend
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the naturalism, sentimentalism, and narration of theatre, cinema, and the book. It would

abandon conventional staging for a more abstract artistic form that uses “the reception,

amplification and transformation of vibrations released by living or dead beings, dramas of

states of mind, full of sound effects but without words.”324 In addition, the manifesto exhibited,

as might be expected, a disruptive tendency: “LA RADIA abolishes / the space and stage

necessary to theatre / time / union of action / dramatic character / the audience as self-

appointed judging mass systematically hostile and servile always against the new, always

retrograde.”325 Instead, this new art brings about the “compressed dramas comprising an

infinite number of simultaneous actions.”326 LA RADIA looked like the synthetic theatre

manifesto squared.

At the same time LA RADIA represented a continuation of Russolo’s art of noises in

the electronic medium of recording, montage, and the transmission of sound, that is, radio.

Marinetti and Masnata envisioned a realm of radio art in which “parole in libertà, daughters

of the aesthetics of the machine, contain a whole orchestra of sounds and sound harmonies

(realistic and abstract) which, single-handedly, can assist the colourful and pliable word in its

flash representation of that what cannot be seen.”327 Encouraged by technological

advancements, Marinetti and Masnata supercharged their Futurism. Not only did they suggest

the inclusion of environmental noise as artistic material, but they predicted the recording of a

wider spectrum of sounds, even those that cannot be heard by the human ear. These sounds

were to be registered by ultra-sensitive equipment able to catch an infinite variety of noises,

vibrations of human, animal, vegetal, and inanimate bodies, extensions of voice and breath,

and interference between radio stations, celestial bodies, or other radio emitters. Thus the

microphone, a new tool for capturing sound, enabling its amplification and radio broadcast,
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would become a powerful means of immense wireless communication based on the Futurist

“wireless imagination,” which until then had relied solely on intuition.

Microphone recording and the art of radio married the art of noises with concrete

sound poetry and musique concrète. Radio provided laboratories for acoustic research for

many notable composers of the twentieth century. At Radio Television Française in Paris,

Pierre Schaeffer directed the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète (Research Group on

Concrete Music), which started recording “concrete” noises and experimenting with sounds

abstracted from them as the elements of their musical compositions. Thus, as Marinetti and

Masnata proposed in LA RADIA, the microphone entered into undiscovered fields of sonority.

By the recording and the manipulation of an infinite variety of sounds, including those that

had previously been inaccessible to the human ear, Schaeffer strove to achieve musique

acousmatique -- an aural experience that got its name from a Pythagorean term for sounds

whose source is unknown. The technological advancement played a significant role in the

work of contemporary sound poets as well. Sensitive microphone recording and amplification

of a whisper, a breath, or a cry helped Henri Chopin to discover the terra incognita of the

human body’s dark cavities and Bernard Heidsieck to insert “biopsies” of human utterance

into the texture of pre-recorded ubiquitous sounds. Finally, radio became the home of an

acoustic art that, contrary to representational radio drama, allowed for a symbiosis of sound

(music and noise) and speech, a tonal organization (in Cagean terms) of recorded and

electronically prepared material. Klaus Schöning describes it in this manner: “The sensitive,

receptive ear of this technology is the microphone, and its storage media are the tape, cassette,

record, and microchip. Its speaking mouth is the loudspeaker. One of its utopias is an acoustic

space accessible to everyone: the radio.”328

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LA RADIA, a muse of a still little-known “art without time or space, without

yesterday or tomorrow,” helped Marinetti and Masnata envisage a utopian, but now

ubiquitous, “immensification of space.” They were scouts of an electronic age of global

communications that would replace the industrial age of machines that they inhabited.

“Marinetti’s claims for the radiomorphic sensibility of La Radia,” writes Schöning, “anticipate

some of the claims made more recently for the cybernetic sensibility of postmodernism. La

Radia, he declared, would go beyond time and space, since the possibility of receiving

broadcast stations situated in various time zones and the lack of light will destroy the hours of

the day and night.”329

Truly, radio began to draw virtual maps detached from the now-deserted lands of

reality, even before Jean Baudrillard analyzed the concepts of simulacra and simulation as

symptoms of the postmodern estrangement from real life. On the other hand, radio had the

communicational power to cross borders of real time and space and to create a virtual co-

presence of different aural environments from all over the world. In one of his radiophonic

syntheses, Drama of Distances, Marinetti turned this communicational feature of the radio

medium into an aesthetic device. This work is an audio collage of seven different

soundscapes, each one limited to a length of eleven seconds. One after another, we hear a

military march in Rome, a tango danced in Santos, religious music played in Tokyo, joyful

peasant singing in the fields near Varese, a boxing match in New York, street noises in Milan,

and a jazz rendition of a Neapolitan canzone at the Hotel Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro.330 A

series of exotic but real sound events is liberated from the constraints of local time and shaped

into an acoustic art piece. The piece itself is a sonic event in the virtual sphere of a radio

broadcast, a live performance of the “synthesis of pure radio phonic sensations” as depicted in
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LA RADIA. Its soundscapes of distant locations and interpenetrating states of mind are, first

and foremost, rhythmically organized noises and sounds, that is, juxtaposed sound textures.

Their dramatic clash happens in the field of aurality, namely in the combination of timbres,

intensities, and densities of sound. Every eleven seconds, the listener is forced to adopt a new

level of sensibility required by a new sound attraction that obliges him or her to pulsate with

the drama of the material. Clearly, then, the radiophonic synthesis Drama of Distances relies

more on the materiality of sounds than on the nature and location of their sources.

Rudolf Arnheim, a gestalt psychologist and art theorist known for his influential

books on film and visual arts, wrote a little-known book in 1933 called Der Rundfunk sucht

seine Form (Radio Searches for Its Form). Herbert Read translated it into English in 1936 as

Radio: The Art of Sound. Arnheim’s argument in favour of radio art begins with the depiction of

a global sound-sphere where radio connects distant places, emotions, and people, which is, in a

way, almost identical to Marinetti’s Drama of Distances. Soon after, however, Arnheim

abandons his exploration of the “wireless as a means of transmission and dissemination” (as he

refers to radio) and turns instead to the “wireless as a means of expression.” In radio, he

believes, an “art that makes use of the aural only”331 has become for the first time fully

accessible. The real subject of his book is an appeal for an aesthetic of pure sound: “In wireless

the sounds and voices of reality claimed relationship with the poetic word and the musical note;

sounds born of earth and those born of spirit found each other; ... so that reality presented itself

much more directly, objectively and concretely than on printed paper: what hitherto had only

been thought or described now appeared materialized, as a corporeal reality.”332

The aural exclusiveness of radio is its advantage, claims Arnheim, who praises its

blindness for paradoxically extending the listener’s visual imagination beyond the physical
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reality ordinarily known to him. “The sounds coming from the box next to my bed,”

comments Salomé Voeglin, “would have nothing to do with the visual world around me.”

They appear as noise -- “sound that is truly not, and never was, related to any visual source

and might lead the listener to invent a ‘visuality’ beyond his visual imagination. … Such a

blind ‘noise’ radio surpasses and stretches out of … its re-presentational task into a generative

presentation: intensively always now, clasped in a continuous present, nothing else and

nowhere else.”333 This is what Robert Wilson had in mind when he called for a juxtaposition

of “a radio image over the [silent] film’s voice,” each maintaining its full autonomy. Wilson’s

utmost care for the aurality of performance, which extended the imaginative realm of his

productions and his collaboration with Philip Glass and Hans Peter Kuhn, ushered the art of

sound in the inventory of postdramatic theatre methods.

Besides acknowledging sound as a corporeal reality, Arnheim conceives of an

“acoustic bridge” that connects different kinds of sounds in a unique artistic device: “By the

disappearance of the visual, an acoustic bridge arises between all sounds: voices, whether

connected with a stage or not, are now the same flesh as recitations, discussions, song and

music. What hitherto could exist separately now fits organically together: the human being in

the corporeal world talks with disembodied spirits; music meets speech on equal terms.”334

The term “acoustic bridge” comes close to the notions of “flash representation of that

which cannot be seen” and “an endless variety of concrete versus abstract, of real versus

imagined, through a community of sounds” conceived in LA RADIA.335 Through his concept of

community of sounds Marinetti determines the field of a new acoustic art similarly to Arnheim.

They both insist on expressive characteristics of sound that affect us directly. Arnheim, whose

notion of the acoustic art of radio was consistent with the Futurists’ fundamental recognition of
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the materiality of sound, even explicitly claims that its idiom is “comprehensible without any

experience by means of intensity, pitch, interval, rhythm and tempi, [and all other abstract]

properties of sound which have very little to do with the objective meaning of the word or the

sound.”336

RADIO SINTESI: PREFIGURING CAGE’S CONCEPT OF SILENCE IN MUSIC AND PERFORMANCE

In 1939, six years after his 1933 manifesto repudiating all previously existing forms of

performance, Marinetti published five short radio pieces called radiophonic syntheses.337

Although he never mentioned Arnheim’s name or ideas and most likely never crossed paths

with him, Marinetti employed Arnheim’s principles of pure acoustic art in his radio syntheses.

In one of them, Un paesaggio udito (A Landscape Heard), he combines several concrete

sounds of nature in a musical fashion. The synopsis at the top of the script reads: “The whistle

of a blackbird, envious of the crackling of a fire, ends by extinguishing the gossip of water.”338

At first it looks promising for a dramatic plot with motivation (the blackbird is envious) and

resolution (the action of the water gets stopped). But the noises -- the babbling of a brook, the

crackling of a fire, and the cry of a blackbird -- that arise one after another shape an arbitrary

rhythmical structure independent of psychological idiosyncrasies. Their durations are strictly

measured in the script; the blocks of babbling -- ten, eight, five, nineteen, twenty-five, and

thirty-five seconds long -- are interrupted by cracklings of one second, while the ending

blackbird’s call lasts six seconds. Apparently, Marinetti’s radio sintesi is an atechnical piece

in terms of synthetic theatre; it is a piece with no traditional dramaturgy in it. Instead, it

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displays sounds and noises of different timbres along a fixed timeline, following the rules of

radiophonic creation “in the field of pure and no longer representational sound,” which as

Arnheim claims, “demands no interpretation of the sound, but only the apprehension of the

sound itself and of its expression!”339

Another of Marinetti’s short radio pieces, I Silenzi parlano fra di loro (Silences

Speak among Themselves), consists of several audio blocks; periods filled with sound are

counterpointed with silent periods of exactly measured durations of eight to forty seconds. In

the periods of sound we hear either music -- single notes or brief sequences of notes played on

piano, trumpet, and flute, or noise -- the roar of an engine, a baby wailing, and so on. The non-

sounding passages are equally important to the sounding ones because the aural architecture of

the piece is created as a dramatic clash between silence and sound. Marinetti deliberately

extends the duration of the silent blocks to make silence an active element of the aural drama.

Here he actually applies his own idea from the manifesto LA RADIA, the idea of an acoustic

art capable of the “delimitation and construction of silence.” As a result, as Michael Kirby

notices, in Marinetti’s radio pieces “silence stops functioning as a neutral ground. ... Silence is

heard against the background of sound; silence becomes equal to sound as an aesthetic tool.

Obviously, thoughts of this kind have much to do with the ideas of John Cage.”340

In Battaglia di ritmi (Battle of Rhythms), we first hear an electric bell ringing for a

short while, and then we “listen” to three minutes of silence. Then we hear the turning of a key

in a lock and again a minute of silence. And that is the whole piece. Curiously enough, there is

nothing to be heard after the last block of silence placed at the end of the piece to mark its

conclusion; again we “listen” only to silence. There is no full stop at the end of a phrase or a

story. Obviously, Marinetti was dealing here with a different syntax, if not an absence of
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syntax. He believed that silences did not need sonic borderlines to be noticed. In his poetics of

matter, silence was neither a sign of absence nor a break from the sensation of hearing, but an

indistinguishable part of the flux of sound available for listening. Marinetti thus appears as a

follower of Bergson’s philosophy of la durée and a precursor of Cage in his concept of

duration as the essence of a music that encompasses sound, noise, and silence.

Marinetti’s radio sintesi La Costruzione di un silenzio (The Construction of

Silence) deals directly with silence. Paradoxically, in the piece there is no silence at all but

only four juxtaposed blocks of sound, each coming from a different direction and distance.

The four sounds are supposed to create the floor, two walls, and the ceiling of an imaginary

room of silence -- housing for a hollow sculpture of sound, that is, silence reminiscent of the

Dadaist extravagance of Marcel Duchamp.

Marinetti’s radio sintesi might seem like mere witticisms, but they were real

promulgators of a new audio/radio art that we find now in the works of Bill Fontana, Klaus

Schöning, and other soundscape, acoustic environment, and Ars Acoustica practitioners.

Marinetti’s play with sound as construction material and his audacious use of long silences

expanded Russolo’s art of noises and once again underlined the notion that aurality

encompasses sound and silence, time and space. In the realm of aural creation extended

beyond the field of harmonic music, speech, and music drama, the dramaturgy of sound or

sculpting of sonic matter became possible.

Marinetti’s radio sintesi, where sound and silence were treated equally, and Russolo’s

art of noises prefigure some of John Cage’s principles of sound composition. Throughout Cage’s

musical compositions, poetry, sound installations, and performance pieces runs his conviction that

there is no such thing as silence, only our failure to pay attention to sound. After his experience in
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an anechoic chamber at Harvard University, where the complete absence of sound was simulated,

Cage redefined silence as non-intentional, non-musicated, and non-pitched sound. What he did

hear in the chamber was a constant high-pitched ring and a low-pitched pulse: the singing tones of

his nervous system and the throbbing noises of his blood. In other words, it was not an empty

silence. “Music is continuous,” he declares; “only listening is intermittent.” Understood in this

sense, music encompasses tonal forms together with noise and silence, all of them participating in

the realm of aurality that is always around us, but it is up to us whether we listen to it or not.

John Cage’s paradigmatic silent piece, 4'33", was first performed 29 August 1952, in

Woodstock, New York, by the young pianist David Tudor. It was a stunning debut. Tudor

walked onstage, sat down at the piano, opened the score, raised the lid of the keyboard, and

remained motionless. He repeated the action three times since the piece is composed of three

silent movements of different lengths. With the music piece liberated from any premeditated

composition or any externally imposed meaning, the lack of performed sound served as a

metaphor for the wholesale elimination of the usual sound-silence opposition. All that listeners

had to do was to let themselves go with the unintended and previously unattended sounds of

silence to be found in their environment. Cage’s intention was, as he said, to let sounds be

themselves and to expose listeners to their own, and the piece’s, aurality.

In his sound poetry and short performance pieces of the 1960s, Cage attempted to

escape the logocentric patterning of language in a fashion reminiscent of the Italian and

Russian Futurists, who had abolished syntax to set words free. After a period of

experimentation with irregular words, punning, and allusion, he opted for what the sounds of

elementary words could offer. “I hoped to let words exist,” he said, “as I have tried to let

sounds exist.”341 Abandoning his quest for bizarre words, he tried using ordinary language but
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freeing it from the constraints of syntax, in a process Cage regularly referred to as the

“demilitarization of the language.” To discover “the music of verbal space” and to deal with

words as sounds, Cage looked for the cadence inscribed in the words’ natural inflection:

“Speaking without syntax we notice that cadence takes over. Therefore we tried whispering.

Encouraged we began to chant. … To raise language’s temperature we not only remove

syntax: we give each letter undivided attention, setting it in unique face and size; to read

becomes the verb to sing.”342

Cage thus developed oral performance pieces that use only a single instrument -- the

human voice -- and a single medium -- language and its verbo-vocal structure. He wrote a

series of sound poems for performance called “mesostics.” They were so named because of

their centrally aligned acrostics running through the body of the poem. Since the verses were

now aligned by their unpredictably positioned middle letters, the poems assumed an

asymmetrical hieroglyphic form similar to the ideograms of Japanese haiku poetry. This

method offered a visual presentation of a poem that would let the sounds of words exist in a

new verbo-voco-visual environment. Like Marinetti’s synoptic tables of parole in libertà and

the Russian Cubo-Futurist stencilled books of zaum poetry, Cage’s mesostics reflected sounds

iconically by the graphic layout of letters. In that sense one can appreciate Cage’s poems as a

minimalist version of a Futurist typographical sound poem, as in this fragment:

Me?

I sleep eAsily

undeR

any aCcoustic condition.

as hE said:
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Lullaby. 343

A follower of Zen philosophy, Cage admittedly found inspiration for his mesostics

in the poetry of Matsuo Basho, the renowned haiku master of seventeenth-century Japan who

shaped his poems in the form of ideograms:

old pond

a frog jumps

the sound of water

Cage wanted to free language from the grip of Western, syntactical, linear thought,

and to bring it more in line with poetry like Basho’s, which “floats in space … [and] only the

imagination of the reader limits the poem’s possible meanings.” This “floating in space” of

haiku poems is comparable to the sensation that a spectator of Noh theatre feels when a

performer with subtle vocal modulations and slow body movements chants, “sculpts,”

“writes,” or “paints” the poem/play in the air while conquering the silence around him and the

emptiness of the naked stage. The meaning of Noh performance lies no less in the sculpture

that the actor creates in time and space than in the words he utters. The aural, visual, and

kinetic elements of Noh performance interact in a manner reminiscent of Basho’s famous

haiku, in which the sound of the poem is embedded in the shape of an ideogram as a sound-

sculpture.

In Sculpture Musical, a sound poem that Cage performed in Tokyo in 1986, the

mesostic string consisted of Marcel Duchamp’s words: “sons durant et partant de différent
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points et formant une sculpture sonore qui dure” (sounds enduring and coming from different

points, thus shaping a lasting sound sculpture). It was a performance created in the spirit of

Duchamp’s idea of making a sculpture of the Venus de Milo exclusively by surrounding the

listener with sounds. Physically, the sculpture would not exist anywhere else but in sound or in

the perception of sound by the centrally placed spectator. This positioning of the spectator in

the midst of an art installation inspired by the immersive quality of sound was well-known in

Futurist painting. In addition, Duchamp’s imagined sound-sculpture merged aurality and

visuality of its subject; it used sound instead of light to reveal the physical volume of the

beautiful Venus’s body. Duchamp conducted experiments with his kinetic sculptures that

operated in a space between the plastic arts and the art of noise. Some of his ready-mades, like

the legendary Bicycle Wheel (1913), were supposed to move, producing sounds that created

their “virtual volume,” as Moholy-Nagy put it. The idea that sound is capable of producing a

“virtual volume” bears a theatrical relevance. It became one of the defining characteristics of

Balla’s, Depero’s, and Prampolini’s theatrical experiments with set, costumes, noise, and light,

which in turn led to the invention of the plastic moto-rumoristic complex and influenced

Malevich’s sculpting in sound, light, and objects in Victory over the Sun.
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THE DRAMATURGY OF SOUND IN THE AVANT-GARDE AND POSTDRAMATIC THEATRE

Sixth Chapter -- Sound as Structure: Toward an Abstract Architecture of Theatre

FROM ONOMATOPOEIA, ANALOGY, AND ICONICITY TO THE PLASTIC MOTO-RUMORIST

COMPLEX

Futurist poets substantially disturbed linguistic and literary conventions by turning the spoken,

written, and printed word into a verbo-voco-visual ideogram. Both poetic idioms, parole in

libertà and zaum, refashioned words into aural and visual icons and used them as sensorial

kernels with an intrinsic performance potential. Because visual setting of the script often

determined the corporeal, sensory dimension of Futurist declamation, Giovanni Lista found it

appropriate to include Marinetti’s synoptic table Battaglia a 9 piani del Monte Altissimo

(Battle on 9 levels of Monte Altissimo) in his anthology of theatre, describing it as a synthetic

performance by “declamators in motion -- Marinetti, Balla and Depero.”344 In the same vein

John J. White thought of the synoptic tables and non-linear typography of the Futurists’ poems

as iconic consequences of their declamations. This view can be applied to the scripts of

Cangiullo’s Piedigrotta or Depero’s Colori, which were also printed as tavole parolibere. But

it is hard to say which came first -- Futurist vocal performance or its visual representation. Is

onomatopoetic declamation cause or consequence of the typographical layout of a poem? In

any case, the verbo-voco-visual shape of Futurist poetry signalled the heightened audio-visual

expression of a new performance style that Marinetti described as “dynamic and synoptic

declamation.” What we can say with certainty is that Futurist poetry, in both its oral and
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graphical aspects, was paradigmatic for the development of Futurist theatre, particularly in its

synthetic phase.

In their sound poetry declamations Futurists first explored the world of “forgotten”

sound symbolism, endorsing Walter Benjamin’s assertion that “the phonetic elements of a

sentence represent the basic resources in which, in a flash-like instant, something mimetic can

reveal itself out of a sound.”345 Looking for such sudden revelation in their theatrical sintesi,

Futurists condensed all drama into a “flash-like instant” that would ignite the audience with

the energy of direct experience. The inner workings their idiom of essential brevity relied on

the synaesthetic correspondence of visual sensations, vocal and inanimate sound,

environmental noise, music, colour, and smell. They followed the same impulses that led

words, sounds, and letters of text-sound poetry to achieve their material equivalence with the

things they stood for as their aural and visual icons. As a consequence, physical and spatial

elements of the stage -- the plasticity of movements, objects, and masses -- became a part of

the vocabulary of Futurist synthetic theatre. Adopting the iconic and analogical structuring of

the aural, visual, spatial, and kinetic elements of the stage as a creative method of their

abstract abstract theatrical sintesi, Futurists cleared the way for concrete experiments with the

“plastic moto-rumorist complex” on the kinetic sculpture-like stage, exemplified by the later

works of Balla, Depero, and Prampolini.

At first intuitive and corporeal, the historical avant-garde’s experiments with sound

in the theatre started with the diversion of the vocal gesture from syntactic language, but their

explorations spread to more abstract approach to sound and its semiotic potential. In The

Theatre and Its Double, a book that from the 1960s avant-garde onwards had an immense

impact on contemporary theatre, Antonin Artaud proposed: “For the theatre to be neither
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subjected to this [logocentric] structure of language, nor abandoned to the spontaneity of

furtive inspiration, it will have to be governed according to the requirements of another

language and another form of writing. … This time, writing not only will no longer be the

transcription of speech, not only will be the writing of the body itself, but it will be produced,

within the movements of the theatre, according to rules of hieroglyphics, a system of signs no

longer controlled by the institution of voice”346

Artaud imagined a language that requires “expression in space [in which] objects

themselves begin to speak,” a theatre idiom “of experimental demonstration of the profound

unity of the concrete and the abstract,” in which “the overlapping images and movements will

culminate, through the collusion of objects, silences, shouts, and rhythms, or in a genuine

physical language with signs, not words, at its root.”347 Futurist demands for a new theatrical

idiom were very similar. But seeking an idiom with signs at its root, Futurists never

abandoned their exploration of phonetic sources. Their scenic language remained indebted to

the dramaturgy of sound, even when it became abstract; it remained moto-rumorist, that is,

kinetic and noisy.

Marinetti’s visit to Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1914 provides evidence of this

aesthetic trend. For the Russian Cubo-Futurists his visit was an opportunity to delineate their

artistic endeavours and theoretical beliefs from those of their Italian counterparts. Oddly

enough, the visit verified that the aesthetic platforms of the two movements were basically the

same. A telling dialogue between Livshits and the celebrated Italian guest, reported by the

former in his famous memoir The One and a Half-Eyed Archer, provides a case in point.

Although Livshits and Marinetti engaged in controversy, it was evident that they both held to

the elementary notions established in Futurist art.

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Livshits criticized Marinetti: “What is the point of piling up amorphous words, a

conglomeration which you call ‘words at liberty’? To eliminate the intermediary role of reason

by producing disorder, right? … When I heard you reciting I asked myself a question: is it

worth destroying the traditional sentence, even the way you do, in order to reinstate it, to

restore its logical predicate by suggestive moments of gesture, mimicry, intonation and

onomatopoeia?”

Marinetti responded: “Do you know that Boccioni sculpts the same work out of

different materials -- marble, wood, bronze? … Recitation is only a transitional stage, a

temporary substitution for syntax. … The day we manage to put what I call ‘wireless

imagination’ into effect, we will reject the outer layer of analogies. … The ‘analogies of the

second order’, will be completely irrational. … All psychology must be expelled from

literature and replaced by the lyrical possession of substance.”348

It emerges that Marinetti’s concept of declamation was not aimed at the cowardly

reconstruction of syntax, signification, or psychology as Livshits asserted. Marinetti first and

foremost cared for the materiality of signs; that is why he immediately reached for an example

of tactile visual art by Boccioni to defend his use of onomatopoeia. The onomatopoetic

declamation was just a transitional stage leading toward “analogies of the second order,” he

explained, in which the material will be exposed in a more concrete and abstract way. This

Marinetti’s insistence on onomatopoeia, iconicity, and analogy as leads toward an abstract

artistic idiom had a clear impact on the development of Italian Futurist theatre, where vocal

and gestural declamation were soon replaced by the treatment of sound as an abstract element

of the stage complex. These changes were a logical continuation of inherently theatrical

concepts formulated in Marinetti’s poetry manifestos that celebrated the power of analogy to
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tie together distant, seemingly diverse, and hostile things, the potential of different

onomatopoeias to shape an abstract structure, and the physical value of “dynamic and synoptic

declamation” to express the “geometric splendor and mechanical sensibility.”

In 1913, concurrently with Zang Tumb Tumb, Marinetti published his major

programmatic manifestos that transcended the borders of mere poetry and incited innovations

in the idiomatic structure of all Futurist art. Marinetti’s call for “an orchestral style, at once

polychromatic, polyphonic, and polymorphous [that] can embrace the life of matter only by

means of the most extensive analogies,”349 for example, was not limited to poetry but sought

further Futurist experimentation within the wider and more complex structures of the plastic

arts and theatre. At the same time, in their manifestos, Umberto Boccioni and Giacommo

Balla outlined concepts of the Futurist visual arts, including plastic dynamism, the

compenetration350 of objects and environments, and the use of “force lines” that put the

spectator in the midst of a fragmented reality, while Enrico Prampolini and Carlo Carrà

reflected on the interference between objects and atmosphere based on chromophony, or the

synaesthesia of sound, noise, and smell carried by colour vibrations. Finally, that same year

saw the publication of Luigi Russolo’s L’arte dei rumori.

In his comprehensive monograph on Italian Futurist theatre, Lista acknowledges this

interplay of artistic disciplines and proposes a periodization of the movement’s aesthetics into

four phases. By suggesting four phases instead of the habitual two, Lista contests the widely

accepted belief that the year 1920 marked the single cut-off between a first and second

Futurism. According to Lista, a first period of Futurism, pre-1915, encompasses works defined

by dynamism of the above-mentioned poetry, painting, and theatre manifestos. In a second

period, 1915-20, works were defined by the exploration of the “plastic moto-rumorist
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complex.” This period, Lista suggests, started with Depero and Balla’s “Futurist

Reconstruction of the Universe” and Prampolini’s “Futurist Scenography and Choreography,”

published in 1915 and 1916, and went on to include their research into abstract plastic art and

theatre up to 1920.351 A third period, during the 1920s, was defined by a mechanical art that set

the eradication of the human actor as its goal. A fourth period, initiated by the “aeropittura”

(aerial painting and adjacent forms of literature and performance), was integral to the spatial

and spectacular extension of theatre. Lista here does not mention Marinetti’s proposal for an

abstract tactile theatre, his latter’s plans to build a total multimedial theatre, and radiophonic

art of the 1930s, but had he done so, he would no doubt have included them in this last period.

Lista’s diachronic summary of Futurist theatre aesthetics points to an increasing

awareness of the materiality of signs, including the oral/aural ones, in poetry, art, and

performance. Likewise it indicates the growing tendency toward an abstract theatre based not

on literary drama but on concrete, scenic material. The influence of Marinetti’s poetics of

matter is evident throughout, from the interconnected experiments with sound and colour in

poetry and painting to the conception of an abstract, tactile theatre of pure sensation. More

importantly it entered into a fruitful compenetration and simultaneity (to borrow these two

favourite Futurist/Dadaist terms) of the ideas, concepts, and performance practice that have

permeated avant-garde theatre theory and production from the beginning of the twentieth

century to our postmodern era. Günter Berghaus, for one, considers avant-garde attempts at a

non-literary “total theatre,” integral to the methods of contemporary live performance and art

in the domain of electronic technologies, as a major thrust of Futurist theatre theory.352

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DADAIST SOUND STRUCTURES AND SCHWITTERS’S MERZ-STAGE: PRELUDES TO TOTAL

THEATRE

The ideas conceived in Italian Futurism spread to the anarchist and nihilist aesthetics and

performance practice of Dada from Zurich to Paris, New York, Berlin, and Hanover. Richard

Huelsenbeck, one of the performers of the famous simultaneous poem at the Cabaret Voltaire,

L’amiral cherche une maison à louer, admits to borrowing the methods of bruitism and noise

music from Marinetti: “Le bruit -- noise with imitative effects, was introduced into art (in this

connection we can hardly speak of individual arts, music or literature) by Marinetti, who used

a chorus of typewriters, kettledrums, rattles and pot-covers to suggest the ‘awakening of the

capital’; at first it was intended as nothing more than a rather violent reminder of the

colorfulness of life.”353

It is not clear why Huelsenbeck failed to mention Russolo, the real author of

Awakening of the City. Did he think that Marinetti’s contributions epitomized the Futurist

revolution? In any case Huelsenbeck shared Russolo’s belief in the expressive power of noise

in contrast to the limitations of tonal music. Maintaining a noisy and arrogant stage presence,

he performed “accompanied by a big drum, shouts, whistles and laughs,” as Hugo Ball notes

in his Dada diaries, in “an attempt to capture in a clear melody the totality of this unutterable

age, with all its cracks and fissures, with all its wicked and lunatic genialities, with all its noise

and hollow din.”354 Clearly, there is a marked similarity between Huelsenbeck’s verses in

Fantastic Prayers and parole in libertà: “Plane pig’s bladder kettledrum cinnabar cru cru cru /

Theosophia pneumatica / … Or or birribum birribum the ox whizzes round in a circle or

contracts for / Casting light hand grenade parts 7.6 cm chaser …”355 Enthralled by the noise of
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the mechanical age himself, in En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism Huelsenbeck was able

to properly diagnose symptoms of the Futurist predilection for noise: “While numbers, and

consequently melody, are symbols presupposing a faculty for abstraction, noise is a direct call

to action. Music of whatever nature is harmonious, artistic, an activity of reason -- but

bruitism is life itself. … Bruitism is a kind of return to nature. It is the music produced by

circuits of atoms; death ceases to be an escape of the soul from earthly misery and becomes a

vomiting, screaming and choking.”356

Huelsenbeck understood very well the materiality of Futurist art, its Dionysian

inspiration, and its obsession with the concrete. Accepting Marinetti’s and Russolo’s concepts,

he suggested that, contrary to the abstract artists, who “maintained the position that a table is

not the wood and nails it is made of but the idea of all tables,” the Futurists wanted to immerse

themselves in the angularity of things: “Along with tables there were houses, frying pans,

urinals, women, etc. Consequently, Marinetti and his group love war as the highest expression

of the conflict of things, as a spontaneous eruption of possibilities, as movement, as a

simultaneous poem, as a symphony of cries, shots, commands, embodying an attempted

solution of the problem of life in motion.”357

Thus, despite the opposite ideological sides Futurists and Dadaists took regarding

the First World War -- Futurists siding with nationalist warmongers, Dadaists with

internationalists and pacifists -- Huelsenbeck, who in the 1920s propagated Dada as German

Bolshevism, did not judge Futurists’ love of war as an inexcusable political attitude but as a

consequence of their inclination toward the dynamism of life and its materiality. His reasoning

clearly reflects the growing interest in “literalness” among Expressionists and Dadaists
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inspired by the Futurist intoxication with matter and Russolo’s inclusion of everyday

sounds/noises in music.

Raoul Hausmann, a central figure of the Berlin Dada group, created Seelen

Automobile, a series of sound poems he recited in June 1918 at the Café Austria. “The sound

poem is an art consisting of respiratory and auditive combinations,” he explained, “firmly tied

to a unit of duration … In order to express these elements typographically, I had used letters of

varying sizes and thickness which thus took on the character of musical notation.”358

Evidently, Hausmann was familiar with the techniques of Marinetti, Tristan Tzara, and

Huelsenbeck before he learned of Ball’s poems without words in 1920. Delving deeper into

the abstraction of sound-text art, Hausmann began writing “optophonetic” poetry --

optophonetische Gedichte. By defining his poems, made solely of letters in different sizes and

shapes, as optophonetic, Hausmann emphasized the synergy of their optic and phonetic

features. For him it was “the first step towards poetry that is perfectly non-objective and

abstract,” as is shown in this example:

k p ’ e r i O UM lp’eri O u m
Nm’ p eriii PERnounnurn

bprE ti Berree e RREbe e

e

ONNOo gplanpouk
konmpout pERIKOUL
RR EE ee EEe e rreeeee A
oapAerrre E E E
mgl ed padANou
MTNOU tnoum t 359

“This is where I differ from Ball,” Hausmann went on to say. “His poems created new

words, sound and above all musically arranged onomatopoeia; mine are based on letters,
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therefore excluding all possibility for creating language with a meaning or with coordinated

movement.”360 Hausmann insisted on a sharp delineation between his “alphabet poems,”

which were directly and exclusively based upon letters -- that is to say, “letterist” -- and Ball’s

poems, which were based upon words. The optophonetic architecture of their letters

represented a score for an abstract vocalization of sound, timbre, stress, and pitch: “A poem

for me is the rhythm of its sounds. So why have words? Poetry is produced by rhythmic

sequences of consonants and diphthongs set against a counterpoint of associated vowels and it

should be simultaneously phonetic and visual. Poetry is a fusion of dissonance and

onomatopoeia. … Spiritual vision, spatial form and material sound form are not poetry in

themselves but they all make up the poem.”361

As if acting under a Futurist spell of “geometric and mechanical splendor and

numerical sensibility,” Hausmann was able to envision its ultimate consequence in the abstract

letterism of a printed page or poster (poster poetry, or Plakatgedichte, was one of his later

inventions). His abstract vocalizations, like bbbb and fmsbw, kperioum, and pggifmu, proved

to be seminal for French lettrism of the 1950s, while his idea of the “lawfulness of sound”

influenced the purely acoustic approach of contemporary radio/audio art and music. In terms

of the dramaturgy of sound, Hausmann’s simultaneous use of abstract visual, spatial, and

phonetic elements opened up a possibility for a synthetic art no longer exclusively motivated

only by synaesthetic correspondences, an art concept further elaborated during the second,

synthetic phase of Italian Futurism.

Hausmann’s introduction of a pure acoustic art dependent on the graphic disposition

of letters was crucial for the work of another Dadaist painter and collage artist, Kurt

Schwitters. Schwitters had been writing/collaging/composing and performing his famous

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sound poem Sonate in Urlauten (Sonata in Primordial Sound), or Ursonate,362 for twelve

years, from the 1920s until its final publication in 1932. He ended up with a very precise

typographical score for a thirty-five-minute vocal performance, organized into four

movements with prelude and cadenza. Subsequently performed and recorded by the author for

Stuttgart radio, Ursonate was issued as a LP record, which has proved to be inspirational for

many contemporary musicians and performance artists. Musician Brian Eno, for instance,

included its sampled version in his 1977 album Before and after Science, which explored

avant-garde and environmental sound, while director Christoph Marthaler used it to

counterpoint or discredit the celebratory recitation and documentary presentation of the

positive outcome of the Second World War in his 1995 staging of Stunde Null.

Schwitters started from the letterist structure of Hausmann’s alphabet poetry and, by

breaking it down into a vocal texture, played on the exclusively musical characteristics of the

chosen consonant clusters, vowels, and syllables. In this way he conceived the poem as an

abstract vocal sonata written according to musical parameters. Schwitters actually borrowed

the initial letters of Hausmann’s poem, f b m s b w, and used them as his first theme in

Ursonate. Hausmann, however, was not impressed: “I severely reproached him at the time for

having made out of my invention … a classical sonata, which seemed blasphemy to me and

contrary to the phonetic meaning of the letters I had chosen.”363 But Sonate in Urlauten was

far from a classical music form. It was a collage of sounds available for a surprising, aleatoric,

truly Dadaist rendition. When performed at the time, the sonata challenged the perceptions of

the audience; listeners did not know whether it was a poetry recital, a variety performance, or

a musical piece. Schwitters contributed to the piece’s fame by his peculiar stage presence.

Together with Tzara, Theo Van Doesburg, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Ed Lissitzky, and Hans
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Richter, he participated in poetry readings all across Europe in the 1920s. Richter remembers

one of Schwitters’s appearances in a Prussian noble house in Potsdam:

Schwitters stood on the podium, drew himself up to his full six feet plus, and began

to perform the Ursonate, complete with hisses, roars and crowing, before an audience

who had no experience whatever of anything modern. At first they were completely

baffled. … Their faces, above their upright collars, turned red then slightly bluish.

And then they lost control … and the whole audience, freed from pressure that had

been building up inside them, exploded in an orgy of laughter. … [But soon] the

hurricane blew itself out as rapidly as it has arisen. Schwitters spoke the rest of his

Ursonate without further interruption. The result was fantastic. The same generals,

the same rich ladies, who had previously laughed until they cried, now came to

Schwitters, again with tears in their eyes, almost stuttering with admiration and

gratitude. Something had been opened up within them, something they never

expected to feel: a great joy.364

Moholy-Nagy praised the work from an avant-garde point of view, as an abstract

construction of verbal sound able to convey the aesthetic and emotional charge of a work of

art: “The words used do not exist, rather they might exist in any language; they have no

logical, only an emotional context; they affect the ear with their phonetic vibrations like

music. Surprise and pleasure are derived from the structure and the inventive combination of

the parts.”365
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In Ursonate, Schwitters collaged sound patches irrespective of the possible lyrical or

denotative value they could have as syllables extracted from words. In his 1924 manifesto

“Consistent Poetry” he stands adamant that it is absolutely irrelevant whether one recites a

poem or uses any other textual/phonetic structure for his verbo-vocal material: “one can recite

the alphabet, a string of purely functional sounds, in such a way that the result is a work of

art.”366 For him, in contrast to the standard use of letters and sounds, unambiguous when they

constitute words, their use in “sound poetry is consistent only in one case, namely when it is

created in public performance.” The consistency of poetry assured by its concrete material,

that is, sound, is what relates Schwitters’s work to that of the Futurists. His reductio ad

absurdum of possible meanings of the words priimiitittiii, incomplete primitiv (primitive),

and, changeable tisch/tesch/tusch (table) was achieved by repetitious phonetic play resembling

Khlebnikov’s “Incantation by Laughter”:

Priimiitittiii tisch
tesch
priimiitittiii tesch
tusch
priimiitittiii tischa
tescho
priimiitittiii tescho
tuschi
priimiitittiii
priimiitittiii
priimiitittiii
too ... 367
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Schwitters’s poem goes further in an abstract structuring of phonemes released from

the context of words and their associations. The script contains page after page of carefully

arranged strings of phonemes, syllables, consonant clusters, and multiplied vowels,

configuring a score for an abstract vocalization. Later in Ursonate, for example, Schwitters

builds musical motifs spreading “from the pure lyric of the sung [syllabic tune] ‘Jüü-Kaa’ to

the strict military rhythm of the third theme which sounds totally masculine compared to the

trembling, sheepishly tender fourth theme.”368 His “words” veer between chants and

incantations of an ur-language and more sophisticated aural forms, never abandoning the

poem’s musical scheme.

Although far more abstract than Marinetti’s onomatopoeia of war, Schwitters’s

declamation was consistent with the tradition of loud poetry readings that characterized

Futurist and Dadaist evenings. It continues to influence more recent performances by François

Dufrêne, Bob Cobbing, Steve McCaffery, and other poets oriented to concrete sound and the

disintegration of language. Sybil Moholy-Nagy (Laszlo’s wife and, interestingly, one of the

teachers Robert Wilson appreciated the most) recounted an anecdote that speaks to this

tradition, celebrated on both sides of the ideological barricade. The event took place in Berlin

in 1934 at a formal banquet for a delegation of Italian artists, at which all the Nazi dignitaries

short of Hitler were present: Goebbels, Göring, Hess, Röhm, and so on. Moholy-Nagy, who

received a personal invitation from Marinetti, hesitated to go, but Schwitters, who wanted to

honour the Italian poet, insisted, and so they went. They were sitting “sandwiched between the

head of the National Socialist Organization for Folk Culture and the leader of the movement

Strength Through Joy. Moholy was full of resentment, silent. … Schwitters drank speedily.”

Suddenly he started to expound, no holds barred:

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“I love you, your Cultural Folk and Joy. … You think I am not worthy of sharing

your art chamber for strength and folk? I am an idiot too, and I can prove it.” …

The official from the Organization for Folk Culture nodded droolingly, his round

cheeks puffed up with wine and amazement. “Oh joyful baby face,” Schwitters

muttered, tears running down his cheeks, “you will not prohibit me from MERZing

my MERZ art?”

The word prohibit had finally penetrated the foggy brain of the Strength Through Joy

man. “Prohibited is prohibited: Verboten ist verboten… And when Führer says Ja, he

says Ja, when Führer says Nein, he says Nein. Heil Hitler!”

Schwitters looked wildly at Moholy, at me, at Marinetti, but before he could incite

anyone to action, Marinetti had risen from his chair. He swayed considerably and his

face was purple. “My friends, he said in French, after so many excellent speeches

tonight, I feel the urge to thank the great, courageous, high-spirited people of Berlin. I

shall recite my poem The Raid on Adrianople.”

“Adrianople est cerné de toutes parts SSSSrrr zitzzitzzitzzitzi PAAAAAAgh

rrrrrrrrrrr,” roared Marinetti “ouah ouah ouah départ des trains suicides, ouah ouah

ouah…”

The audience gasped: a few hushed giggles were audible.

“Tchip tchip tchip -- féééééééééélez …”

He grabbed a wineglass and smashed it to the floor.

“Tchip tchip tchip… des messages teléphoniques… Piiiiing sssssssssrrrrrr zitzitzit …”

Marinetti threw himself on the table. …

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Schwitters had jumped up at the first sound of the poem. Like a horse at a familiar

sound the Dadaist in him responded to the signal. His face flushed, his mouth open,

he followed each of Marinetti’s moves with his own body. In the momentary silence

that followed the climax his eyes met Moholy’s.

“Oh Anna Blume, he whispered and suddenly breaking into a roar that drowned the

din of protesting voices and scraping chair legs he thundered:

Oh, Anna Blume, Du bist von hinten wie von vorn, A-n-n-a.”369

Of course, in the upcoming carnage of the Second World War, Schwitters and

Marinetti would remain worlds apart, one whose art was designated degenerate by the Nazis

of his country and who had to flee from them to Norway and England, and the other who was

crowned with academic laurels by the Fascists of his country and who served them from Libya

to the Eastern Front.

Schwitters, who was best known for his collage paintings, christened his own

Hanover Dadaist movement and the magazine he published between 1923 and 1932, Merz,

after a cut-out from an advertisement for Kommerz und Privatbank. The word Merz stood for

“freedom of all fetters for the sake of artistic creation” in Merz-poetry, Merz-painting, Merz-

stage, and so on. The culmination of all these hybrid art forms was an installation, exhibition,

sculpture, and performance space called the Merz-building (Merzbau). Also known as The

Cathedral of Erotic Misery, it was an environmental artwork in progress, a growing

architectonic construction made of ready-made bric-a-brac that devoured Schwitters’s entire

two-storey house in Hanover. Layer upon layer, its grotto-like rooms were filled with the

endogenous tissue growing from the artist’s tumultuous life, documented by saved art objects,

debris of popular culture, notes, documents, and trivial scraps, including a sock belonging to
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Moholy-Nagy and a strand of Richter’s hair. All of it was encased by interconnected

architectural structures made of plaster and wood that were erected along multiple, irregular

axes, a new chamber appearing for each new installation, ad infinitum. Richter remembers one

of his many visits to The Cathedral when he became aware that “all the little holes and

cavities that we [avant-garde artists] had formerly occupied by proxy were no longer to be

seen. “‘They are deep down inside,’ Schwitters explained. They were concealed by the

monstrous growth of the column, covered by other sculptural excrescence, new people, new

shapes, colors, and details.”370 Never finished “out of principle” and more than ten years in the

making before Schwitters fled Nazi Germany in 1936, the Merzbau exemplified art that

resisted consolidation -- always in flux and never purified into an ideal aesthetic form. An

Allied bombing raid destroyed it in 1943.

Schwitters’s ideas of painting/collage, sculpture, architecture, and theatre were initially

conceived in his abstract/concrete art of poetry: “I pasted words and sentences together into

poems in such a way that their rhythmic composition created a kind of drawing. The other way

around, I pasted together pictures and drawings containing sentences that demand to be read. I

drove nails into pictures in such a way that besides the pictorial effect a plastic relief arose. I

did this in order to erase boundaries between the arts.”371

Schwitters saw an uninterrupted link between the rhythmical design of sound-text

poetry and the structural design of the plastic arts that, again unfinished “out of principle,”

flow into each other. In theatre, this concept called for an intense intermixing and fusion of

sound, colour, light, materials, and objects. Consequently, Schwitters conceived the Merz-play

as an abstract work of art where, “as in poetry, word is played against word, factor is played

against factor, material against material,” and which, in contrast to the drama or the opera,
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“cannot be written, read or listened to; it can only be produced in the theatre.”372 In several of

his theoretical texts, published in Sturm-Bühne in 1919, Schwitters outlined the Merz-stage as

a composite artwork: “The Merz stage knows only the fusion into the total work. Material for

stage set are all solid, liquid, and gaseous bodies such as white wall, man [sic!], barbed-wire

fence, blue distance, light cone. Use surfaces that can become solid or dissolve. … Let things

turn on themselves and move, let lines broaden into surfaces. … The materials for the score

consist of all sounds and noises that can be created by violin, drum, trumpet, sewing machine,

ticking clock, water stream, etc. … The materials are not to be used logically in their objective

relationships, but only within the logic of the work of art.”373

At the end of his famous Dada book-poem An Anna Blume, Schwitters included a

manifesto, “To All the Theatres of the World I Demand the MERZ-stage.” Here, he goes on to

encourage theatre artists to “marry off the materials to each other. For instance marry the

oilcloth sheet to the building society, bring the lamp-cleaner into a relationship with the

marriage between Anna Blume and the concert pitch.”374 Was this not a Marinetti-inspired

thought of escaping the psychological and sentimental “I” and indulging in the life of matter

itself? After describing different freely mixed objects, surfaces, and colours, he ironically

concludes that in his theatre even humans may be used. “Human beings may be tied to the

wings. … [They] may appear even in their daily situations, may talk on two legs, even in

sensible sentences.” As if having in mind opportunities that the dramaturgy of sound offers, he

merges disparate sounds in a fiery spinning ball-like crescendo of the aural and the visual in

an apotheosis of Merz-stage: “And now begins the glow of musical saturation. Organs behind

the stage sing and say: ‘Phutt, phutt.’ The sewing machine rattles on in the front… A man says

‘Bah...’ A water-pipe drips monotonously… Drums and flutes flash death, and a streetcar
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driver’s pipe shines brightly. A jet of ice-cold water runs down the back of the man in one

wing into a pot. He sings C sharp, D, D sharp, E flat, the whole worker’s song … a melody of

violins shimmers pure and as delicate as a girl. A veil spreads latitudes. The glow in the center

boils a deep dark red. … I demand unity of the forming of space. I demand unity of the

molding of time.”375

Schwitters’s conception of a composite work of art in the theatre coalesces with the

Futurists’ preference for materiality, tactility, and abstraction, which led them to include

different media and materials in their synthetic theatre. The idea of an abstract theatre based

on the materiality of sound, colour, mass, and movement was not limited by national borders

but was advanced by an international group of avant-garde artists. The Bauhaus theory and

practice of “total theatre” can be traced not only to German Expressionists and Dadaists like

Oskar Kokoschka, Lothar Schreyer, or Schwitters, but also to Italian and Russian Futurists

like Marinetti, Cangiullo, Balla, Depero, and Prampolini, as well as Malevich, Tatlin, and

Kandinsky, who broke ground for the hybridization and synthesis of art forms that constitutes

an essential element of contemporary theatricality.

EXPRESSIONIST GEIST PERFORMANCE: A CONFLUENCE OF VERBAL, VOCAL, AND STAGE SOUND

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The German Expressionist theatre that developed in the first decades of the twentieth century,

most notably in the period of the Weimar Republic, exhibits three different performance

styles: scream or ecstatic Shrei-performance, spiritual or abstract Geist-performance, and self-

centred or ego Ich-performance. Kokoschka’s Murderer, the Woman’s Hope (1909), whose

hybrid form was discussed here earlier, is considered the source of all three styles. Undeniably

the eroticism and physicality of Schrei-performance, in which “sounds became corporal and

movements aural,” made it suitable material for the dramaturgy of sound. The dramaturgy of

sound became integral to Geist-performance in determining an abstract aural dimension, that

is, spirit of performance. In his production of August Stramm’s play Sancta Susanna in

October 1918, Lothar Schreyer, a key practitioner of the Sturmbühne, shaped a model of

Geist-performance in which “setting, sound and action combine on equal terms.” This type of

performance finds its roots in Kandinsky’s theory of “inner sound” that externally

differentiates but essentially unites bodily and colour-tone sounds and their movements into a

stage composition. Influenced by Kandinsky, Schreyer, who was also a visual artist in the role

of theatre director, developed a particular mise en scène based almost exclusively on the

rhythmic and acoustic properties of dramatic language and stage elements. He conceived of

drama/performance as “a rhythmic succession of sounds” that echoes the Geist (spirit) of the

phenomenal world. In addition, Schreyer’s performance technique was inspired by the

concepts of the aurality and plasticity of the stage derived from Zurich Dada and Futurism. In

the Sturmbühne’s sound-based performances, Mel Gordon claims, we find “bright-color

backdrops of black, yellow, green, and red … oversized cylindrical costumes made from

geometrically-painted cardboard and wire … gigantic ten-foot-high masks … bizarre

instrumentation, like a West African xylophone, glass harmonica, or a violin-solo -- all

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dramatic elements of other avant-garde theatres.”376 This led Gordon to conclude that it was

Lothar Schreyer who, albeit unintentionally, “bridged Expressionism’s abstractionist

beginnings from Kandinsky’s Blaue Reiter movement (1911) to Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus

Theatre Workshop (1923).”377

Schreyer’s emphasis on the sound structure of theatre performance was in keeping

with the emphasis that avant-garde poets placed on the sound of words. Like the poets

associated with Futurism and Dada, Schreyer eschewed conventional concerns with tempo or

metre and sought instead the “fundamental sound” of language. Once liberated from their

syntactic fetters, he believed, words would reveal the spirit (Geist) that lies hidden in their

inner sound. Historical evidence of the affinity of his ideas with Marinetti’s concept of parole

in libertà can be found in Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm, an influential Berlin magazine that

continued to publish Futurist poetry and manifestos throughout the 1910s. Soon afterwards, a

number of German Expressionists started writing poems in strings of rough, elementary words

instead of verses, which were, once freed from syntax and versification, were able to carry a

rich texture of surprising verbal analogies and sonorous combinations. Stramm, for example,

as John Willett has noted, destroyed all his previous writings after reading Marinetti’s

“Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” in 1912. His ensuing poetry and dramatic opus,

including Sancta Susanna, were marked by condensed dialogues in an asyntactical,

telegraphic language with emphasis on sound akin to parole in libertà. Schreyer, who joined

the Der Sturm circle in 1916 and became the editor of the magazine, was also exposed to

Futurist influence. Experimenting with bruitist declamation and art-of-noise art imported from

Italian serate, for two years he organized numerous “sensational, if sometimes

incomprehensible” evenings. By the close of 1918 Schreyer had moved to Hamburg, where he
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formed the Kampfbühne ensemble and started to work on short plays resembling Futurist

sintesi.

The rhythmic and aural principles of Geist performance, as David Kuhns suggests,

come from Schreyer’s conviction that “every word has a particular ‘sound value’ based on its

structure of consonants and vowels … [and] together they determine the unique ‘word-tone’ of

every word. Each word, each sentence, has its unique rhythmic properties; the rhythmic

succession of words in drama is a rhythmic succession of sounds.”378 Primarily concerned with

the sound of performance, Schreyer developed a profoundly meditative program of actor

training based on vocal gymnastics: a practice of incantation focused on the sound and pace of

single words and brief phrases of condensed Expressionist scripts. He taught his students to

express various “vibrations of the soul” with their mouths and throats in an act of “sound-

speech” different from conventional talk, dramatic dialogue, or operatic singing. “Individual

‘sound-speakers’ learned to create a ‘rhythmically harmonized’ ensemble, known as a

‘speech-choir.’”379 This expressive style was employed, more recently, in the postmodern

theatre practice of the late Einar Schleef.

In conventional drama, alleged Schreyer, the actor is an agent while the words are the

agency. In contrast, Geist-actors are an agency allowing word-sounds to become agents.

Hence, actors no longer deliver mere dramatic character speech; they consciously produce

word-sounds as material constituents of performance. The actors, now equal to voice and

body, sound and movement, can be treated as formal materials of poetry and theatre. They

become “sound figures” or bearers of “form, color, movement, and sound.” Schreyer asked

Geist actors not to portray men, but rather to become “animated and resounding color-form.”

Thus, the performers were encouraged to create movement and actions from what they felt in
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the sounds of the words and the colours of the stage rather than in a dramatic text. They

followed the internal logic of an abstract/concrete stage composition in which sensory

attractions induce one other, explains Schreyer: “The movement colors the form. The

movement forms the color. The sound induces the color-form. The induced color-form

produces sound.”380

Schreyer’s Geist-style staging of Sancta Susanna was an autonomous stage

composition in which these modalities of “inner sound” flowed into each other. Its hybrid

form caused consternation among critics, who had some respect for Stamm’s script but did not

appreciate the actors’ “sound-speaking,” the mystic changes of music and light, and, most

intensely, the character of the rebellious nun, Susanna, played in the nude. Hebert Ihering’s

review enumerates the distinct, albeit for him undesirable, aural qualities of the performance:

“Before a gaudy black, yellow, green and red wall stands a woman. … She speaks, sings,

sounds a litany. … A second woman answers in a shrill, whistling, giddily high voice. The

antiphony continues in harsh dissonances until the woman who is lying on the ground begins

to sing a coloratura aria. … The acoustic signals of Clementia and Susanna are exchanged

again. Now there are trombone flourishes; then later, whistles. One time muffled thuds;

another time, clinking glasses. The bodies move like marionettes. Anything dropped to the

ground is supposed to be inwardly composed sound, and the nude scene is supposed to be

austerely rhythmic. Behind the scenery, Negro drums complete and intensify the

orchestration.”381

Apparently, critics were not ready for Schreyer’s foray into sound-colour abstraction

and the actors’ non-psychological play. Schreyer soon left the Sturmbühne for Hamburg to

experiment further with sound and rhythm until Walter Gropius called him to be the first
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teacher of the Bauhaus Theatre Workshop in Weimar in 1921. In his final contribution to the

Sturmbühne magazine, Schreyer offered an apt summation of abstract theatre:

Art is the artistically logical formulation of optical and acoustic relations.

Art comes from the senses and appeals to the senses.

It has nothing to do with understanding.

The theatre is the formulation of focal color forms.382

Schreyer’s mystical inclination toward the inner sounds and rhythms of words,

people, and the world did not last long in a school that was predominantly oriented to

functional design. It was his student, Oskar Schlemmer, who took up his teacher’s post and, in

his Triadic Ballet of 1922, developed a similarly abstract but primarily visual technique

emblematic of the Bauhaus. As Kuhns alleges, “Schreyer cautioned that a geometric approach

to the principles of theatrical movement tended toward ‘undisguised constructivism.’”

Schlemmer admitted that the Workshop paid inadequate attention to the sound of language

with an excuse: “For the time being, we must be content with the silent play of gesture and

motion -- that is, pantomime -- firmly believing that one day the word will develop

automatically from it.”383

Yet, from Gropius’s introduction to The Theatre of the Bauhaus, originally published

1924, one can conclude that the dramaturgy of sound was alive and well in the celebrated

artistic school. Gropius describes first performances prepared by the theatre class as a

synacoustic/synoptic mix of attractions, which remind us of the above review of Sancta

Susanna:
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The dancers [were] in metallic masks and costumed in padded, sculptural suits. …

The silence was broken by a whirring sound ending in a small thump; a crescendo of

buzzing noises culminated in a crash followed by portentous and dismayed silence.

Another phase of the dance had all the formal and contained violence of a chorus of

cats, down to the meowing and bass growls, which were marvelously accentuated by

the resonant mask-heads. Pace and gesture, figure and prop, color and sound, all had

the quality of elementary form. … The stage elements were assembled, re-grouped,

amplified, and gradually grew into something like a ‘play,’ we never found out

whether comedy or tragedy. ... Set of formal elements ... gestures and sounds would

become speech and plot.384

AURAL DRAMATURGY IN THE FUTURIST SYNTHETIC THEATRE

In 1915, after all their experiences with propagandistic art-as-action (arte-azione) events,

bruitist declamation at theatrical evenings (serate), hybrid performances at gallery afternoons

(pomeriggi spetacollari), and attempts at variety theatre, Futurists took a decisive step toward

a “real” theatre. They decided to engage professional actors to stage a series of their sintesi

(short dramatic texts). Thus, in 1915 and 1916, several leading actors (capocomici) -- Ettore

Berti, Ettore Petrolini, Luciano Molinari, among others -- and their companies, commissioned

by Marinetti and friends, toured Italy with full-evening programs of Futurist sintesi. These

tours, meant to popularize Futurist theatre, turned out to be an unfortunate step backwards.

Encouraging a number of minor artists to write short synthetic plays, Futurists found
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themselves promoting sintesi of a lower quality; most of the performances on these tours were

not very well received. Besides, the radical reform of theatre they sought could not be

adequately represented on the institutional stage of the time. Nevertheless, “The Futurist

Synthetic Theatre,” a manifesto written by Marinetti, Emilio Settimelli, and Bruno Corra and

published in February 1915 together with two volumes of short plays, several of which

scripted by the strongest talents of Italian Futurism, remains a source of inspiration for the

contemporary theatre. Most importantly for the inquiry into the dramaturgy of sound, many of

the theatrical sintesi, especially those subtitled as abstract, included sound as their essential

component. They continued the synaesthetic explorations in painting, poetry, and music and

evolved into a synthetic dramaturgy announced by the manifesto: “The Futurist theatrical

synthesis … will be autonomous, will resemble nothing but itself. … Above all, just as the

painter and composer discover, scattered through the outside world, a narrower but more

intense life, made up of colours, forms, sounds and noises, the same is true for the man gifted

with theatrical sensibility, for whom a specialized reality exists that violently assaults his

nerves: it consists of what is called THE THEATRICAL WORLD.”385

The manifesto’s dictum that Futurist theatre would “resemble nothing but itself”

promises an abstraction of the inherent theatricality of the real world “made up of colours,

forms, sounds and noises.” Theatre, then, was bound to be not about human beings and their

psychology, suffering, or joy, but about the matter that makes up the world. Futurist theatre

works were supposed to compress “fragmentary dynamic symphonies of gestures, words,

sounds and lights” that capture a mood, a sensation, and a state of consciousness and create

“stage ambiences where different actions, atmospheres, and times can interpenetrate and

unroll simultaneously.”386 The new theatre had to be synthetic, which meant extremely
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condensed and short. Some sintesi are only momentary flashes -- Cangiullo’s Detonation, for

instance, consists of a bullet shot on an empty stage. The synthetic theatre had to be

atechnical, that is, dismissive of the dramaturgy of passéist, naturalistic playwriting and

staging (most of the manifesto is devoted to this issue). It should be dynamic, simultaneous,

autonomous, alogical, and unreal -- all features alluding to concepts developed in Futurist

poetry and painting.

The attribute “alogical” used in the manifesto, although consistent with

contemporaneous developments in painting and poetry, was a new word in Marinetti’s

theoretical vocabulary. It is generally accepted that the manifesto’s co-authors, Corra and

Settimelli, were the prime movers of alogical art and the push toward abstraction in synthetic

theatre. On the other hand, as Lista points out, Marinetti’s intensified contacts with Russian

Cubo-Futurist poets and painters, after his 1914 visit to Moscow and St. Petersburg,

influenced his adoption of the term “alogical” for the description of the new dramaturgy.387

Indeed, as discussed earlier in this chapter, Marinetti’s readiness to steer toward abstraction

was apparent in his controversy with Livshits during the visit. Consequently, “The Futurist

Synthetic Theatre” determined its subject to be “autonomous,” “unreal,” and “resembling

nothing but itself,” using the vocabulary of Cubo-Futurist “objectless art.”

Some of the most interesting synthetic pieces were written by Marinetti, a relentless

innovator of Futurist poetics, Cangiullo, a man with a proto-Dadaist sense of absurd humour

and playfulness, and Balla, known for brave experiments with abstract pictorial and aural

forms. Balla wrote Macchina tipografica (Printing Press, 1914) as a score for “onomatopea

rumorista” with choreographed movement and stipulated duration. Twelve performers on the
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stage, in front of a large backdrop/billboard reading TIPOGRAFIA, enacted movements of

machine pistons and wheels, simultaneously repeating each different phoneme:

1st PERSON: settesette …

2nd PERSON: nennenenne …

3rd PERSON: vùùùùmmùù …

4th PERSON: tè.tè.tè …

5th PERSON: miaaaaaanavano …

6th PERSON: sta -- sta -- …

7th PERSON: lalala …

8th PERSON: ftftft …

9th PERSON: iòriòriò …

10th PERSON: scsscsscs scsscsscs …

11th PERSON: vèvèvè …

12th PERSON: nunnnònòn nunnnònòn …388

The manuscript of the sintesi has three folios containing a script for vocalization, a

design for the backdrop with huge typographic upper-case letters, a schematic study of the

circular movement of the performers’ arms with notes for the tempo, and a sketch of the

costumes in white, black, and orange. The performers on the stage produce abstract

vocalizations mimicking the mechanical noise and rotation of printing machine parts. From

Balla’s sketch one can see that in performance they looked like semaphores moving by the

rules of Futurist dance and synoptic declamation that required the “fluency of a train wheel
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and of an airplane propeller.” The visual, kinetic, and aural elements of the piece are simple,

repetitive, and abstract to the point that, if not for the backdrop, one would be hard-pressed to

decide exactly what they represented. Even though it gave an impression similar to Foregger’s

Machine Dances, which appeared almost ten years later, the sound of Macchina tipografica

was definitely of another kind. It was not produced by metal noisemakers but by vocal

onomatopoeia resembling nothing but itself, and sounded like an accelerated version of

Balla’s previous attempts at free word poetry, Verbalizzazioni astratte (Abstract

Verbalizations) and Mimiche sinottiche (Sinoptic Mimes). Curiously, depending on which

source one refers to, Macchina tipografica has been considered an onomatopoeic poem, a

theatrical sintesi, and a Futurist ballet. Lista, for example, included it in his anthology of

Futurist theatre as a ballet script. This is probably because Balla and friends showcased the

piece for Diaghilev in his Parisian drawing-room, attempting to convince him to include it in a

double bill with Feu d’artifice. Unfortunately, that attempt failed. Among Futurists the piece

was regarded as moto-rumorist, in this case performed by people who would soon be replaced

by kinetic objects, puppets, or machines.

A later work by Balla, Sconcertazione di stati d’animo (Disconcerted States of Mind

1916), represents another stage complex of sounds, colours, forms, and movements. The

language of the piece is reduced to simple, phonetic gestures: four individually costumed

people stand on a white stage simultaneously talking, gesticulating, and producing abstract

vocalizations. What makes the work unusual is the quasi-musical character of its script. Its

verbal/sound material is organized into four micro-scenes/stanzas or tempos in an arrangement

similar to a music score. The stanzas are separated by lines/bars into four quasi-musical

movements of a set length. In the first “movement” each performer loudly recites various
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rounds of numbers: 666, 333, 444, and 999. In the second, the performers pronounce different

letters/sounds: aaa, ttt, sss, and uuu. The third consists of four parallel silent gestures; the first

performer raises his hat, the second looks at his watch, the third blows his nose, and the fourth

reads a newspaper. The concluding, fourth stanza, in contrast to the restrained and serious tone

of the previous ones, serves as a kind of emotional crescendo in which all the characters

perform very expressively, delivering their lines loudly and simultaneously. First goes

“sadness – aiaiaiaiaiaiaiai’” second “quickness -- quickly, quickly,” third “pleasure -- sí sí sí sí

sí’” and fourth “denial -- no no no no no no.” 389

Balla dwells on the simultaneity and compenetration of states of mind by the

rhythmic play of sounds and gestures. Human emotion is only permitted at its end, but even

then it is disconnected from the characters, whose lines overlap and lose their relation to

individual psychology. The audience’s reading of sadness, quickness, pleasure, and denial is

thrown off balance as the work verges into the humorous or tragic cacophony of the synthetic

piece.

Storneli vocali (Vowel Refrains, 1916), a sintesi by Francesco Cangiullo, subtitled

“verses of life -- music of death,” has a similar structure. Five characters line up onstage and

respond to the master of ceremonies with the refrains of a dying man, a doctor, the relatives,

the brother, and the crowd. The characters answer each with different, lengthy pronunciations

of a vowel sound: aaaah, eh, iiih, oh oh oh oh, and uh. The sarcastic but clearly abstract

conclusion comes when the emcee mechanically utters the line “A. E. I. O. U.” Obviously, any

naturalistic “as-if” acting is out of the question here. Even if a performer chooses to

emotionally emphasize with the tragic absurdity of his or her situation, the individual act will

be restricted by the performers’ having to stand in a chorus line.

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In Balla’s Per comprendere il pianto (To Understand Weeping, 1916), two men, one

dressed in a white summer suit and the other in a woman’s black mourning dress, stand before a

square backdrop painted half in red and half in green. They deliver their lines with the utmost

solemnity. Fourteen lines of dialogue repeat a series of nonsensical vocalizations and numbers:

MAN IN BLACK: To understand weeping…

MAN IN WHITE: Mispicchiritotiti

MAN IN BLACK: 48

MAN IN WHITE: Brancapatarsa

MAN IN BLACK: 1215 ma mi…

MAN IN WHITE: Ullurbusssssut

MAN IN BLACK: 1, seems you are laughing

MAN IN WHITE: Sgnacarsanipir

MAN IN BLACK: 111.111.022 I forbid you to laugh

MAN IN WHITE: Parplicurplotorplaplint

MAN IN BLACK: 888, for God’s sssssake don’t laugh! Understand?

MAN IN WHITE: Iiiiii rrrrr I rr iririri

MAN IN BLACK: 12344 Enough! Stop it! Stop laughing!

MAN IN WHITE: I have to laugh.390

This could go on indefinitely were it not for the Man in Black’s demanding of the

Man in White to stop laughing. But there is no realistically motivated laughter or mourning on

the stage, just two parroting performers in contrasting black and white costumes, in front of

the backdrop of contrasting colours, talking in the style of parole in libertà. The materials of
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sound and colour, used to express diametrically opposite states of mind, have overtaken the

dramaturgy of characters who might be weeping or laughing for different psychological

reasons. In spite of its slight suggestion of the grotesque by clothing one of the men in a

woman’s mourning dress, the spectator is left wondering whether the piece requires any

understanding of weeping at all. Still, through the clash of the visual and aural material, one

can perceive an embryonic dramatic form.

The use of nonsense language and the production of noise are the central

dramaturgical elements of two sintesi by Mario Carli: Stati d’animo and Violenza (“States of

Mind” and “Violence,” 1916). In Stati d’animo the stage is a typical promenade café filled

with ordinary patrons speaking an extraordinary, nonsensical language. In truth, all the

characters express their attitudes appropriately but they do so using an “inappropriate”

vocabulary of abstract vocalizations. This vocabulary apparently serves them well; it

expresses their states of mind by means of pure vocal gestures. Thus, a speculator bites his

fingernails and calculates possible gains by uttering clusters of harsh consonants: “astrr ghrrr

frr magnakalacafu…” while a student at the next table conveys nostalgia and bitterness:

“auflin bergin ochiputecio…” The coquette, in turn, glances at both of them, flirting: “chono

chiono psi psi…” while the clerk reads a newspaper: “ito rito marito oro coro coloro...” The

journalist, the deputy, and the lovers follow the same pattern. Only the poet and the

philosopher express a few pseudo-comprehensible words like “shudder mystery sunrise” and

“casuistry universal perspicuity,” but their phrases sound more like verbal noise than

meaningful speech. The short scene of an everyday, carefree afternoon abruptly ends when a

wrestler rushes in, fighting everyone, overturning tables, and screaming, “brututum zum

pum!”391 Two blocks of sonority clash: the indifferent murmur of the café visitors occupied
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with their own states of mind gets forcefully disrupted by the violent, aggressive noise of the

intruder.

Violenza, subtitled “a symphony,” represents again an ordinary street soundscape. It

is populated by everyday people, but this time, instead of the drone of a café, a much more

intense sound permeates the stage. It begins with the offstage sound of a distant drum roll and

cymbals that intensifies throughout the scene. With time, this aural backdrop becomes loud

enough to incite a growing frenzy among the people in the street. Vendors loudly advertise

their merchandise while a newspaper hawker throws out the headlines: “Killing!

Bombardment! Disaster!” A man is chased out of a café by a waiter. They shout: “I won’t

pay! You have to pay! I won’t pay! You have to pay!” We hear children scream, windows

smashed, cracks of a whip, and a tire exploding offstage. Two actors loudly rehearse a quarrel

scene. A real couple starts a violent fight that ends with the woman lying stabed on the

pavement. Another man unsuccessfully chases a woman with the words, “Magda! If you don’t

return I’ll kill myself!” and blows out his brains with a pistol. The persistent, ominous sound

of drums and cymbals accompanying all stage actions reaches its deafening crescendo in the

duels between these couples. Then a sudden silence sends “a shiver of disgust” through

everyone on stage. As all hastily make their exit in different directions, fruit-stands and tables

with drinks get overturned and food is scattered on the floor. The loud, violent soundscape is

abruptly replaced by a deathlike silence; only a distant tremble of the windowpanes is to be

heard on the now-deserted the stage. The glow of a bloody-red sunset appears; night falls.

Fairly soon, as a new dawn arrives, we see an old man and woman slowly exiting a house with

the help of a young boy. As the old couple comes to the front exchanging trivial phrases about
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a peaceful life -- the old man is happy; “La violenza non esiste,” he says -- the boy

“innocently” points out two corpses lying onstage. The end.

There is no standard dramatic development here. Quite the opposite, in fact; the

actions of the characters are chaotic, fragmented, and unmotivated. The piece is moulded in

sound -- sound is its main dramaturgical device. The conflict and resolution, if those are still

needed in an “atechnical” sintesi, reside in the different aural qualities of the work’s three

parts -- or three tempi, as Balla calls scenes of his abstract “Disconcerted States of Mind.”

Although Carli did not separate the parts by bar lines, they differ sharply by their intensity,

timbre, and rhythm. The three parts are juxtaposed in the manner of a musical or, rather, noise

composition. The first part, whose irritating, violent sonority reaches its high point in a

cacophonous turmoil, ends abruptly with a man and a woman lying dead in the street. The

second part, short and silent, is juxtaposed to this longer part; we hear only the gentle but

menacing trembling of windows in a soft sunset breeze. The final, third, part is an ironic idyll

of the subdued speech of the old couple and a young boy: a dialogue of the “disenfranchised.”

To show the absurdity of the dramatic content, Carli uses sonic textures

contrapuntally; he juxtaposes layers of different timbre, rhythm, and intensity, making a

collage of various soundscapes in a manner close to musique concrète and Russolo’s noise

compositions. Without a doubt, the drama in his Stati d’animo and Violenza builds through the

compenetration and simultaneity of aural elements.

Marinetti’s abstract sintesi Lotta di fondali (The Battle of the Backdrops, 1916) is a

play with the-stage-as-itself, in which the protagonists are ubiquitous symbols of the theatre:

curtains forced into an interactive play with living characters. The first scene unfurls in front

of a red backdrop as we hear the shouts of a rebellious, stampeding crowd. Three characters,
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the Bully, the Sensitive, and the Persuasive, enter one after another and deliver

incomprehensible speeches, with different attitudes, toward the backdrop. This is followed by

a minute of silence. Then the backdrop changes, or, one could more appropriately say, it exits

and another one enters. Thus, in the second scene, after a red exits, a soft blue backdrop

appears and we hear:

Four mandolins play a sweet note, offstage.

A minute of silence.

Whispering and repressed laughter, offstage.

A scale played on a flute, offstage.

The voice of an amorous woman, offstage.

A very rending sob, offstage.

Three beats on an invisible bass drum.

The stage lights dim.

In the dark, the loud snoring of a man. 392

While the first scene contains characters who deliver dramatic, though unintelligible,

lines, the second contains only sound: music, noise, and silence on an empty stage. It is at this

point that Marinetti uses sound alone as the dramaturgical element of his play. In the script he

makes a point of stipulating the exact duration of the pause -- a minute of silence -- and thus

highlighting the dominance of aurality in the play. This kind of rhythmic juxtaposition of

silent and sounded blocks reappears in Marinetti’s later synthetic radio pieces.

The red and the soft blue backdrop can be thought of as characters. Indifferent and

silent against the futility of human rioting or love affairs, they bear witness to the dignity of
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matter. They act similarly to the chairs and pieces of furniture in Marinetti’s drammi di ogetti

(dramas of objects) Il Teatrino dell’Amore and Vengono. Giving character roles to inanimate

objects, Marinetti reveals his love for matter and wish to abolish the anthropocentrism of

bourgeois art.

Il Teatrino dell’Amore (The Little Theatre of Love, 1916) is a drama of objects

developed in the background of a dreamy atmospheric love-betrayal plot with real characters:

a husband, a wife, a lover, and a little girl. Here the kitchen buffet and the sideboard take over

the emotional tension of the show by expressing the “suffering” of the material. Marinetti

attends to the tactile features and texture of their materials; we literally hear the noise of

wooden objects shrinking and expanding as they are exposed to the touch, weight, pressure,

and moisture of their surroundings. Their lines, quasi-objective reports of the physical

conditions mixed with onomatopoetic mimesis, are rhythmically interspersed with moments of

silence:

IL BUFFET: Cric. It’s gonna rain in three quarters of an hour (Silence).

Griiiiil. They’re opening the gate (Silence). Cric Cric. The pressure of the

silver service is greater than my consistency!

LA CREDENZA: Crac-crac. On the third floor, the maid is gonna lie in bed

(Silence). It’s 70 kilos on the scale (Silence). Craac.

-------

IL BUFFET: Cric. It’s raining.

LA CREDENZA: Crac. I dilate (Silence). … Craac craac.393

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The objects/characters of the chairs in Vengono (They Are Coming, 1916) are

submitted to torture by a majordomo and maids who are nervously preparing a reception for

guests who never arrive. It is a choreographed piece of subtle violence in which the sadistic

majordomo forces the maids to constantly rearrange the seating plan. The ultimate victims are,

of course, the chairs. Panicking near the end of the play, the majordomo starts to speak

nonsensically -- “briccatirakamemame” -- herding the maids into a corner of the room. At the

end, the chairs silently “leave” the stage with a beam of light elongating their shadows as if

they were moving toward the exit.

In Marinetti’s drammi di ogetti the dramaturgy of sound (expressed by

onomatopoeia, incomprehensible vocalizations, and strictly programmed silences) joins lights,

colours, and the disposition of objects to create the subtleties of stati d’animo onstage.

Replacing the dramatic or narrative development of the play with an audio-visual composition

of a stage environment able to emanate energies, these synthetic pieces announced the

theatricality of the architectural composition/construction of sound, light, and objects in

motion.

PRAMPOLINI, CARRÀ, AND DEPERO SYNAESTHETIC THEORIES AND ABSTRACT STAGES

The path toward the synthetic form of Futurist theatre, initiated by the exploration of synaesthetic

correspondences in painting, can be traced in two manifestos published in 1913, “The Painting of

Sounds, Noises and Smells” by Carlo Carrà and “Chromophony -- the Colours of Sounds” by

Enrico Prampolini.
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Carrà, for example, maintained that sounds, noises, and smells incorporated in the

painterly expression of lines, volumes, and colours are able to create dynamic, polyphonic

architectural entities similar to musical works. Obviously indebted to Kandinsky’s suggestion of

synaesthetic and vibrational correspondences of sound and colour, his elaboration was similar to

the ideas of Rayonists Mikhail Larionov and Nataliya Gonchareva, who maintained that vibrations

of sound and colour, and their reflections (rays) in the atmosphere, were integral to painting. For

them, it was not the representation of a figure or an object but the abstract play of atmospheric

vibrations that made a picture. Carrà also tried to objectify colour and sound as carriers of abstract

shapes; he claimed, “From the formal point of view: there are sounds, noises and smells which are

concave, convex, triangular, ellipsoidal, oblong, conical, spherical, spiral, etc. From the colour

point of view: there are sounds, noises and smells which are yellow, green, dark blue, light blue,

violet.”394 On these grounds Carrà promoted an art of total painting that involved the cooperation

of all the senses. His acknowledgment of sound as colour -- and vice versa, colour as sound -- and

his depiction of a work of art as a polyphonic architectural construction were practically realized

in Depero’s abstract synthesis Colori, a pioneering attempt at a kinetic sound sculpture in

performance.

Prampolini, an abstractionist painter who became the most successful and internationally

recognized stage designer of Futurism, went further in expressing atmospheric and emotional

states of mind through the synergy of sound and colour, which he called “chromophony.”

Chromophony amalgamates the plastic entity of set with scenic action, the movement of actors (if

they appear on stage at all), light, and sound. Its force and lyrical beauty stem from the intrinsic

material quality of these elements. As for sound, he said: “Why have I chosen sound in order to

define the basis of chromophony? Because, it is the fittest expression for classifying these new
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manifestations of mankind. […] A noise, a sound, a word, while arousing in the atmosphere a

pure dynamic vibration, arouses within the volatile imagination of the artist the intuitive

chromatic stimulus.”395

Prampolini tries to scientifically justify the artistically productive impact of sound

and noise on visual arts. He describes chromophony by giving an example of an engine sound

that displaces the atmosphere, rhythmically diffuses in it, and rebounding from obstacles

breaks up into a myriad of chromatic scales that awake many lights and colours. For him

“painting is an aggregation of chromatic vibrations” in the atmosphere, able to express the

complexity of physical and psychic forces in nature; it is a pure optical visuality that “needs

no help from culture.” Consequently the artist, like the spectator, gets hold of the material

essence of a work of art and its idiom beyond cultural codification and framing.

In Fortunato Depero’s piece Colori (Colours, 1915), subtitled “an abstract theatrical

synthesis,” the stage consists of a pale blue cubic room with no doors or windows. Inside this

abstract room, or box, four abstract individualities, or objects, make abstract movements

manipulated by invisible strings and talk in an abstract, incomprehensible language of babble

and noise. The cast members are described in physical terms, not by human traits. GRAY is

“dark, plastic, dynamic ovoid;” RED is “plastic, triangular, dynamic polyhedron;” WHITE is

“plastic, long-lined, sharp point;” and BLACK is “multiglobe.”

Lista called the piece “a visualization of psychic forces, a kind of ballet of abstract

forms and sounds.”396 It is unclear whether it is a picture staged according to the laws of

chromophony or sound transformed into kinetic sculpture. The four individualities are

supposed to produce vocalizations of their stati d’animo that in turn correspond by nature and

timbre to the relevant chromatic and formal essence of their own shape and colour. BLACK
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speaks with a “very profound, guttural voice,” WHITE “has a sharp, thin, brittle voice,”

GRAY utters “animal-like sounds,” while RED’s voice is “roaring and crushing.” Their lines

are written in the manner of parole in libertà; indeed, the whole two-page script looks like a

tavola parolibera sinotica, containing vertical and horizontal lines of different-sized letters,

typefaces, and levels of boldness. Fragments of their speech go:

BLACK: TO COM momomoo dom pom grommo BLOM uoco DLONN …

WHITE: ZINN – FLINN fin ui tli tli dlinn ...

GRAY: Bluma dum du clu umu fubulù …

RED: SOKRA TI BOM TAM cò te’ to’ lico397

Near the end they start to relentlessly repeat their lines in unison until a whistle

interrupts them. As Daniela Fonti asserts, “There is no story; the whole dramatic action is

reduced to the presence of four protagonists whose only meaning is to be phonetic-chromatic

equivalents; in short, pure self-reference.”398

Colori represented the dramatization and visualization of Depero’s “onomalingua,”

an idiom that he derived from onomatopoeia, parole in libertà, and Russolo’s rumorismo

(noisiness). Onomalingua, as the author defines it, is an abstract verbalization of colours,

forms, materials, speed, light, temperature, space, and states of mind -- a kind of “universal

abstract poetry.” Colori replicated its structure in the field of plasticity, aurality,

chromaticity, and illumination as a synergetic theatre performance based on the collusion of

objects, words, sounds, lights, and movements. The piece was similar to Kandinsky’s

staging of Mussorgsky’s Images from an Exhibition, one of his experiments from the

Bauhaus period, in which the flow of the music generated kinetic images of an abstract

theatrical tableau radiating its own “inner sound.” In Depero’s Colori, however, there is no
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musical composition in the background; its sonority is supplied by the objects/characters,

who themselves produce the audio-visual structure of the performance. Depero’s piece relies

solely on the pulsation of the intrinsic energies of the differently shaped/coloured objects;

their dramatic clash is generated in the sphere of their aural, chromatic, kinetic, and plastic

features. Colori, therefore, can be considered as an early, crude, but for that reason radical

attempt at the dissociation of anthropocentrism and psychology from matter and form. Most

importantly, it announced further Futurist explorations of scenography and choreography,

leading toward conceptualization of the plastic moto-rumorist complex, the most relevant

expressive mode of their abstract theatre. Unfortunately, like the majority of the Futurists’

outstanding conceptual works, Colori was never staged.

THE PLASTIC MOTO-RUMORIST COMPLEX: A PREFIGURATION OF THE BAUHAUS THEATRE

To claim that it was the Futurists’ recognition of the materiality of sound and the ensuing

dramaturgy of sound that laid the theoretical and practical groundwork for their abstract painting

and stage design might at first seem far-fetched. But it was Futurist visual artists who shared an

interest in the texture, density, and treatment of verbal/painterly masses with Futurist poets and

who first came up with the oxymoronic term “chromophony” to denote the synaesthetic,

vibrational interference between colour and sound. Their approach to audio-visual hybridity of

art was a crucial step toward the conceptualization of the plastic moto-rumorist complex

(complesso plastico motorumoristo) broad enough to encompass all the material elements of

theatre and to synthesize all that was seen and heard on the Futurist stage. The term was coined

in 1915 by Balla and Depero, in their manifesto “Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe,” to

describe the creation of marionette-like or robot-like “polyexpressive artificial living beings.” Its
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meaning was extended that same year by Prampolini in his “Futurist Scenography and

Choreography” to include the creation of an abstract entity equivalent to the scenic action of a

theatrical work of art. For Balla, Depero, and Prampolini, the plastic moto-rumorist complex

represented much more than stage objects, sets, lights, and sound; it was the plastic equivalent

of the simultaneity, compenetration, and dynamism of the theatrical performance. It was born

from the dynamic interplay of the fluid phenomena of light, noise, and motion in the time and

space of a performance. Sound was considered an obvious and inextricable part of the plastic

moto-rumorist complex since it was a medium in which motion and noise, key attributes of the

performance, amalgamate, creating materiality and atmosphere on the stage.

The manifesto “Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe” was a result of the growing

maturity of Futurist art. Its significance lies in an effort to embrace all possible forms of

sensory perception and unite them, formulating “a new aesthetic object -- ‘the plastic

complex’ -- which marks a leap from a statement of synaesthesia to a concrete

reconstruction.”399 Balla and Depero acknowledged having been influenced by Marinetti’s

words-in-freedom and Russolo’s art of noises, which provided a dynamic, simultaneous,

plastic, and noisy expression of universal vibration. Their ambition was to achieve a synthesis

that would satisfy a newly established Futurist sensibility. Consequently, they defined the

“plastic complex” as “poetry + painting + sculpture + music … a noisiest-pictorial-psychic

complex plasticism, [which uses] onomatopoeia, graphic equivalents of noises, phonoplastic

equivalents, psycho-plastic equivalents.”400 Balla and Depero promised: “We will give

skeleton and flesh to the invisible, the impalpable, the imponderable, and the imperceptible.

We will find abstract elements of all forms and all elements of the universe … a life-work
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based on a variety of materials and most of all on its autonomous character of a plastic

complex that is similar to itself.”401

In addition, they suggested that all of this had to be done with joy. Hence, the

manifesto initiated the construction of Futurist toys, artificial landscapes, and mechanical

animals. The authors professed an abstract but energetic and optimistic art in which the

temporal elements -- sound and motion -- merged with the spatial ones -- forms and plastic

objects. They made a list of kinetic categories that determine plastic complexes as

decompositions, rotations, and miracle magic. The contraptions, puppets, and robots they

imagined and constructed would not only be illuminated but would be illuminating, colourful,

and bright in themselves. Two such contraptions made by Balla, the “Plastic Ensemble

Coloured with Din + Speed” and the “Plastic Ensemble Coloured with Din + Dance + Gaiety,”

were reproduced in the manifesto. Although the actual objects might not be that illuminating,

the concept of a moto-rumorist plasticity of the Futurist stage has remained inspirational for a

type of contemporary theatre that sculpts and constructs an autonomous

performance/production in space and time.

Giacomo Balla’s stage set for Stravinsky’s ballet Feu d’artifice (Fireworks), was

conceived as such a construction. The “ballet” premiered on 24 April 1917 at the Teatro

Costanzi in Rome under the direction of Serge Diaghilev, conducted by Ernest Ansermet.

There were no human performers on the stage. Instead, a big flower-like sculpture with a heart

of sound, an atmosphere of light, and the muscles of abstract forms pulsated on the stage.

Balla had lights replace the dancers. He built a complex of abstract sculptures made of

prismatic, pointed, half-spherical, and half-cylindrical wooden boxes covered with painted

fabric. The lower structures diffracted and reflected beams of coloured lights, while the
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smaller ones on the top, transparent and translucent, were illuminated from the back and

inside. Stravinsky’s score was virtually choreographed by changes of lights that blinked on

and off. There were forty-nine light cues for a show that lasted approximately five minutes, so

that Balla had to devise a lighting keyboard in the booth. With its help, music and colour were

synthesized in a dynamic interplay of bursts of sounds and lights. Rays of coloured light that

backlit the asymmetrical architectural construction produced surprisingly shaped

multidirectional shadows extended toward the audience in the rhythm of Stravinsky’s music.

Actually, the stage itself, a space without actors, became a moto-rumorist “polyexpressive”

entity. It became a space-as-actor (l’attore-spazio), envisioned by Prampolini in his manifesto

“Futurist Scenic Atmosphere” as “a personification of space in the role of the actor, as a

dynamic and interacting element between the scenic environment and the public spectator.”402

Fortunato Depero’s Balli plastici (Plastic Ballets), conceived in Capri in

collaboration with Gilbert Clavel (a Swiss poet and Egyptologist from the Cubist circles of

Diaghilev and Jean Cocteau), were performed by marionettes at the Teatro dei Piccoli in

Rome in 1918. The show consisted of five short musical mime-actions: The Buffoons, The

Mustachioed Man, The Savages, The Shadow, and The Blue Bear. The multicoloured,

stylized, mechanical wooden characters/marionettes/toys performed strange actions in an

oneiric stage atmosphere created by sound and light. In contrast to traditional, more or less

naturalistically designed puppets, Depero’s figures were made of Cubist geometrical forms

painted in bright primary colours. They were not only operated by puppeteers but animated by

the play of light and shadow. Their scenic actions were presented through architectural

counterpoints of lines, perspectives, and volumes. The rhythm of the performance was created

by the exchange of obsessive silences and sudden shots, thuds, and crazy laughs, expressing
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the “plasticity of noise.” In terms of the role of sound, Ombre (The Shadow), a shadow play,

was most interesting; it was “a symphony of abstract shapes in black and gray juxtaposed with

a light-play of vivid colours, which offered a visual interpretation of a composition by Béla

Bartók.”403

Prampolini’s “Scenografia e coreografia Futurista” (Futurist Scenography and

Choreography, 1915) advocates the “creation of an abstract entity that identifies itself with the

stage action of the play.”404 It calls for the abolition of painted backdrops and all the other

idiosyncratic elements of the naturalist theatre, including actors. Instead, it suggests a

complete activation of the stage by the introduction of coloured lights, noise, and kinetic,

electromechanical architecture. Prampolini envisions a total theatre in which its physical,

spiritual, and emotional content would find architectural, kinetic, chromatic, and plastic

valorization onstage. He sees a revival of the stage as an abstract, autonomous reality in which

the temporal media of sound and movement, each preserving its autonomy, integrate into a

spatial architecture of colour, form, and plasticity. Thus, also in 1915, Prampolini wrote “A

New Art? Absolute Creation of Noise and Motion” (1915), describing “a chromatic and

sounding architecture in motion which unites material qualities of the individual art forms in

an abstract, synthetic theatre.”405 Prampolini reveals the theatrical legacy of Marinetti’s lyrical

substantiality of matter by insisting: “We must shape with greater vehemence the impulses and

sensations of the infinitesimal world and the universe which surrounds us. This is the

foundation of the absolute construction of sound and motion which not only unites in itself the

material values of all the arts, but also the sensations which until now have been determined

by each individual art form.”406 In this way he reinforces a Futurist synthetic theatre

pronouncement that requires a plunge into the “dynamic, fragmentary symphonies of gestures,
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words, noises and lights” of the world that only as such can be deemed theatrical. Prampolini’s

inclination toward aurality in design and dramaturgy of sound in theatre can be discerned from

his comment on the collaboration with Achille Ricciardi on The Theatre of Colour at the

Roman Teatro Argentina in 1920: “For both of us, delivery, mime, music, and stage design

converge, not as isolated, predominant elements or as purely decorative motifs, but as values

with equal force, they swell into an accord and music stream … a rich, unified rhythm of light,

colour, movement, and sound.”407

While Michael Kirby and Giovanni Lista name Adolphe Appia, Alexander Tairoff

and, most of all, Gordon Craig, as Prampolini’s major influences, Günter Berghaus believes

that Kandinsky’s famous essay “On Stage Composition” played a crucial role in laying the

groundwork for Prampolini’s ideas of stage totality. The revelation of this link also makes a

case for the viability of a Futurist dramaturgy of sound.

Berghaus goes as far back as the work of Romantic German painter Philipp Otto

Runge (1777-1810) and his notion of Gesamtkunstwerk. Runge held that a union of the arts

could only be achieved under the hegemony of music because music uses “an abstract

language that speaks directly to the heart of the addressee. … It stimulates his senses

synaesthetically. A Gesamtkunstwerk based on musical principles elicits vibrations in the

recipient that are not the result of objective representation but of subjective imagination. The

artwork is not a representation of reality (Abbild), but a ‘heightened product of nature.’”408

Rather than representing anecdotal content or a certain reality, art/music vibrates

from the object through the artist to the spectator in a fashion similar to Kandinsky’s “inner

sound.” Futurists shared this concept through their Dionysian inclination toward a lyrical

intoxication with matter. It is certainly true of Marinetti’s sound poetry, where onomatopoeia
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directly communicates aural sensations to the listener, or Prampolini’s plastic complex, where

“the rhythms of sound, scenery and gesture create a psychological synchronism in the soul of

the spectator.”409 The notion of a vibrational transfer of feeling, spirit, or essence of matter via

an “inner sound” was a conceptual building block of the abstract stage as epitomized in

Kandinsky’s staging of Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition. The Bauhaus theatre-like

or Craig-like manipulation of geometrical shapes and lit screens as synaesthetic reflections of

music in this performance clearly shows that Prampolini and Kandinsky were artistic

soulmates.

In his “Teatro della pantomima Futurista” Prampolini demanded that the decor of the

stage be replaced by the active interplay of the performer and the scenery: “It is a question of

renouncing the mimic decorativism, which operates on the surface, in order to enter into the

domain of architecture which is concerned with depth.”410 Human bodies, objects, lights, and

sounds should unite on stage to create an attore-spazio (space-as-actor) that pulsates in front

of the audience’s eyes. In 1927 Futurist pantomimes were successfully staged at the Théâtre

de la Madeleine in Paris and later in Rome, Milan, and Turin. One of them, Prampolini’s

Santa velocità (Saint Speed), has neither words nor actors, just scenery and sound. In some

ways his “abstract pantomime” can be seen as a finer version of the collages of urban life’s

sensorial attractions that Russolo and Ruttman used in their noise piece and film. Prampolini’s

stage set for Santa velocità, or rather, its luminescent backdrop, represented a metropolis with

its skyscrapers, neon lights, enormous streets with intense traffic, and the electric frenzy of

“cinematographic” nocturnal life with all the accompanying noise: “Only artistic intervention

[is] a human song that arrests and subdues the noise of speedy life out there. But after the song

slowly finishes, the rhythm of speed and modernity takes over in an extraordinary crescendo,
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magic, immense and deafening.”411 Dramatic action was contained in a dynamic interplay of

coloured lights projected onto an empty stage and different sound textures of city life

interpreted by Russolo’s intonarumori. There was no habitual dramatic conflict, denouement,

or resolution -- just an analogical interchange of blocks of sound and light.

Ivo Pannaggi and Giacomo Balla’s Balli Meccanici (1922) worked on the same

premise but included human performers. It is a noisy ballet in which two dancers in spiky,

metallic costumes “execute actions mimicking the cadenzas of engine rhythms.”412 Their

mechanical movements accompany the noise of two motorcycle engines that make music of

their roar in the wings. A white light flashes to their rhythm turning at times into

polychromatic swirls to accentuate changes in sound and motion.

The synaesthesia of Futurist works like Macchina Tipografica, Colori, Feu d’artifice,

Santa velocità, and Balli Meccanici and their concept of the stage as an absolute plastic moto-

rumorist complex were the predecessors of today’s abstract, multimedia theatre. Robert

Wilson’s performances, architectonic audio-visual stage installations in time and space,

provide a contemporary example of such theatrical form initiated by the Futurist and historical

avant-garde dramaturgy of sound, material, and form that replaced the dramaturgy of character

and plot. Marinetti, who started an artistic revolution with parole in libertà, in one of his latest

theatre manifestos, “The Abstract Psychological Theatre of Pure Elements and Tactile

Theatre” (1924), furthers the idea of synthetic theatre. Like the Bauhaus member Lothar

Schreyer, who maintained that art was a formulation of optical and acoustic relations, he

conceives an idea of theatre as “an abstract and alogical condensed drama of pure elements

which, without any psychology, present the forces of life in movement to an audience,” and

“an abstract synthesis [which] is an alogical and surprising combination of blocks of typical
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sensations.413 The theatre envisioned by Futurists, Dadaists, and Expressionists called for an

entirely new dramaturgy of clashing forms, expressive materials, and their syncretism in a

kind of abstract montage of sensorial stimuli (like Eisenstein’s ‘montage of attractions’). It

emerged as a consequence of the avant-garde dramaturgy that used sound as independent

material, equivalent to other plastic and kinetic elements of theatre performance and stage

architecture. The contemporary focus on the generation of materiality in performance and the

scenic dynamic that replaced the dramatic dynamic in postdramatic theatre bear witness to a

legacy from such dramaturgy, whose workings will be reexamined in this book’s conclusion,

on the example of several newer theatre productions.

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DRAMATURGY OF SOUND IN THE AVANT-GARDE AND POSTDRAMATIC THEATRE

Seventh Chapter -- The Avant-garde Dramaturgy of Sound through the Rear-view Mirror

of Postdramatic Theatre

The historical avant-gardes were the first to put forward the notion that sound can be

something that both reveals and is a performance -- a notion that has found a sympathetic ear

among contemporary theatre creators. Less well-known perhaps, and my specific interest here,

was that this early recognition of the materiality of sound has contributed to a larger “project”

that has more recently come to be called “performative turn” (Erika Fischer-Lichte) and/or

“postdramatic theatre” (Hans-Thies Lehmann). But proofs of this development seem as

elusive as its subject, the phenomenon of sound itself. Patrice Pavis, one of the leading figures

of theatre semiotics and performance analysis, admits to being stymied by Robert Wilson’s

play The Golden Windows since “it simply comprises vocal and rhythmic material to be used

as a plastic element without any claim to semantic referentiality -- so it would be quite

fruitless to launch oneself into scholarly exegesis.”414 Notwithstanding this comment, the study

of sound in postdramatic theatre in connection with avant-garde sound poetry and

performance remains viable. As Pavis himself makes clear, a theatre semiotics based on the

avant-garde’s focus on a spatial/visual mise en scène is facing a crisis in contemporary theatre

discourse, where “a domination of another avant-garde, that of time, rhythm and voice [that is,

of sound], is seeking to break.”415

A heightened concern with stage sound emerged as an extension of the historical

avant-garde’s general tendency to turn techné into praxis, the work of art into action, and
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dramatic text into performance. In the process, the materiality of artistic means such as

voice/sound was brought to the fore. More particularly, the historical avant-garde’s

experiments with sound, following radical discoveries in the idiom of poetry, took root in

scenic “inventions,” such as the Futurist moto-rumorist complex or the Bauhaus’s “theatre of

totality,” which anticipate the postdramatic era. Acknowledging this trend, Fischer-Lichte

introduced the term “performative generation of materiality,” which takes place in a

continuous cycle of corporeality, spatiality, and tonality of the stage and provides for a new

aesthetics based on the “transformative power” of such performance practice. Accordingly, all

stage signs -- lights, objects, and audio-visual and stage design -- hitherto illustrative of a

play’s dramatic development, which had already been turned by the avant-garde into a

physical display of theatricality, generated a genuine music/painting/sculpture-like theatre

form that Lehmann has termed postdramatic.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, one of the key theorists of the Bauhaus, writing about Futurist,

Dadaist, and Merz theatre, describes a line of development stemming from the works of the

avant-garde sound poets who, “taking after non-objective painting where the interaction of

colour is essential, transformed word-sound relationships into exclusively phonetic sound

relationships, thereby totally fragmenting the word into conceptually disjointed vowels and

consonants.”416 This fragmentation of aural material and the interpenetration of time and space

achieved in poetry, when applied to stage, brought about a “theatre of totality, a great

dynamic-rhythmic process, which can compress the greatest clashing masses or accumulations

of media as qualitative and quantitative tensions into elemental form.”417 The synacoustic,

synoptic, and syncretic concept of stage, promoted by Moholy-Nagy, validates sound as an

independent, simultaneously concrete and abstract theatrical element which, as Marinetti

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suggests, participates in the structuring of “an abstract and alogical pure drama of pure

elements [... and] blocks of typical sensations.”418 Advancing Futurist, Dadaist, and Bauhaus

ideas, Richard Kostelanetz describes the innovative performance of the alternative and

experimental neo-avant-garde groups of the 1960s as mixed-means theatre, clearly a

predecessor of postdramatic theatre: “Mixed-means performances differ from conventional

drama in de-emphasizing verbal language, if not avoiding words completely, in order to stress

such presentational means as sound and light, objects and scenery. ... A mixed-means piece

usually opens with a sound-image complex that is constantly communicated; and rather than

resort to the linear techniques of variation and development, the piece generally sustains or

fills in its opening outline. Narrative, when it exists, functions more as a convention than as a

revelatory structure or primary dimension.”419

Among the creators of this kind of theatre, Kostelanetz lists the Open Theatre Group,

Robert Wilson, Meredith Monk, Merce Cunningham, and John Cage. These artists turned

away from narrative pretensions of plot development toward a synchronized exposition of

different materials. The juxtaposition of visual and aural stage elements in the mixed-means

pieces is related to the technique of verbo-voco-visual clash used in avant-garde sound poetry,

and to the syncretism, synaesthesia, and abstraction of the futurist plastic moto-rumorist

complex. It is worth noting that the promoters of the avant-garde legacy in theatre were not

playwrights and directors but primarily poets, painters, and musicians such as Gertrude Stein,

Michael Kirby, Robert Motherwell, Dick Higgins (inventor of the term “intermedia”), and

John Cage. It is no wonder then that Kostelanetz, being one of them, describes the 1963

Living Theatre’s performance of Kenneth H. Brown’s The Brig, directed by Judith Malina, in

terms of contemporary “intermedia” arts and music theatre:

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The Brig is a music of military noise. As the prisoners individually shout their

requests for permission to cross a certain white line, I could hear a fugue developing;

then on the right two soldiers are stamping their feet in 4/4 time. The closest analogue

in the history of art is Edgar Varèse’s Ionization (1931), which pioneered in making

music entirely of percussive sounds. … Throughout the performance something is

always moving and something is always sounding. The narrative line is a day in the

brig, but there is little narrative action. The form of the performance is spatial, as

meaning comes primarily through the repetition of action, rather than the

development of plot. Very much as in musical theatre, movements and sounds are

effectively integrated into a coherent kinetic whole.420

In spite of the fact that The Brig emulated the routines set by The Guidebook for

Marines in a hyper-naturalistic physical performance inspired by Artaud’s theatre of cruelty,

Kostelanetz found all elements needed to describe it as a musical abstraction. Seemingly

incongruous, his critical note is apt; it rightly identifies the continuum of the oral and aural

aspect of the theatre performance in the parallel exercise of a libidinal voice and an abstract

sound structure. True, the Living Theatre celebrated the Artaudian stage idiom of “the

collusion of objects, silences, shouts and rhythms” by their exaggerated vocal mime of the U.S.

marine prison drill -- a visceral cry against brutality and repression. But the aural elements of

the performance that the critic describes as structured noise -- its 4/4 time (duration), repetition

of convulsive rhythmic movements, and absence of narration -- converge into “a coherent

kinetic whole” reminiscent of a musical piece/installation. Malina remembers: “Reading the

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disembodied commands, the numbered shouts that evoke the machine but remain

transcendentally human outcries, I heard clearly in my ears the familiar metal scraping prison

sounds and the stamp of the booted foot on concrete. … I urged the actors to listen to this

sound; to strain to catch its modulations … [which] they built it into a steady crescendo.”421 It

was as if the Living Theatre were taking Russolo’s art of noises and Varèse’s organization of

sound and merging them with Marinetti’s fisicoffolia (body madness). Thus The Brig, for

Kostelanetz at least, presented an ideal example of aurality that made it an icon of innovative

performance in the 1960s. Its semiosis -- powered by the excessive vocal gestures, shouting of

reports, commands, submissions, revolt, and suffering -- produced an abstract sound structure

in which two streams of the avant-garde met: the corporeality of physical theatre and the

abstraction of music theatre. As this example shows, the dramaturgy of sound has the capacity

to materialize both the sensuality/corporeality of the voice in performance (in the sense of

Artaud’s, Barthes’s, and Lyotard’s explorations) and the concreteness/abstraction of sound

onstage (in the sense of Kandinsky, the Bauhaus, and Wilson).

In his introduction to a collection of essays called Close Listening: Poetry and the

Performed Word, Charles Bernstein states that “the twentieth-century innovative poets work

with sound as material, where sound is neither arbitrary nor secondary but constitutive.” He

claims that their dealing with sound as a materializing dimension of poetry and a subject of

vocal performance extends the patterning of poetry into a “more fluid and pluriform aural

(post-written) poetic practice.” Interestingly, Bernstein’s parenthetical adjective, “post-

written,” is analogous to Lehmann’s term “postdramatic.” It reflects the fact that just as

modern performance poetry destabilizes its linguistic object, the written poem, by its

insistence on sound, so does the modern theatre destabilize its literary source, the drama, by its
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anti-Naturalistic staging. This confirms a legacy of the resounding challenge that poets and

performers of the historical avant-garde issued to conventional poetry, art, and theatre by

promoting the materiality of sound and experimenting with sound patterns in their works.

Consequently, Bernstein’s attempt to reconcile the oral and aural aspects of performance

poetry provides an innovative and welcome contribution to the contemporary understanding of

voice and sound in theatre: “By aurality I mean to emphasize the sounding of the writing, and

to make a sharp contrast with orality and its emphasis on breath, voice and speech -- an

emphasis that tends to valorize speech over writing, voice over sound, listening over hearing,

and indeed, orality over aurality. … Aurality is meant to invoke a performative sense of

phonotext or audiotext and might better be spelled a/orality.”422

Bernstein’s introduction of the composite term “a/orality” acknowledges the

performative value of vocal sound patterning without restricting it to speech. In theatre it

supports the possibility of a performance/mise en scène independent of the emotional and

psychological interpretation of dramatic speech and plot development. The dramaturgy of

such theatre, concerned with an audiotext in place of a conventional drama, devises a

performance in the field of Bernstein’s a/orality by paying equal attention to the voice of the

performer and stage sound.

One such attempt at a/orality was the 2000 performance of War Music, Christopher

Logue’s translation/adaptation of Homer’s Iliad, staged by the theatre company Sound & Fury

in the completely darkened auditorium of the Battersea Arts Centre in London for its “Playing

in the Dark” season. Critic Martin Welton describes his experience of the event in the essay

“Seeing Nothing: Now Hear This …”: “I’m sat in the far right corner, at the back … and we

are plunged into darkness. A great clap, a rumble of thunder, and Patroclus comes crying to
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Achilles’ tent. There is no light, none at all … Words and sound are more ‘concrete’ than is

ordinarily the case … the word ‘Apollo’ in the dark takes a musculature all its own; it exists in

space. … Unsighted, off-balance, surrounded by very real actors and sound effects, how does

one construct meaning, make sense of what is going on? … The words of Logue’s text were

afforded no permanence. In the darkness, they could come into being only in the actors’

mouths, in the spectators’ ears, and disappear.”423

In War Music Logue sought to reveal the tragic mythos embedded in the sound of the

poem’s words and verses. He approached Homer as a poet rather than a translator of Greek,

with an interest in reviving the oral/aural and performative value of his poetic speech. Thus

War Music (performed in 2000 and published in 2002) was able to communicate the intrinsic

orality and acoustic features of Homer’s epos to the audience and readers in the form of a

textscape/soundscape. Emily Greenwood, who called Logue’s project “Sounding Out Homer,”

compares his undertaking to a process of “mapping the oral event onto an augmented textual

surface designed to bear more and different kinds of meaning than the conventional printed

page,” a method used by ethnologists in the transcription of traditional oral works, such as

Native American tribal chants: “The layout of his poem is often likened to a script, with the

very deliberate alternation of text and blank space controlling the pace at which the reader

moves through the text, signalling performance. In fact, Logue’s Homer contains a veritable

soundscape; to the sound of the dramatic voice we can also add music, insofar as his language

strives to reproduce both visually and aurally (on the page and in the ear) the music of war.”424

This kind of poetry-making was also characteristic of members of the historical

avant-garde, Apollinaire, Marinetti, and Raoul Hausmann, for example, who designed the

verbo-voco-visual structure of their poems with its acoustic effectiveness in mind. By

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inventing the unique theatrical device of “playing in the dark,” Sound & Fury emphasized the

acoustic effectiveness of Logue’s sound-text. In a program note for War Music, the artists

state their key interest in developing the sound space of theatre and presenting their audience

with new ways of experiencing theatre by heightening the aural sense. Martin Welton notices

that it is in such a sound space, wedged open by focusing on listening to the voice, that

“spoken words become ‘things’ in their own right. … Rather than existing in terms of

representation and interpretation, War Music can be considered as an embodied event played

out sensorially rather than conceptually.”425

Sound & Fury’s next production, The Watery Part of the World (2003), was also

staged in darkness. This time the content of the show offered an ideal justification for the use

of an immersive, exclusively aural space. The piece was based on fragments of Herman

Melville’s Moby Dick and the grim story of the Essex, a whaling boat that was shipwrecked in

1820. According to records, crew members fought to survive in the ocean for more than one

hundred days. Lyn Gardner reviewed the show in The Guardian: “The sea of darkness that

envelopes the audience -- except for some tiny glimpses of ghost-like faces bleached with

guilt -- immediately puts us in the same position as the Essex’s crew, adrift in the vast expanse

of unknowable, never-ending ocean. … I longed to be released from the purgatorial darkness,

the sound of creaking timbers, the vast expanse of the becalmed ocean, the tiny snuffling

sounds of dying men and, indeed, my own imagination. Playing the piece in the dark

concentrates its power.”426

Peter Stein’s 1980 staging of Aeschylus’ Oresteia at the Berlin Schaubühne provides

another example of the emphasis on orality/aurality achieved by turning off the lights. To

expose the tensions between verbal and oral aspects of the trilogy, that is, dramatic speech and
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stage voice, Stein “devised a darkened and thus primarily aural space” for the first two parts.

What the audience heard was the actors’ almost-incomprehensible speech, dissipating into an

old men’s chorus of murmurs and whimpers. A reviewer in Die Zeit describes their rendition

of the ololygmos (a sacrificial cry -- a vocal ritual traditionally used by the tragic chorus) as “a

sound shouted out, sung, and tuned with a flittering tongue in falsetto, half cricket chirp and

half birdcall. … Yet the voices primarily articulated segments of speech. If one of the old men

murmured a sentence, others spread across the room and repeated it at varying volumes,

pitches, and tempos to emphasize the diverse range of voices. … The materiality of the voices

became evident. The tense relationship between the particular tonalities of voice and language

was sustained throughout.”427 Obviously, the actors’ efforts were aimed at the creation of a

sonorous performance rather than the articulation of a syntactic text. Helped by a darkened

stage and freed from the boundaries of a strictly dramatic presentation, the speech segments

vocalized by actors acquired an independent reality on the stage as pure sounds; it was the

sound of their voices at play.

On the other hand, sounds of words rather than sounds of voices played a crucial role

in the structure of Robert Wilson’s early plays. In his opera A Letter for Queen Victoria

(1974), performed without the sophisticated electro-acoustic additions typical of his later

work, Wilson opted for a method inherited from avant-garde sound poetry that focused on the

phonetic substance of words. He devised the work’s script by emulating verbal formulas and

utterances of his adolescent friend and collaborator, autistic poet Christopher Knowles.

Knowles spelled and pronounced words in an endless chain of variations that followed his

own formal logic. He dissociated words from their conventional meanings and syntax and

turned them into mnemonic aids in the form of pure sounds and/or visual patterns. “I became
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more fascinated with him and what he was doing with language,” Wilson recounted in an

interview. “He would take ordinary, everyday words and destroy them. They became like

molecules that were always changing, breaking apart all the time, many-faceted words, not

just a dead language.”428 Thus in a segment of A Letter for Queen Victoria called “The

Sundance Kid Is Beautiful,”429 Knowles and Wilson engage in a word game animated by this

unusual speech practice. The result is a kind of concrete poetry, an aleatoric music score that

becomes characteristic of the visual, physical, and mental structure of the whole piece. In

another scene the company members (who had been through rehearsals of endlessly repeating

Knowles’s vocalizations) pronounced a series of syllables in front of a backdrop printed with

the seemingly nonsensical text (“HAP HATH HAT HAP …”). At times this took on direct

satiric commentary; so, in front of a backdrop where the words “CHITTER CHATTER” had

been written one hundred times, they appeared as café patrons engaged in gibberish

conversations that verged on environmental noise. The piece is punctuated by murmurs, sound

effects, scream songs, and contrapuntal shouts, all of them contributing to its musical sound

texture. In the Futurist synthetic theatre piece Stati d’animo (States of Mind, 1916) by Mario

Carli, as we have seen, a similar conversation in a nonsensical language appears as a sonorous

image of an uneventful afternoon in a café patio that will be destroyed by a violently loud

intruder with a different state of mind (presented by a different sound/language texture).

As Arthur Holmberg claims, the main character of A Letter for Queen Victoria is

language, which, pushed by Wilson to its limits, collapses into a kind of sonic debris. This

phonetic trashing, inspired by Knowles’s peculiar pulverization of words, has proved to be a

gold mine for oral/aural performance. It carries dramatic tension from the entr’acte’s

beginning with a pre-verbal, primal shriek that “goes through a phonetic chaos … [of]
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MNHJUYGTHRD VBNH V B BBNHJ BVG PJER GLOS O CHOCOLATE … to finish with

the word -- “chocolate” -- clear, recognizable, lovely in the sweet simplicity of its reference to

glâce au chocolat (chocolate ice cream).”430 Here, the word play builds on the confrontation of

two polarized voice/sound structures: one a mass of “primitive” intuitive vocalizations, the

other a cultivated high speech appropriate for a letter to the Queen. Nature against culture. The

dramatic clash evolves from the inherent contradictions of voice, speech, sound, and text. At

one point in the performance, after an initial struggle for proper articulation, “these electro

whe whe whe whe whe whe wheeelswheels,” comes the question: “What are we doing? /

We’re doing a letter for Queen Victoria. / We’re doing the play. / And you sit on the bench

and just wait for me … OK.”431 Is this final approval a reassuring clarification or a tacit

condescending violence whose orality bears historical references? Perhaps the answer could

only be instinctively inferred from the change of an intuitive cacophonic noise into a rational

euphonic speech. Wilson explains: “Together we bring to life a verbal text, but one in which

the words do not have the function of telling a story or communicating a meaning. The words

are like music, devoid of plot: a kind of concrete poetry used as sound and also as image …

To define this phrase precisely, I would say that the words make their appearance to be

listened to like a noise, a sound, is listened to, as if the atmospheric elements had been

gathered together in the room.”432

The intuitive, music-like words in Caryl Churchill’s play The Skriker (1994) are dug

up from a pre-verbal phonetic chaos. The play begins with the long, almost incomprehensible

monologue, chant, and dance of the spider-like fairy Skriker, “a shape shifter and death

portent,” a screeching river spirit who, according to Northern English folklore, steals and

drowns children. Her incantation is reminiscent of avant-garde sound poetry performances that
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strove to revive the ancient phonetic roots of language. Skriker’s word play, full of puns,

nursery rhymes, and ritual rhythms, lets her reclaim the primordial power of speech’s

forgotten sensuality. Through the free, unabashedly ludic composition of words and sounds,

Churchill deconstructs ordinary language and creates a primordial idiom appropriate for a

creature from the underworld:

Heard her boast beast a roast beef eater, daughter could spin span spick and

spun the lowest form of wheat straw into gold, raw into roar, golden lion and

lyonesse under the sea dungeonesse under the castle for bad mad sad adders and

takers away. …

Slit slat slut. That bitch a botch an itch in my shoulder blood. Bitch botch itch.

Slat itch slit botch. Itch slut bitch slit.433

Skriker’s depiction of herself, threatening as it is, resounds with the sheer musicality

and assonance of sibilants and affricates. Her subliminal language retaliates against

logocentrism, consumerism, and the belief in scientific progress -- a world that has forgotten

fairies: “bloodmoney is the root of evil eye nose the smell hell the taste waste of money.” The

pre-symbolic speech of Churchill’s female avenger -- primitive, infantile, and illogical --

resides in the semiotic chora, a term (borrowed from Plato’s Timaeus) that Julia Kristeva uses

to denote a space of uncertain, mobile, and provisional articulation. Kristeva defines “chora”

as having a profound, bodily root: “indifferent to language, enigmatic and feminine, this space

underlying the written is rhythmic, irreducible to an intelligible verbal translation; musical,

anterior to judgement.”434 She criticizes traditional Platonic thought for depriving logos of its
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originary acoustic pleasure and claims that “the voice precedes and makes possible a language

that always bears its traces. Both generating and destabilizing the semantic, the vocalic is

therefore -- at the same time -- the precondition of the semantic function and its uncontrollable

excess.”435 Churchill’s use of excessive, libidinal vocality to express/characterize her damaged

fairy subscribes to Kristeva’s idea of revolutions in poetic language that originate from the

instinctive sonority of the semiotic, maternal chora. This concept has considerably marked

The Skriker’s production history, which has recently leaned toward the oral field of

expression. While The Skriker’s initial 1994 production with the modern dance company

Second Stride emphasized features of physical theatre, the 2006 staging at the Victorian

College of the Arts School of Drama in Melbourne, directed and designed by Brian Lipson,

demonstrated an increased preoccupation with sound. “Lipson divides the Skriker’s speech

between the actors of the company, who vocalise it as a sound poem or a spoken oratorio

around the audience,” wrote critic Alison Croggon. “This is language as thickness, viscera,

weight, saliva, sex, violence, the softness of palate and lip: language as spell and enchantment,

where meaning constantly threatens to slip its noose and collapse back to animal howl and

croon. Here Churchill is pushing theatre hard up against the poem, sense against nonsense, and

one can only admire the force of the centrifugal will that keeps the text this side of

comprehensible.”436

This newer version of The Skriker amalgamates two layers of oral/aural

expressiveness, of theatre and of poetry, in a seemingly centrifugal flow, reminiscent of the

swirl of force lines that Futurist painters used to put the spectator in the centre of their works.

Paradoxically, because of our intuitive, sensual immersion in sound, Churchill’s keeping the

language “this side of comprehensible” makes the performance and its reception coherent. It
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gathers strength from a poetic return to the sonority of the maternal chora, which had been

advanced by the historical and neo-avant-garde’s explorations of language, not only in the

field of poetry.

In his book Empty Space Peter Brook, a protagonist of the 1960s theatrical avant-

garde, asked: “Is there another language, just as exciting for the author, as a language of

words? Is there a language of actions, a language of sounds -- a language of word-as-part-of-

movement, of word-as-lie, of word-as-parody, of word-as-rubbish, of word-as-contradiction,

of word-shock or word-cry?”437 This question, evidently inspired by Artaud, still looms large

among theatre artists. It motivated the relentless exploration of physicality to which Brook

contributed with his 1964 production of Artaud’s The Spurt of Blood. At the same time it

motivated the search for a primordial language by theatre artists such as Brook, Eugenio

Barba, and Ariane Mnouchkine, whose productions examine not only the individual

performer’s vocal body but also the expressive style embedded in the authentic oral traditions

of different cultures. In 1970 Brook gathered a group of performers from all over the world in

Paris and established the Centre International de Recherches Théâtrales. They breathed, spoke,

chanted, moved, and acted in different languages and performance traditions. Their first

intercultural exercises that targeted the language divide were, naturally, “restricted” to sound.

Inventing a vocabulary of syllables to which each actor contributed his own -- bash / ta / hon /

do -- they gave birth to the language known as Bashtahondo. It eliminated, at least in the

rehearsals, which were more corporeal than cerebral, the need for understanding the concepts

behind words used in different languages. Brook and his international troupe soon embarked

upon an ambitious performance project that examined linguistic and theatrical

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communication: their production of Orghast, scripted by poet Ted Hughes in an ur-language

of the same name, interactively devised by the playwright and the company.

After roughly a year of preparation, Orghast was performed at the 1971 Shiraz-

Persepolis theatre festival at two sites of sacred Persian tombs carved into high cliffs. It was a

two-part ritual and physical performance that took place in a spectacular environment at dusk,

lit by the last rays of sunset, and at dawn, lit by the sunrise. As night started to fall, the light

was provided by huge balls of fire lowered from the crag toward the audience. The tragic

mythos of Orghast consisted of fragments from Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Avesta

hymns, Calderón’s La vida es sueño, Seneca’s Hercules Furens and Thyestes, and an

Armenian play. Whether or not the audience understood the mythos, they were unquestionably

captivated by the sheer sensual enjoyment of the vista, the intriguing sound of the actors’

mystical speech, and the stunning physicality of the performance. Tom Stoppard wrote in the

Times Literary Supplement: “Orghast aims to be a leveller of audiences by appealing not to

semantic athleticism but to the instinctive recognition of a ‘mental state’ within a sound. One

can hardly imagine a bolder challenge to the limits of narrative.”438 Indeed, in retrospect, the

historical avant-garde was full of such challenges. The creation of stati di anima (mental

states), for instance, was a frequent topic of Futurist non-figurative paintings and non-

narrative theatrical syntheses based on pure sound. Clearly, in the preparation of Orghast, for

Brook and Hughes the exploration of sound was quintessential. One of their program notes

reads: “What is the relation between verbal and non-verbal theatre? What happens when

gesture and sound turn into word? What is the exact place of the word in theatrical

expression? As vibration? Concept? Music? Is any evidence buried in the sound structure of
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certain ancient languages?”439 A few random lines from the script illustrate their attempt at

such a language:

OARGLAKRIS GLAUR PROGHAST UMLABAOO SHOAR

the eagle overshadows out of sun a new command is flying…

SOYINNABLARG TOTTAHOANYA GROKIDOTUTTU

I was in darkness brought into light I was broken to pieces…

OOOL NEEEE-YAGH OOOL ONEEEAAR NEEY-AGH

Woman has opened woman has opened life…

The dramaturgical use of sound in Orghast, during the processes of scriptwriting,

rehearsing/devising, and staging, which ran parallel, was consistent with the practice of the

historical avant-garde. Hughes’s verbal inventions were encouraged by the linguistic advisers

on the project, Geoffrey Reeves and Mahin Tadjadod. They claimed that speech in ancient

Greek tragedy “must have been closer to what we know as music than what now passes for

acting,” and that in Avesta readings of Zoroastrian hymns, “no phonetic notation can

encompass the range of sounds -- guttural, nasal, glottal, explosive, compound consonants,

seventeen vowels … [and] the voice moving suddenly from lips to throat to nose, and shifting

abruptly in pitch.”440 Brook and his plurilingual ensemble, which had already adopted these

ideas when practising Bashtahondo, devised their rehearsals accordingly. Their exercises were

based on a meditative communication between participants through a number of mantra-like

syllables closer to music than speech. This was a technique used in the historical avant-garde.

Expressionist Lothar Schreyer, for example, practised similar rhythmic sound-exercises with

his actors in the 1920s. He believed that only through a thoroughly meditative process, in

which a performer is stripped of individual idiosyncrasies, could one’s fundamental “sound

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speech” be awakened. In the same vein Orghast’s idiom appears as a fundamental “sound

speech,” intuitively extracted from what the performers and we, the audience, perceive as an

ancient, primal language. “If it doesn’t work musically,” Hughes concludes, “it doesn’t work

at all. ... The deeper into language one goes, the less visual/conceptual its imagery, and the

more audial/visceral/muscular its system of tensions. ... In other words, the deeper into

language one goes, the more dominated it becomes by purely musical modes, and the more

dramatic it becomes -- the more unified with total states of being and with the expressiveness

of physical action.”441

Exploring the confluence of the conceptual and the physical, which, as he believed,

had already been happening in the audio-visual sphere of language, Hughes followed the path

of the avant-garde arts. Richard Peaslee, the sound designer and composer of the piece, who

thought that theatre always lags behind the other arts, offers a practical summary: “After ten

years of rock now suddenly everyone is trying to write a rock musical. This production

[Orghast] is a big leap forward for the theatre, from representational to abstract, abandoning

the meaning of words to their sound. It happened in art fifty years ago, when the form of an

object was abandoned for colour and shapes.”442 The interaction between abstract painting and

sound poetry, exemplified by Giacomo Balla’s involvement with Futurist poets and

playwrights of parole in liberta and sintesi teatrale in Italy or Kazimir Malevich’s

involvement with poets of zaum in Russia (discussed earlier in the book), indeed remains

characteristic of the avant-garde approach to theatre.

Tadeusz Kantor, one of the key figures of new avant-garde theatre and visual art

(installations, happenings, and conceptual art), directed his pieces using performers’ bodies,

voices, sound, space, and rhythm to make a kinetic, sculptural, or musical stage composition.
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In his famous performance piece Dead Class (1975), a theatrical wonder that toured Europe

for years, the stage was emptied or filled up with music, clatter, or silence as

conductor/sculptor Kantor called up his dead classmates. Here the theatrical space appeared as

“something elastic, not given and inflexible, but something which beats like a heart,” asserts

Brunella Eruli.443 Its beat was both corporeal and musical -- the sound patterns and rhythm of

the performance were produced by the sensorial impulses. At the same time, as with

Marthaler’s musicalization of the stage or Wilson’s prolongation of performance time, Kantor

created a fluid time/space entity that relied on an aesthetic of duration. This aesthetic pursued

Henri Bergson’s concept of la durée (duration), which, as a representation of the continuum of

time and space, was adopted by the historical avant-garde -- in Futurist painting and sound

poetry -- and spread to new avant-garde movements such as Fluxus and Informel, to name just

two. Since la durée determines the meeting point of music (or art of sound) and plastic arts,

Kantor’s hybrid installations and performances indeed may be called time sculptures or sound

sculptures.

Kantor has stated that his stage presence as a conductor/sculptor of an energetic

performance and/or kinetic installation encapsulates and exemplifies ideas of Informel. The

term “Art Informel” was coined by Michel Tapié in Un art autre (A Different Art, 1952), a

book that describes the work of several notable painters, including Jean Dubuffet, Wols, Jean

Fautrier, and Alberto Burri, whose common denomination was rebelliousness, spontaneity,

irrationality, and freedom of form. More concerned with immediate physical encounter with

the material than with the final shape of the work of art, they focused on painterly mass and

texture and the act of painting itself. The predilection of Informel artists for palpability of

material and gestural expression clearly appealed to Kantor. His moulding of an ur-matter of
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language and performance was an oral/aural counterpart of the raw and impulsive painting of

Informel artists, while his live interaction with the performers on the stage reflected an

American variant of Informel “action painting” or “gestural abstraction,” epitomized by the

works of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, who spontaneously dribbled, splashed, or

smeared paint onto the canvas. In his manifesto The Informel Theatre (1961), Kantor

embraced the idea of “REALITY in its elementary state: MATTER that is freed from abiding

the laws of construction, forever changeable and liquid, escaping every rational measure.”

This concept let him to develop a theatre that turns all elements of performance -- actors,

objects, space, text, and sounds -- into flexible, malleable, raw matter. Kantor described (and

in one occasion actually staged) his actors as “degraded, without dignity, hanging motionless

like cloths, a heavy mass of sacks in a wardrobe … [waiting to] earn a chance to become the

form.” In their speech, “instead of classical linguistic forms, THE COARSE ‘BRUTE’

MATTER OF LANGUAGE, … INARTICULATE SOUNDS, and PHONEMES, emerge. …

Human articulation resembles the remotest, the wildest forms (howling of the pack of dogs)

and cruellest sounds (cracking of bones).”444

During the performance of Dead Class Kantor stands, sits, walks, and dances around

and within the stage space, conducting a group of old people dressed in plain mourning

clothes with corpse-like infant dummies attached to their bodies on a pilgrimage to their

childhood classroom: four rows of school benches thrown into a corner of the stage. They

roam onstage and utter broken, incomplete, sometimes nonsensical lines, trying to recall

happier days. As they “grind words like mills,” their grammar drills evolve into the “raw

material of speech: inarticulate sounds, murmur, stutter, drawl, whisper, croak, whining,

sobbing, spitting, phonemes, obscene and syntax-free language.”445 When at the beginning the
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actors and mannequins sit motionlessly on their benches with crushing apathy visible on their

faces, the audience cannot distinguish one from the other. But, when the music of a valse

française temporarily infuses them with life, their still sculptures change to carnival parade

figures marching around the benches. Animated by the music, their faces brighten and their

bodies straighten up in sync with the strokes of Kantor’s baton, and they succeed, if only

momentarily, in their enormous fight. As they climb onto the school benches, incited by the

swell of the music, they reach for the sky; a sculpture of hope is built before the audience’s

eyes. Then, in sync with the music’s diminuendo, disillusion returns and their edifice

disintegrates into a state of formless, suffering matter. Once again, although aware of its

ephemeral nature, Kantor tries to give form to inert matter. Aided by the music, he continues

sculpting a human pyramid that constantly crumbles. All the elements of performance enter

into a dynamic relationship that creates tension and rhythm. There is no dramatic

representation in Kantor’s Dead Class, just the convulsive pulsation of matter

(actors/sounds/objects/space) struggling to acquire some sort of meaningful shape.

Additionally, since the manipulation of raw, inchoate matter, inherited from Informel, was

dictated by the musical flux, Kantor’s aural/kinetic sculpture of Dead Class can be seen as an

instance of the musicalization of theatre.

Musicalization is a theatrical phenomenon recently identified and discussed by David

Roesner in the works of Christoph Marthaler, Einar Schleef, and Robert Wilson, who devised

a staging method based primarily on the organization of rhythm, sound, tonality, and other

aural features of speech and performance. Marthaler’s performance/staging style, for instance,

follows the lines of a carefully designed spatial, rhythmic, and auditory score which

encompasses all performance elements in the shape of a unique music/stage composition. His
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technique also ideally fits Erik Salzman’s description of a new music theatre “that is music

driven (i.e., decisively linked to musical timing and organization) where, at the very least,

music, language, vocalization, and physical movement exist, interact, or stand side by side, in

some kind of equality.”446

Marthaler’s theatre has two distinct characteristics: the dystopian stage space and the

preeminent slowness with which the performance unfolds. Anna Viebrock, who has designed

the settings for most of his shows, creates cavernous spaces -- waiting rooms, institutional

halls, gymnasiums, train stations, cafés -- that isolate and alienate the individual. As critic

Christine Richard of Theater Heute wrote: “Marthaler’s stage world is a waiting-room at four

in the morning, or better, a piano bar at half past one. Dreams and sadness take over and the

single light source reveals only self-irony, halfway between sleep and awakening, between

tipsy and sober.” To this emptiness of space Marthaler affixes an emptiness of time induced

by the slow pace of the performance. Dramaturg Stefanie Carp, another of his faithful

collaborators, has remarked that there has rarely been a director of text-based theatre who has

worked so particularly and precisely on rhythm. This practice has drawn Marthaler toward

musical expression, and it has allowed him to make historical time, empty time, and memory-

time always/already present on his stage. The relentless slowness of his troupe’s clownery-

cum-melancholic-singing challenges the myth of efficiency and progress and constitutes, as

Carp states, “a theatre of victims, never one of perpetrators.” The formal, compositional

features of Marthaler’s music theatre coalesce with his political engagement in the same way

that absurd, alogical anti-art stemmed from Dadaists’ anti-bourgeois, anti-war stance. It was

for good reason that in the early years of his career, when he produced several experimental
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evenings devoted to Érik Satie, John Cage, and Kurt Schwitters, Marthaler was referred to as a

“neo-Dadist.”

The now-legendary piece Murx den Europäer! Murx ihn! Murx ihn! Murx ihn! Murx

ihn ab! (Screw the European! Screw him! Screw him! Screw him! Go screw him!) became the

hallmark of Marthaler’s performance/staging style. It premiered in January 1993 at Berlin

Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and ramained in the theatre’s repertoire until 2007.

Ironically subtitled “a patriotic evening,” it marked the occasion of the reunification of the

state with a sadly humorous farewell (some call it a requiem) to the German Democratic

Republic. The play begins with an extremely long, static, and mute scene where the affectless

performers sit on chairs at individual tables, together but alone, in a vast neon-lit waiting-room

with a broken clock and a sign reading “So that time never stands still,” composed of

individual letters, hanging on the back wall. As the audience becomes irritated by the

seemingly never-ending immobility and silence, letters begin to drop to the floor. The lonely

people on stage start their mindless everyday routines -- obsessive, grotesque, and sometimes

even violent. Alienation, depression, and melancholy are thick in the air. A few times

throughout the performance they leave their seats at the sound of a buzzer, line up in front of

an upstage door, and wash their hands in the toilet room. These repetitive sounds/actions

represent the “musical bars” of the performance’s rhythmic structure. The trivial actions that

follow in slow tempo are repetitive as well. Mostly taken from the clown repertoire,447 they

depict clumsy, funny, and sad attempts by human beings to connect with each other. These

awkward and desperate physical motifs get resolved when the performers break into song.

Benedict Andrews wrote: “Singing in Marthaler’s theatre occasions acts of collective memory.

Mostly sung very quietly, songs grow out of silence bringing individuals from solitude into
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chorus. They are sung as if half-remembered, very fragile, harmonious and beautiful.”448 One

by one, the whole company gradually joins in with the nostalgic humming of one of the actors,

fighting the desolation and hopelessness of the waiting room. Choral singing of the tunes dug

out from their path into oblivion (ranging from the patriotic and romantic Volkslied, Schubert,

and Wagner to trivial German pop songs) raises people on the stage, along with those in the

auditorium, from their habitual pettiness. Of course, all of it will soon crumble into despair

like the human pyramid of hope that Tadeusz Kantor stubbornly keeps conducting and

sculpting to the swelling music in his Dead Class.

Marthaler’s recognizable music theatre style has been a mainstay of European and

world stages for more than two decades. His recent production RiesenButzbach: Eine

Dauerkolonie (Rising Butzbach: A Sustainable Colony), staged at the 2009 Wiener

Festwochen, was co-produced with Napoli Teatro Festival Italia, the Athens Festival, the

Avignon Festival, the International Theatre Festival Wroclaw, Theater Chur, and Festival

Tokyo.449 Marthaler calls the piece “a musical-dramatic contemplation of the last days of

consumption,” and once again we find a cavernous space designed by Anna Viebrock, a

temporal collage-dramaturgy by Stefanie Carp, and a musical mise en scène by Marthaler. A

huge white bunker-like box, poured in concrete, with the label “Institute of Fermentation

Industry” on its top, opens into several rectangular pockets. It epitomizes a painful space laid

bare by the current global financial insecurity, foreclosures, and job losses, in which a

bedroom, a garage, a bank, a recording studio, a furniture warehouse, and a shopping mall are

all literally present at all times. At the beginning an indistinct sound of tectonic disturbance

comes from outside. A dozen people onstage, residents of the “rising” city of Butzbach,

disempowered and disenchanted like the East German citizens in Murx den Europäer!, engage
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in petty, everyday activities in an environment of surveillance and suspicion. Surrounded by

security cameras, alarm systems, and anti-theft devices, they become mutual spies, closest

enemies, and beloved partners who conspire/fight/love to protect their company and family

assets. Only in their childish acts and beautiful singing does a common humanity break

through; sobbing, they throw themselves at the furniture that is to be confiscated or hide in the

garage to let off steam with the disco hit “Stayin’ Alive,” in spite of a “singing inspector” who

directs them to sing Mahler or Beethoven. In the same garage, toward the end of the

performance, they all sing the “Prisoners’ Chorus” from Beethoven’s Fidelio: “O welche Lust,

in freier Luft …” (“O what joy to breathe in the free air …”). During their singing, the garage

door is used to modify the loudness of the polyphonic chorus we hear from the stage; the

sound swells up as it opens and dies down as it closes. These are among many moments in

which the artistic and political message of RiesenButzbach gets delivered not only by the

interweaving of short performance acts and singing, but also through the deliberate

manipulation and structuring of sound.

In the process of musicalization and postdramatic staging, “the drama as a literary

linguistic reality all but vanishes and makes room for ‘something completely different’: for the

paralinguistic dimension, for voices and intonation, rhythm, speed and slowness of speech,

sexual and gendered auditive information, gesture and the expressivity of body language in

general,”450 writes Lehmann. Elfriede Jelinek’s drama Ein Sportstueck (A Sport Piece, 1998),

directed by Einar Schleef at Vienna’s Burgtheater, is a rich example of the rhythmic, musical

organization of the mise en scène that embodies the “paralinguistic” dimension of the piece

announced by its script. On opening night, the massive production, with a chorus line of 133

actors/dancers and the conductor planted in the balcony, lasted five hours. For their marathon
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exercise, the performers were rewarded, as Linda DeMerrit states, with a fifty-five-minute

standing ovation. Although DeMerrit’s assessment of the applause’s duration might be

exaggerated, Ein Sportstueck, as a provocative argument in the hot public debate over the

political swell of Jörg Haider and his nationalist Austrian Freedom Party, no doubt could

arouse an emotional reception.

Upon winning the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, Jelinek was praised “for her

musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary

linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power.”451 Indeed,

the script for Ein Sportstueck is musically arranged by the rhythmic juxtaposition of

“Sprachflächen” (a term she uses to define speech/language planes used in her work).

Patching together quotes from disparate sources running the gamut from tabloid pages and

soap operas to the literature of Kleist and Hofmannsthal, Jelinek assembles a collage of verbal

textures linked to sports activity: prompts for training routines, cheers, laudatory speeches,

words of competitive encouragement, expressions of triumph and defeat. Into this disquieting

clash of verbal layers, she inserts racist, anti-Semitic, and sexist statements as a reminder of

the audience’s recent past (and a warning of a potential future). Rather than a heroic individual

effort, Jelinek portrays sport as a violent expression of hostility toward the other, driven by a

team/nationalistic mentality.

When writing for theatre, Jelinek breaks the linguistic cadence of her script into

different language melodies and rhythms: “I always work with language in a compositional

way. It’s like a piece of music with different voices that are drawn close in a stretto and then

also occur in reverse. It is basically a contrapuntal weave of language that I try to produce.”452

Thus manipulating phonetic and syntactic forms of words and sentences, Jelinek creates an
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aural structure that is based on contrasting textures, energies, and rhythms of individual and

choral speech. Director Einar Schleef, known for his choric staging, went even further than the

playwright in the juxtaposition of aural blocks by adding numerous verbal and musical

quotations to be used in the chorus’s gestural and vocal performance. Schleef approached the

script of Ein Sportstueck as a “phonotext,” that is, a blueprint for musicalizing theatre. He

explains: “A text consists of rhythmic phases. It can’t be just information. On stage I obstruct

this consumption of the text as information through the rhythmicisation and the distribution of

the text onto several performers. Thus it defies an all too easy availability.”453 Hence, his

chorus members, instead of merely delivering script lines, execute gymnastic drills of shouting

and stomping to expose the aggression that lies at the core of team sports. Then, for more than

half an hour, they repeatedly mime the motions of a physical assault, kicking and punching an

imagined victim while happily chanting brutal words as if they were the lyrics to a rap song.

In addition, from time to time, at a barked command the performers threateningly storm

toward the audience. Departing from natural speech, the vocal and physical performance of

the chorus becomes an energetic transfer in which, as Roesner notices, “asemantic stresses

predominate. … As the text is chopped up ... the musicalization enters into a conflict with the

text.”454 Intentionally enforcing the conflict between the text’s signification and its rhythmical

sound patterning, Schleef resuscitated the paralinguistic dimension embedded in Jelinek’s

script/score for Ein Sportstueck.

Schleef’s choric method of staging originated in his reinvention of the ancient chorus

in his 1986 Schauspiel Frankfurt production of Mothers, a tragedy devised from Euripides’

The Suppliants and Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes. Here the chorus took the dynamics of

vocal performance to its extreme, from a subdued whisper to an extended cry. Particularly in
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the phonetic segments of speech containing sounds of ritual lamentation (extant in the original

Greek verses), the chorus completely abandoned any signifying textual coherence and turned

to non-verbal screams encrypted in “crying” syllables -- effectively corresponding to what

Fischer-Lichte sees as a possible resolution of the dramatic clash between verbal and oral

aspects of theatre: “The tension disappears as the voice [sound] itself becomes language. The

voice [sound] no longer transmits language; it is language, in which a bodily being-in-the-

world expresses him/herself and addresses the audience purely. The materiality of the voice

[sound] reveals the performance’s materiality in its entirety.”455 As my insertion (in square

brackets) attempts to show, by thinking not just of voice but of sound, the meaning of Fisher-

Lichte’s statement may broaden in its relevance. Leaving the cocoon of dramatic speech, voice

meets with music and noise as an independent producer of sound space. As such, in addition

to forming part of Marthaler’s or Schleef’s musicalization, it is articulated in sound-image

theatre pioneered by Wilson and now apparent in intermedial performances by groups such as

the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, the Theatregroep Hollandia, and others.

The Theatregroep Hollandia, founded by dancer, actor, and director Johan Simons

and percussionist, composer, and sound artist Paul Koek in the early 1980s, left behind

proscenium theatre to perform in dysfunctional places: abandoned factories, churches,

scrapyards, and other sites typical of the post-industrial landscape. By infusing sounds, noises,

and rhythms into their theatrical imagery, they enhance the spectator’s bodily awareness of the

environment, not only in showing the inhumanity of such places but making the audience feel

its own displacement. Interestingly, Theatregroep Hollandia’s mission statement describes

their work as “resisting reality” and providing “a leading part for music”: “Sounds of reality

(musique concrète) are also incorporated into the play, sometimes electronically manipulated.
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…non-dramatic and non-literary texts -- ordinary texts such as speeches, articles, interviews --

can be transferred from reality and serve as a basis for or part of a stage performance. … It is

not always a text that provides the basis for a play: it may also be music and musical

structures. The creation of music-theatre is the main sideline in Hollandia’s work.”456

In the Industrial Project KLM Cargo (1998), for example, a collective exercise based

on conveyer-belt work in an airport warehouse, the physical and aural disposition is similar to

Schleef’s choral theatre. It is also reminiscent of Futurist Balla’s Machina Tipografica and

constructivist Nikolai Foregger’s Machine Dance with noise orchestra. But in KLM Cargo it

goes beyond the mime of machinery. In one scene sophisticated electronic and percussive

sounds and choreographed movement are performed in front of a video screen showing a mute

close-up of a suffering individual. This contrast produces an engaged sound-image of an

inimical environment, that is, the industrial area in which the performers and spectators are

enclosed. This is typical of the aurally enhanced environmental theatricality that Hollandia

works to achieve. As a result, the Veenstudio, a music-theatre laboratory, was established

within the company under Paul Koek’s direction with a mandate to workshop and develop a

new language: “Essential to this new language is that all dramatic elements are chosen and

interpreted musically. The text is chosen for its rhythm or melody; the tempo of the

performance evolves with a musical tension and the music has a substantive role. The text is

hence not only chosen for its content but also for a rhythmic or melodic feature, and the visual

elements are arranged compositionally in space in relation to one another.”457

The company’s performances of the 1990s and early 2000s were determined by a

non-hierarchical organization of auditory, visual, and kinetic stage elements. Henk Oosterling

describes Hollandia’s performance method as similar to the montage of attractions in the first
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Russian films in which “images are cut without anecdotal bridges, sounds are sampled on

rhythms, images, words and gestures.” Thus, in their productions, “voices become instruments

that produce new theatrical and dramatic effects … [so that] sound deconstructs the unity of

the images, as the rhythm stresses the intensity of the theatrical gesture”458 In Su-pa (1996), for

example, digitally treated and amplified musical rhythms and sounds are counterpointed to the

raw noise of “earthly materials such as wood, iron, grass, vegetables, stones and paper.” In

Quick Lime (1999), a piece about Marinus van der Lubbe, a revolutionary sentenced to death

for setting fire to the Reichstag, the protagonist’s raging cry, his obsessive repetition of the

made-up word/gesture Gottadusumfing, and the percussive sounds heard as he repeatedly

beats himself become an acoustic performance in themselves.

Chiara Guidi and Claudia and Romeo Castellucci, founding members of Socìetas

Raffaello Sanzio, also subscribe to an aural dramaturgy that brings an immediacy and intensity

to the performance event. Guidi admits: “The acoustic magma shaking up inside me awaits its

dramaturgical catalyzing. … I’d like the cry of an animal or the screech of a machine to cause

the sort of commotion that makes me want to intervene, to placate an anguish that doesn’t

even exist.”459 All eleven episodes of Tragedia Endogonida (produced in different European

cities from 2002 to 2004) open with the sound of human/animal/cosmic breathing. This drone,

digitally prepared by sound designer Scott Gibbons, “spreads through the space like a smoke,

creeping into all cavities and passageways of the stage and auditorium, opening them up to

their own vibrations,” describes Nicholas Ridout.460 Then the hum evolves into a human voice,

becoming screams and groans, whose intensity reaches the limits of audibility. The episodes

close with a choral rendition of the text in front of a video projection of letters and spoken

words. While their images speed past, blurring into indistinct strobes similar to Rorschach
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blots, the choral speech deteriorates into a kind of vocal clamour. In Berlin’s episode, for

example, remembers Ridout, one could hear the sound of “percussive sucking, breathing,

spitting amplified inside of the voice: … all the scraps and shards of breath discarded in the

act of forming meaningful phonemes. A language in the negative, the sound of language in

tatters and ruins, still desperately, urgently carrying something that must be communicated.”461

This subversive act, emphasizing the limited communicational reach of logocentrism, is

similar to Wilson’s trashing of language or the Futurist destruction of syntax as a means of

liberating words/sounds. Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s urge to communicate beyond verbal

language drives them to use sophisticated media extensions of the voice and body such as

audio-visual capturing, electronic amplification, and digital treatment of their sound. Thus, in

Shakespeare’s Giulio Cesare (1997) Romeo Castellucci gave the role of Mark Antony to an

actor who had recently undergone a laryngotomy that left him with a screeching voice.

Castellucci capitalized on this fact by projecting a live, endoscopic image of the actor’s throat

while he delivered Antony’s famous monologue. The cool, quasi scientific, audio-visual

scrutiny of the performer’s vocal body added an uncomfortable physicality to Mark Antony’s

moving but shrewd oration. In the same vein, the actor playing Brutus inhaled helium to

change the pitch of his voice. This conscious juxtaposition of corporeal voice and dramatic

speech exposed the tension between orality and the rhetoric of theatre. It might have looked

like nothing more than a trick, especially in the case of staging a classic, but Castellucci’s

practice, deeply rooted in the avant-garde trend toward the materiality of performance,

factually enhanced the drama by means of postdramatic theatricality.

Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s concert adaptation of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s 1932 novel

Voyage to the End of Night, produced for the 1999 Avignon Festival, added another para-
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textual dimension to its performance. It included a vocalization of the novel’s torrent of

language, similar to the Futurist declamation of parole in libertà and Artaud’s use of

glossolalia in his radiophonic piece, Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu. As Timothy

Scheie reports, “during the first of the piece’s six ‘movements,’ four vocalists, standing

around a table, whispered, clucked, groaned, and shrieked fragments of Céline’s text in tightly

orchestrated rhythms, weaving the words into abstract tonalities and percussive noise.”462 It

was a concert for a world that has been reduced to cacophony. Reading from scores, the

performers interacted with a continuous flood of sound effects and film clips projected on

three circular screens. The visual stream, in the style of Expressionist and surrealist cinema,

led the spectators on a journey through a First World War battlefield, a bordello, an American

automotive factory, and a Parisian suburban slum. The unrestricted torrent of sounds and

images from Céline’s novel assaulted the audience’s senses with bursting fragments of life, as

Futurists would say. But this intense collage of aural and visual attractions was achieved by a

technical sophistication unknown to the Futurists.

The oral/aural performance style of contemporary theatre has been substantially

enriched by its technological sophistication. The aural environment of the theatre event is now

created by the use of wireless microphones, constellations of loudspeakers, electronic/digital

equipment for sound treatment, and a whole set of paraphernalia known to contemporary

sound designers and theatre-makers. Today, “less than an organ or an instrument […] the

voice in theatre appears more as a producer of a sound space with multiple sources, relying

both on the bodies on stage and recordings and samples.”463 In companies like Theatregroep

Hollandia and Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, sound designers and music producers/performers are

crucial contributors to the artistic team. Aside from composer Philip Glass, who organizes
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musical sound in counterpoint to the author’s architectural ideas, one of the most celebrated of

Wilson’s collaborators has been the sound designer Hans-Peter Kuhn. Kuhn’s specialty is

building environmental noise into a complete layer of acoustics in Wilson’s pieces. In the

Schaubühne production of Death Destruction & Detroit II (1987), for example, he created a

kind of sonic cocoon: “We had a line of 10 little speakers grouped around the sides and back

of the auditorium. There were nine separate spots in the house, four for voices and five for

taped sound effects. We also had speakers in the ceiling, the proscenium and backstage. So

you were completely covered with sound.”464 Kuhn’s architectural dispersal of sound sources

ideally fulfilled Cage’s idea of a “total sound space.” Working with a massive archive of

recorded sounds, which were sampled, treated, and mixed with voices and noises produced by

the actors, Kuhn structured an aural space parallel to Wilson’s visual one. Wilson forced the

audience to change their viewing angle by raising walls (China’s Great Wall or the walls of

Berlin’s Spandau Prison) into position, interchangeably, on all four sides of the theatre. Acting

in response to the logic of the piece’s three-dimensional design rather than illustrating stage

events, Kuhn produced a soundscape that made the audience feel the space of the sound itself;

dispersed voices and sounds became autonomous plastic and dynamic elements of

performance. Andrzej Wirth commented in Theatre Heute: “The speaker is accompanied by,

but never identical to, his voice. His statements are produced by him, but do not belong to

him; they belong to space … Separated from the actor, language and speech are elements of a

spatial, not written text.” A similar impression must have been felt by the audience of the 1983

Rotterdam production of the CIVIL warS, where “the tiny figure of William the Silent sat in

the hand of the world’s largest woman reading the Edict of Nantes while his voice [helped by
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a chain of invisible loudspeakers] traveled in a nearly perfect circle around the perimeter of

the auditorium.”465

Robert Wilson designs his theatre pieces as visual and aural configurations that can be

considered a consequence of the spatialization of sound. Although his theatre has often been

called “a theatre of images” because his creative process starts with the sketching of semi-

abstract (one might say hieroglyphic) storyboards, the truth is that Wilson always returns to

the organization of sound and the deconstruction of language as the basis of his staging.

Wilson’s involvement with the dramaturgy of sound includes his probe into the

communicational power of language by fragmenting words and their sound/graphic patterns

(A Letter to Queen Victoria), his exploration of silence (Deafman Glance), the rhythmical

organization of musical and visual structures (Einstein on the Beach), and the production of

dense soundscapes correlated to the architectural volumes of his stage sets (Death Destruction

& Detroit II, the CIVIL warS).

In his production of Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine (New York, Hamburg, and

Berlin, 1986), Wilson organized parallel rhythmical structures of blocks of sound and silence,

carefully choreographed movements, and ninety-degree rotations of the set for each

consecutive scene. Small, incremental changes, repetition, variation, and reversal of motives,

typical of minimalist music, were applied to the change of visual perspective for each tableau.

The silent prologue to Hamletmachine begins with the percussive sounds of two claves hit

together that seem to cut time into pieces, and these sharp beats initiate all major changes in

the performance. It is a technique borrowed from Japanese Noh theatre, used to mark the

merciless evolving of time. In a poorly lit, deep rectangular stage space, we see an old woman

in white rags sitting in a wheelchair. Across from her there is a long table diagonally dividing
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a large room in two. Three identically dressed women enter and sit at the table. They scratch

or knock the table with rhythmical, monotonous persistence. Their non-negotiable,

authoritarian position makes the spectator think of a courtroom or a prison ward. The washed-

out old woman, perhaps a prisoner or a defendant, tied to her chair, looks like a character from

Beckett’s Endgame. She slowly moves her limbs with spasmodic jerks, screams silently, and

freezes with her mouth wide open. A simple piano tune, romantic and almost childish, drips

into the space. A yellow-clad boy comes in playing hopscotch and stops in mid-flight,

balancing on one leg. Wolves howl in the distance, a train passes. All this “silent” ballet,

lasting around thirty minutes, will be repeated in the next, sounded scene in which the scraps

of Müller’s text will finally be uttered: “I was Hamlet. I stood at the shore and talked with the

surf, BLABLA, the ruins of Europe in back of me...”

Hamletmachine is what Lehmann calls, using the words of Wilson’s role model,

Gertrude Stein, a postdramatic “audio landscape” where “the passing of time turns into a

‘continuous present’ … [and] theatre becomes similar to a kinetic sculpture, turning into a

time sculpture.”466 Wilson’s dramaturgy of sound and silence, rotation of the stage, and figural

games with objects and performers require a “landscape-response” from the audience,

suggests Elinor Fuchs. That is the only reception fully appropriate for a dispersed perceptual

field reinforced by the repetition and slow-moving transformations of its aural and visual

perspective. Here, one should remember a brief entry from Thornton Wilder’s journal: “A

myth is not a story read from left to right, from beginning to end, but a thing held full-in-view

the whole time. Perhaps this is what Gertrude Stein meant by saying that the play henceforth is

a landscape.”467 Today, a piece of theatre like Wilson’s is mounted onstage to expose its

phonetic, aural, visual, and plastic materiality to our eyes and our ears. It is an offering for our
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senses, mind, and emotions, a spatial and musical disposition, an “audio landscape” that does

not rush to tell a story. It is a spatial text, a play/performance/production physically “held full-

in-view the whole time,” or, as Kostelanetz has aptly noted, a sound-image complex that is

constantly communicated.

The phenomenon of the spatialization of sound on the contemporary stage must not be

solely regarded as an achievement of new technologies. Rather, it has a long history in the

avant-garde theatre’s struggle to detach speech, voice, and vocal gesture from the written text

and to liberate physical sound from the individual voice trapped in corporeal, emotional, and

psychological intricacies. From the historical avant-garde’s sound poetry and performance to

the postdramatic theatre of Sound & Fury, Schleef, Castellucci, and Wilson, vocal gesture has

been used to dislocate verbal meaning in order to make words/sounds resonate both within the

body and in the space. Artaud acknowledged the expressive and dynamic spatial potential of

voice in contrast to what could be expressed in spoken dialogue. He believed that words

detached from concept-bearing lines of dialogue “will be construed in an incantational, truly

magic sense -- for their shape and their sensuous emanations.”468 In contrast to the way logical

speech flattens theatrical space, as Derrida interprets Artaud’s point, sound reinstates the

volume of theatrical space. Artaud writes: “Once aware of this language in space, language of

sounds, cries, lights, onomatopoeia, the theatre must organize it into veritable hieroglyphs.”469

The hieroglyphic writing and performance Artaud envisioned would coordinate phonetic

elements of language with visual, pictorial, and plastic elements of staging. The postdramatic

text and performance, as confirmed here by the discussion of its recent epitomes, strives to

realize this kind of writing. Hence, quite programmatically describing the “textscape” and a

“theatre of voices,” Lehmann states that “the new variants of text should carry the connotation
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of the ‘spacing’ understood in the sense of Derrida’s espacement: the phonetic materiality, the

temporal course, the dispersion in space.”470

This review of the echoes of the explorations of sound in the historical avant-garde in

contemporary theatre practice proves a continuum in the centrality of the oral/aural

performance. It started in the early part of the twentieth century -- the era of Futurist, Dadaist,

and Expressionist experiments -- when promoters of an anti-Naturalistic mise en scène

rejected the language of character, plot, and dramatic development and opted for a “speech” of

stage materials, one of which was sound. Their understanding of “speech” meant a

communication by sensory attractions, rather than intellectual concepts, aimed at the

audience’s participation in a performance event. This required attending to a

performance/production’s complex audio-visual theatricality and “comprehending” its non-

verbal idiom while forgoing the narrative and figurative frameworks of a standard drama.

Consequently, a core medium of such an idiom, sound, after being recognized by the avant-

garde as a substantial rather than an illustrative element of theatre, has become vital to the

performance/staging style of the twenty-first century.

All of the postdramatic performances examined here, in one way or another, follow the

avant-garde’s tendency to disarticulate Cartesian logocentrism by oral/aural means. They take

part in the process which Helga Finter calls “the theatricalization of voice,” evolving from the

liberation of the performer’s body/voice envisioned by Artaud to the experimental practice in

the field of theatre’s orality/aurality that “on the one hand, takes the written (the seen) as spoken

sounds and transforms sight into hearing and kinesthesia and, on the other hand, takes tone and

sound as spatially written, thus transforming hearing to sight.”471 Voice thus becomes a concrete

sound that crosses sensory borders by virtue of its own materiality. As one among the material
 300

elements of a performance, it shapes an abstract/concrete piece of art -- as much a theatre event

as an image, sculpture, construction, or composition. Looking back at its sources, we can see

postdramatic theatricality as a realization of Kandinsky’s concept of abstract scenic synthesis,

attributed to the power of poetry that “offers the human word as an abstract means developing in

time and space to the disposition of theatre. In the same way plastic arts find their place in

architecture, poetry finds its place in music.”472 In an interview given to Sylvère Lotringer,

Wilson explains that in his theatre “words weren’t used to tell a story. They were used more

architecturally: for the length of the word, of the sentence, for the sound. They were constructed

like music.”473 Thus the circle, from explorations of the phonetic materiality of words to the

temporal and spatial displacement of sounds, closes with a claim that the theatricality of today’s

performance greatly relies on its own orality/aurality. Additionally, the notion of espacement

that is always/already contained in language helps us understand postdramatic theatricality, not

only in terms of the musicalization of performance, but more profoundly in terms of a

concretization/materialization of the theatrical sign, which allows for a revival of its aural,

visual, and physical aspects.

301
 302

EPILOGUE

When a cry, a weep, a chuckle, a cough, a mumble, or a stutter emerges from its secure place

amid the lines of dramatic dialogue -- when the voice springs from the dramatic character,

abandoning its cocoon for stage space -- it is reborn as a part of an evolving theatrical

noise/sound pattern that has a life of its own. I, an audience member, no longer face only

psychologically motivated actions of madness, joy, or grief in a dramatic story being told but

also theatrical sound itself. To my ears and my mind the sound appears emotionally engaging,

empathetic, but at the same time concrete and abstract, naked in its materiality. Needless to say,

this relationship with sound becomes even more complicated when mediated, recorded,

instrumental, electronic, and digital extensions of sound flood the stage. And still more so when

sound’s rhythmic, durational, and contrapuntal workings start to determine stage visuals. But the

point of origin remains: I and a cry in the theatre.

That is how my journey into sonic matters of theatre now and its sources then (in the

historical and neo-avant-garde) began. It started rather intuitively -- I was immersed in sound and

felt its palpability as a radio director/dramaturg and a theatre sound designer -- but turned into a

more rigorous exercise in my effort to retrace, theoretically and historically, the legacy of the

avant-garde treatment of sound in the postdramatic theatre. Finding the urgency of the topic of

sound in theatre -- up to now mostly regarded as an ancillary marker of the dramatic plot --

rooted in the recognition of its materiality and the oral/aural experiments of the historical avant-
 303

garde, this book argues for a place for the dramaturgy of sound within postdramatic theatre

practice.

The parameters of an emerging dramaturgy of sound, primarily concerned with time,

rhythm, voice, and other aural aspects of theatre, cannot easily be pinned down by citing a direct

line of influences. Yet the dramaturgy of sound is both ubiquitous and multi-faceted. One has

only to glance at the theatre of the past few decades, revisited here, to notice just how crucial the

dramaturgy of sound has been. It has been evident in the return to pre-verbal and corporeal

impulses embedded in the sound of words in the Living Theatre’s The Brig (1963), Peter Brook

and Ted Hughes’s Orghast (1971), and Caryl Churchill’s Skriker (1994); in the music-like

staging method of Tadeusz Kantor’s Dead Class (1975) and Christoph Marthaler’s Murx the

European! (1993); in the exploration of aural and physical values of choric performance in

Elfriede Jelinek and Einar Schleef’s Ein Sportstueck (1998); in the emphasis on aurality in Peter

Stein’s Oresteia (1980) and Sound & Fury’s War Music (2000), played in darkness; in the

expansion of the sonic sphere into a kinetic sculptural space in Robert Wilson’s productions; and

in the intermediality of works reaching into the twenty-first century like those of the Socìetas

Raffaello Sanzio and the Theatregroep Hollandia.

All these productions/performances feature an “‘auditive stage’ [that] around the theatre

image opens up ‘intertextual’ reference to all sides or complements the scenic material through

musical motifs of sound or ‘concrete noise.’”474 Few of the most recent among performances

discussed here exhibit an architectural/kinetic extension of sound into space achieved “in the

sense of the espacement: the phonetic materiality, the temporal course, the dispersion in space,

the loss of teleology and self identity”475 that Derrida holds necessary to break the closure of the

dramatic text. These performances concur with my initial hypothesis that the dramaturgy of
 304

sound, from its avant-garde sources to today’s practice, unfolds in two never-separated,

intertwined strains – the gestural, corporeal power of the performer’s voice and the structural

qualities of stage sound.

Listening itself, however, turns us back to the archetypal situation of I and a cry in the

theatre that is revamped in many postdramatic performances, where “breath, rhythm, the opaque

actuality and intensity of the body’s visceral presence take precedence over logos, disturbing and

interrupting all semiosis.”476 Listening “reads” theatre performance without semantic pretensions;

it discovers the flux of “phonotext” or “genotext” (Julia Kristeva) or “the grain of the voice”

(Ronald Barthes) that reveals the materiality of language from within. Therefore, Lehmann

suggests a new theatre “in ways similar to a modern language poétique – an attempt toward a

restitution of chora as a ‘space’ and discourse without telos, hierarchy and causality,” a theatre

that “tends toward something like a chora-graphie.”477 A closer look at Lehmann’s neologism

shows manifold connotations of this word: first, chora denotes a pre-verbal space and an aural

flux, but also, at least phonetically, it calls to mind chorus and chorea, ritual singing and dancing

in the theatre; and then, a graph denotes writing and drawing, that is, something visual embedded

in this compound that does not allow its fixity.

At the end of my journey, having in mind the twofold, gestural/structural development of

the dramaturgy of sound, I can plead together with Robert Wilson: “Listen to the pictures!” It is

not a call for mere synaesthesia or postmodern theatrical trickery; it is an affirmation of “chora-

graphie” as a substantial way of approaching theatre. My book’s trajectory has taken it from the

exploration of the autonomous use of sound and voice in the historical avant-garde, as it breaks

with logocentric literature and dramatic theatre, to an analysis of its “echoes” in current

performance practice. It is my hope that its final destination, the rediscovery of the pronounced
 305

orality/aurality of the postdramatic theatre, may initiate the inclusion of the aesthetics and

phenomenology of sound in contemporary theatre study.

306
 307

DRAMATURGY OF SOUND IN THE AVANT-GARDE AND POSTDRAMATIC THEATRE

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Sangild, Torben. The Aesthetics of Noise. Copenhagen: Datanom, 2002.

Schafer, Murray. “I’ve Never Seen a Sound.” In S:ON - Le son dans l’art contemporain

canadien/Sound in Contemporary Canadian Art, edited by Nicole Gingras, 66-71. Sherbrooke:

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Scheie, Timothy. “Voyage au Bout de la Nuit.” Theatre Journal, vol. 52, no.1 (March 2000):

128-29.
 326

Schiff, Christopher. “Banging on the Windowpane: Sound in Early Surrealism.” In Wireless

Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-garde, edited by Douglas Kahn and Gregory

Whitehead, 139-91. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992.

Schlemmer, Oskar, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Farkas Molnár. The Theatre of the Bauhaus.

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Schöning, Klaus. “The contours of acoustic art.” Theatre Journal, vol. 43, no. 3, Radio Drama

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Schwitters, Kurt. PPPPPP: Poems, Performances, Pieces, Proses, Plays, Poetics. Edited and

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Shklovsky, Viktor. “On Poetry and Trans-Sense Language.” Translated by Gerald Janecek and

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Shklovsky, Victor. “The Resurrection of the Word.” In Russian Formalism: A Collection of

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Shyer, Laurence. Robert Wilson and his Collaborators. New York: Theatre Communication

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 327

Smith, A.C.H. Orghast at Persepolis: An Account of the Experiment in Theatre Directed by

Peter Brook and Written by Ted Hughes. London: Methuen, 1972.

Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke

University Press, 2003.

Szondi, Peter. Theory of the Modern Drama: A Critical Edition, edited and translated by Michael

Hays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Tassel, Janet. “Staging a Kandinsky Dream.” New York Times, 7 February 1982.

Tomashevsky, K. “Victory over the Sun.” The Drama Review: TDR, vol. 15, no. 4, (Autumn,

1971): 92-106.

Violi, Patrizia, ed. Phonosymbolism and Poetic Language. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000.

Voegelin, Salomén, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. New

York and London: Continuum, 2010.

Vovolis, Thanos. “The Voice and the Mask in Ancient Greek Tragedy.” In Soundscapes, edited

by Larry Sider et als. London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2003: 83-102.

Webster, Michael. Reading Visual Poetry after Futurism: Marinetti, Apollinaire, Schwitters,

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 328

Webster, Michael. “Words-in-Freedom and the Oral Tradition.” Visible Language, vol. 23

(Winter 1989): 65-87.

Welton, Martin. “Seeing Nothing: Now Hear This...” In The Senses in Performance. Edited by

Sally Barnes and André Lepecki, 146-55. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Wessendorf, Markus. “The Postdramatic Theatre of Richard Maxwell.” Norsk Shakespeare—og

teatertidsskrift (Oslo) 1/2006: 29-33. http://www2.hawaii.edu/~wessendo/Maxwell.htm

White, John. Literary Futurism: Aspects of the First Avant-Garde. Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1990.
11
Paul Allain and Jen Harvie, eds., The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance (London

and New York: Routledge, 2006), 167.

12
The word “dramatic” has been used here in the sense that connotes dynamics of sound’s supposed

life, not the form of theatrical representation in which it might appear.

13
David Burrows, Sound, Speech, Music (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 21.
14
Patrice Pavis, “The State of Current Theatre Research,” Applied Semiotics/Sémiotique appliquée, vol.

1, no. 3 (1997): 213.

15
Frederick J. Ruf, Entangled Voices: Genre and the Religious Construction of Self (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1997), 67.

16
Euripides’ The Phoenician Women, directed by Paolo Magelli, a production of the Theatre Marin

Drzic, Dubrovnik, performed at the 1988 MESS festival in Sarajevo.

17
See Thanos Vovolis, “The Voice and the Mask in Ancient Greek Tragedy,” in Larry Sider et al., eds.,

Soundscapes (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2003): 83-102; and Torbjörn Alström, “The

Voice in the Mask,” TDR, 48 (2004), 2, 133-5.

18
Andrei Serban, “The Life in a Sound,” The Drama Review: TDR (1976), Vol. 20, No. 4, 1976, pp.

25-26.
19
Murray Schafer, “I’ve Never Seen a Sound,” in Nicole Gingras, ed., S:ON - Le son dans l’art

contemporain canadien/Sound in Contemporary Canadian Art (Sherbrooke: Éditions Artextes, 2003),

68.
20
Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press,

1976), 45.
21
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, James M. Edie, ed. (Evanston, Ill.:

Northwestern University Press, 1964), xvii.

22
David Roesner, “The Politics of the Polyphony of Performance: Musicalization in Contemporary

German Theatre,” Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 18, no. 1 (2008): 54.
23
Roesner, “The Politics of the Polyphany of Performance,” 31.
24
Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. Saskya

Iris Jain (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 17.

25
Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance, 75.
26
Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (New York: Routledge,

2006), 68.
27
Ibid., 92.
28
Robert Bean, “Polyphonic Aurality and John Cage” in Aural Cultures, ed. Jim Drobnick, Toronto:

YYZ Books, 1994, 127 and 134.

29
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5sB_YvvSS4, last accessed 24 May 2010.
30
Steve McCaffery, Carnival, the second panel 1970-75 (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1976), [no

pagination].
31
Steve McCaffery, “Voice in Extremis,” in Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics

(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 161.

32
Claudia Castelucci et als., The Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio (New York and London:

Routledge, 2007), 24-25.

33
Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 18.
34
Kazimir Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism,” in

John E. Bowlt, ed., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902-1934 (New York:

Viking Press, 1976), 130.

35
Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 195.
36
Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove

Press, 1958), 80.

37
Günter Berghaus, ed., F.T. Marinetti: Critical Writings (New York: Clarendon Press, 2006), 391.
38
I am using this twofold word according to Michael Kirby’s definition, which adheres to the avant-

garde predilection for the materiality of the sign/sound/light: “The word ‘affect’ rather than ‘effect’ was

used [… because] theatre seeks not merely an effect - a response - but an affective response, an

emotional and ultimately nonintellectual one. (‘Bright light,’ says Webster in defining the word,

‘affects the eyes.’).” Michael Kirby, A Formalist Theatre (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

Press, 1987), [xiv].

39
Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 2.
40
Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 22.
41
Günter Berghaus, Avant-garde Performance: Live Events and Electronic Technologies (New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 23.

42
Jules Romains, La vie unanime (Paris: L’Abbaye, 1908). Quoted in Marianne W. Martin, “Futurism,

Unanimism and Apollinaire,” Art Journal, Vol. 28, No. 3. (Spring, 1969): 261.
43
Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 22.
44
Steven Connor, “Feel the Noise: Excess, Affect and the Acoustic,” in Gerhard Hoffman and Alfred

Hornung, eds., Emotion in Postmodernism (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1997), 152.

45
F.T. Marinetti, Emilio Settimelli, Bruno Corra, “Synthetic Theatre Manifesto,” in Apollonio, Futurist

Manifestos, 182.
46
Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 24.
47
F.T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” in Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 23.
48
D. Burliuk, V. Khlebnikov, A. Kruchenykh, and V. Mayakovski, “A Slap in the Face of Public

Taste,” in Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle, eds., Russian Futurism through Its Manifestos, 1912-1928

(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 51-2.

49
Hugo Ball, Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary, John Elderfield, trans. and ed. (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1996), 61.

50
Camille Saint-Saens’s letter quoted in Anne d’Harnoncourt, Futurism and the International Avant-

garde (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1980), 11.

51
Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch,

Postmodernism (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987), 119.

52
Ball, Flight Out of Time, 66.
53
Robert Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1981), 26.

54
Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets, 27.
55
John D. Erickson, Dada: Performance, Poetry, and Art (Boston: Twayne, 1984), 97.
56
Quoted in Steve McCaffery, Carnival, the second panel 1970-75 (Toronto: Coach House Press,

1976), no pagination.
57
Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), 50.
58
Torben Sangild, The Aesthetics of Noise (DATANOM, 2002) <www.ubu.com/papers/noise.html>

(last accessed 24 May 2010).

59
Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

1985), 2.
60
Attali, Noise, 5.
61
Ibid., 7.
62
Ibid., 3.
63
Balilla Pratella, “Manifesto of Futurist Musicians, 1910” in Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 30.
64
Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke

University Press, 2003), 3.

65
Hermann von Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of

Music, trans. Alexander J. Ellis (New York: Dover Publications, 1954), 1.

66
Helmholtz, On the Sensations, 2.
67
Don Ihde, Sense and Significance (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1973), 25, 27.
68
Walter J Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 2002), 8.
69
Ong, Orality and Literacy, 33.
70
Ihde, Sense and Significance, 28.
71
Quoted in Garett Barden, “Method in Philosophy,” in John Mullarkey, ed., The New Bergson (New

York: Manchester University Press, 1999), 38.

72
Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. John Warrington (London: Dent, 1956), 51.
73
René Descartes, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, trans. Paul J. Olscamp

(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 65.

74
Ross Brown, Sound: A Reader in Theatre Practice (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 58.
75
Steven Connor, “Windbags and Skinsongs” at http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/windbags/ (last

accesed 17 August 2011).

76
Steven Connor, “The Strains of the Voice,” <www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/strains>.
77
Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” in The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard

(New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 269.

78
Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, 270.
79
Pierre Fédida, Le Corps, le texte et la scène (Paris: Delarge, 1983), 252.
80
Rimbaud Complete, trans., ed. and with an introduction by Wyatt Mason (New York: Modern

Library, 2002), 104.

81
Lawton and Eagle, Russian Futurism through Its Manifestos, 1912-1928, 52.
82
Mikhail Larionov, “Pictorial Rayonism,” in John E. Bowlt, ed., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde:

Theory and Criticism, 1902-1934 (New York: Viking Press, 1976), 101.
83
Enrico Prampolini, “Chromophony - The Colors of Sounds,” in Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 115.
84
See Jeff Edwards, “Steiner, Thought Forms, and Kandinsky,” in Beyond Kandinsky: Revisiting

Spiritual in Art, a New York School of Visual Arts online symposium at

http://www.beyondkandinskyblog.net/2011/04/steiner-thought-forms-and-kandinsky.html.
85
Wassily Kandinsky and Franc Mark, eds., Blaue Reiter Almanach, trans. Henning Falkenstein (New

York: Viking Press, 1974), 92.

86
Wassily Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, eds. (Boston:

G.K. Hall & Co., 1982), 364.

87
Mel Gordon, “Songs from the Museum of the Future: Russian Sound Creation 1910-1930,” in

Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, eds., Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-

garde (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 203.

88
See Janet Tassel, “Staging a Kandinsky Dream,” New York Times, 7 February 1982. The work

reached out to the cybersphere in its version of ‘an animated digital object’ produced by the Gertrude

Stein Repertory Theatre, New York; see <www.glopad.org/pi/en/record/digdoc/1004283> (last

accessed 24 May 2010).

89
Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, 281.
90
Ibid., 263.
91
Ibid., 264.
92
David F. Kuhns, German Expressionist Theatre: The Actor and the Stage (Cambridge: CUP, 1997),

150.
93
Kuhns, German Expressionist Theatre, 267.
94
Marinetti: Selected Writings, trans. R.W. Flint and Arthur A. Cappotelli (New York: Farrar, Straus

and Giroux, 1972), 117.

95
Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, 261.
96
Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture

(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 38.

97
I poeti futuristi, Milano: Edizioni Furutiste di “Poesia,” 1912, 372.

98
See a detailed case study of the performance by Dorothy Pam in The Drama Review, TDR, 67

(September, 1975), 5-12.

99
Lawton, Russian Futurism through Its Manifestos, 51-2.
100
Ibid., 70.
101
Ibid., 73.
102
Ibid., 66.
103
F.T. Marinetti, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature,” in Günter Berghaus, ed., F.T.

Marinetti: Critical Writings (New York: Farrar, 2006), 112.

104
Velimir Khlebnikov, “The Word as Such,” in Charlotte Douglas, ed., Collected Works of Velimir

Khlebnikov, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), vol. 1, 257.

105
Antonin Artaud, “First Letter on Language,” Collected Works, trans. Victor Corti (London: Calder

and Boyars, 1968), vol. 4, 83.

106
Steve McCaffery, “From Phonic to Sonic: The Emergence of the Audio-Poem,” in Adalaide Kirby

Morris, ed., Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies (Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 1997), 155.

107
See Veit Erlmann, ed., Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity (Oxford and

New York: Berg, 2004).

108
Steven Connor, “The Modern Auditory I,” in Roy Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self: Histories from the

Renaissance to the Present (London: Routledge, 1997), 213.

109
Connor, “The Modern Auditory I,” 212.
110
Erika Fischer-Lichte, “The Avant-garde and the Semiotics of the Antitextual Theatre,” in James M.

Harding, ed., Contours of the Theatrical Avant-garde (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,

2000), 92.
111
Patrice Pavis, Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of the Theatre (New York: PAJ

Publishing, 1982), 190.

112
Steve McCaffery, “From Phonic to Sonic,” 155.
113
Fischer-Lichte, Contours of the Theatrical Avant-garde, 79.
114
Christopher Innes, “In the Beginning Was the Word: Text versus Performance,” in Domenico

Pietropaolo, ed., The Performance Text (Ottawa: Legas, 1997), 9.

115
Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove

Press, 1958), 91.

116
Christopher Innes, Avant Garde Theatre, 1892-1992 (London: Routledge, 1966), 15.
117
Khlysty was an underground church sect of Russian Spiritual Christians active from the late 17th

century. Their commonly accepted name Khlysty was actually a corrupted version of Khristy, meaning

The Christ’s Ones. Thus the attribution to whom they were devoted was verbally deformed into the

denunciation of their flagellant practice – the word khlyst means a whip. It resulted in the prosecution

of their rituals, which would often end in sexual orgies. This very connection between body and soul,

stemming from the Russian paganism, made glossolalia as irrational and spontaneous sound creation

even more attractive to the Futurists.

118
See R.S. Gordon, “The Italian Futurist Theatre: A Reappraisal,” Modern Language Revue (London),

85.2 (1990): 349-61.

119
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1978), 240.
120
Ibid., 174.
121
189, 247.
122
Steve McCaffery, “Some Notes Re Sound, Energy, and Performance,” in Stephen Vincent and Ellen

Zweig, eds. The Poetry Reading: A Contemporary Compendium on Language and Performance (San

Francisco: Momo’s Press, 1981), 283.

123
Patrice Pavis, “Avant-Garde Theatre and Semiology: A Few Practices and the Theory behind

Them,” in Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of the Theatre (New York: PAJ Publishing,

1982), 186.
124
For a complete chronology and programs, see Simona Bertini, Marinetti e le ‘eroiche serate’ (con

antologia di testi) (Novara: Interlinea edizioni, 2002), 47-49, 158-160.

125
G. Lista, ed., Théâtre futurist italien, anthologie critique (Lausanne: La Cité/L’Age d’Homme,

1976), vol. 1, 49. Also <http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/balla_giacomo/Balla-Giacomo_Discussione.mp3>.

126
Simona Bertini, Marinetti e le ‘eroiche serate’ (con antologia di testi) (Novara: Interlinea edizioni,

2002), 145. This and all other quotations from sources in Italian are translated by Antonio Mosca, 146.
127
Günter Berghaus, Avant-Garde Performance: Live Events and Electronic Technologies (New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 33.

128
Michael Webster, “Words-in-Freedom and the Oral Tradition,” Visible Language, vol. 23 (Winter

1989), 69.
129
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, 44.
130
Archivi del Futurismo, ed. Maria Drudi Gambillo and Teresa Fiori, vol. 1 (Rome: De Luca, 1958),

295.
131
Marinetti: Selected Writings, trans. R.W. Flint and Arthur A. Cappotelli (New York: Farrar, Straus

and Giroux, 1972), 89.

132
Ibid., 125.
133
Richard J. Pioli, Stung by Salt and War: Creative texts of the Italian Avant-Gardist F.T. Marinetti

(New York: Farrar, 1972), 41. Original in I poeti futuristi (Milano: Edizioni Furutiste di “Poesia,”

1912), 29.
134
Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 112. Original in I

Manifesti del futurismo, lanciati da Marinetti et al. (Firenze: Lacerba, 1914), 154.
135
Ibid., 112.
136
Marinetti, Selected Writings, 147. Original reprinted in F. T. Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista,

a cura di Luciano De Maria (Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1968), 111.

137
Donald Marinelli, Origins of Futurist Theatricality: The Early Life and Career of F.T. Marinetti

(University of Pittsburgh, 1987), 299.

138
Pontus Hulten, Futurism and Futurisms (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 482.
139
Marinetti: Selected Writings, 126-7.
140
Sound alignment and ideophone language practices are discussed in Veit Erlmann, ed., Hearing

Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity (Oxford/New York: Berg, 2004).
141
Steve McCaffery, “Introduction,” in Steve Mccaffery and bpNichol, eds., Sound Poetry: a

Catalogue (Underwich Editions, Toronto, 1978), no pagination.

142
Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), 56-7.
143
Jon Erickson, “The Language of Presence: Sound Poetry and Artaud,” boundary 2, vol. 14, no. 1/2

(Autumn, 1985 - Winter, 1986), 279.

144
Ibid., 281.
145
Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, Mary Caroline Richards, trans. (New York: Grove

Press, 1958), 46.

146
Christopher Middleton, “The Rise of Primitivism and Its Relevance to the Poetry of Expressionism

and Dada” in Bolshevism in Art and Other Expository Writings (Manchester: Carcanet New Press,

1978), 28.
147
Quoted in Middleton, “The Rise of Primitivism…,” 31.
148
Richard Kostelanetz, “Text-Sound Art: A Survey,” Performing Arts Journal, vol. 2, no. 2 (1977),

62.
149
Ibid., 61.
150
Quoted in Günter Berghaus, “Dada Theatre or the Genesis of Anti-Bourgeois Performance Art,”

German Life and Letters, vol. 38, no. 4 (1985), 297.

151
Hugo Ball, Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary, John Elderfield, ed. (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1996), 68.

152
Ibid., 25.
153
Ibid., 68.
154
Ibid., 226.
155
Ibid., 236.
156
Ibid., 70.
157
Ibid., 71.
158
Steven Connor, “The Modern Auditory I,” in Roy Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self: Histories from the

Renaissance to the Present (London: Routledge, 1997), 213.

159
Walter Arndt, “Preface” in Christian Morgenstern, Songs from the Gallows (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1993), xii.

160
<http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/morgenstern_christian/ Morgenstern-Christian_Das-Grosse-

Lalula.mp3>.
161
<http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/scheerbart_paul/Scheerbart-Paul_Kikakoku-Zauberspruch-I.mp3>.

Also in Paul Scheerbart, Gesammelte Werke, herausgegeben von Thomas Bürk, Joachim Körber, Uli

Kohnle (Linkenheim : Phantasia, 1986-1996), v. 1, 576.

162
See Raymond Federman, “The Language of Dada: Intermedia of Words,” Dada/Surrealism 2

(1972), 19-22.
163
Ibid., 22.
164
Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, 93.
165
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1978), 189.
166
Sonia Delaunay-Terk was a wife of Robert Delaunay, a painter, and a propagator of simultaneisme,

whose supposedly innovative Orphism was a subject of a bitter controversy between Cubists and

Futurists at the time.

167
Mel Gordon, ed. Dada Performance. New York: PAJ Publications, 1987, 38/9. The poem is

reprinted from its original publication in Cabaret Voltaire, Recueil littéraire et artistique, edité par

Hugo Ball, Zurich, Meierei Spiegelgasse 1, June 1916.

168
Ibid., 48.
169
Marinetti, Selected Writings, 164.
170
The original edition is reprented in F. T. Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, a cura di Luciano

De Maria (Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore), 1968, 641-779. Zang Tumb Tumb has many textual

versions with different titles (see John J. White, Literary Futurism: Aspects of the First Avant-garde

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 179), along with a later recording of the author’s “dynamic

declamation” called Battaglia di Adrianapoli produced by La Voce del Padrone, Milan, 1926. Its two

basic texts were called Adrianopoli assedio orchestra and published in Lacerba in 1913. The title of

these very first versions clearly demonstrates that Marinetti was aware of possibilities for the

orchestration of a poem, not only as an onomatopoeic sound report from the battlefield but also as an

extension beyond mimetic rendition, toward an independent cacophonic structure that might have

inspired Luigi Russolo’s art of noises.

171
Steve McCaffery, “From Phonic to Sonic: The Emergence of the Audio-Poem,” in Adelaide Kirby

Morris, ed., Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies (Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 1997), 151.

172
“The Battle of Adrianopolis” is recorded in April 1924 for La Voce del Padrone as R6916 [78 rpm]

and later reissued on the CDs Musica Futurista and Futurism and Dada Reviewed.
173
Marinetti, Selected Writings, 332/3.
174
The 1908 Messina earthquake killed 60,000 to 200,000 people in Sicily and Calabria. This tragic

event caused a delay in publication of the first futurist manifesto, and Marinetti dwelled on it as a

comparison to with Futurism’s violent tectonic power. Sulle rovine di Messina, a poem by G.P. Lucini,

was often recited at the futurist serate.

175
“Geometric and Mechanical Splendour and the Numerical Sensibility” in Apollonio, Futurist

Manifestos, 156.
176
Ibid., 157.
177
Bertini, Marinetti e le ‘eroiche serate,’ 145. Also in F. T. Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista,

685/6. This and all other quotes from this source are translated by me with help of Antonio Mosca.
178
Marinetti, Selected Writings, 88.
179
Bertini, Marinetti e le ‘eroiche serate,’ 146. Also in Teoria e invenzione futurista, 689.
180
Marinetti, Selected Writings, 88.
181
Zbigniew Folejewski, Futuristm and its Place in the Development of Modern Poetry, Ottawa:

University of Ottawa Press, 1980, 183-5. Also in Teoria e invenzione futurista, 694/5; Pioli, 78;

Bertini, 144.
182
Clara Orban, The Culture of Fragments: Words and Images in Futurism and Surrealism (Atlanta:

Rodopi, 1997), 45.

183
László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: P. Theobald, 1969), 306.
184
Ibid., 301.
185
Ibid., 304.
186
Zbigniew Folejewski, Futurism and Its Place in the Development of Modern Poetry: A Comparative

Study and Anthology (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1980), 35.

187
Marinetti, Selected Writings, 85.
188
Pioli, Stung by Salt and War, 41.
189
Bertini, Marinetti e le ‘eroiche serate,’ 146.
190
Pioli, Stung by Salt and War, 50.
191
Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976),

83/84.
192
Walter Benjamin, “On Mimetic Faculty,” Reflections, Peter Demetz, ed. (New York: Schocken

Books, 1986), 335.

193
Raymond Chapman, The Treatment of Sounds in Language and Literature (Oxford: Blackwell and

Deutsch, 1984), 38.

194
Chapman, The Treatment of Sounds, 38.
195
Patrizia Violi, ed., Phonosymbolism and Poetic Language (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000), 7, 9.
196
Quoted in White, Literary Futurism, 25.
197
“Geometric and Mechanical Splendor and the Numerical Sensibility” in Marinetti, Selected

Writings, 101.
198
Marinetti, Selected Writings, 144.
199
“Manifesto of Futurist Playwrights, 1911,” in Marinetti, Selected Writings, 113.
200
Giovanni Lista, La scène futuriste (Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique,

1989), 142.
201
Anna Lawton, “Introduction,” in Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle, eds., Russian Futurism through

Its Manifestoes, 1912-1928 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 8.

202
Ibid., 52.
203
Victor Shklovsky, “The Resurrection of the Word,” in Stephan Bann and John E. Bowlt, eds.,

Russian Formalism: A Collection of Articles and Texts in Translation (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic

Press, 1973), 41.

204
Ibid., 42.
205
Krystyna Pomorska, Russian Formalist Theory and Its Poetic Ambience (The Hague/Paris: Mouton,

1968), 120.
206
Velimir Khlebnikov, Collected Works, trans. Paul Schmidt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

Press, 1987), vol. 3 (1997), 34. The use of translation in my analysis of the poem does not deny the

primacy of original Russian text. In this case, and later in Zangezi, I took the liberty to discuss Paul

Schmidt’s translations because they follow the phonetic principles used in the original poem.
207
Khlebnikov, Collected Works, vol. 3, 38. Original in Velimir Khlebnikov, Tvoreniia, edited by V. P.

Grigor’ev and A. E. Parnis, Moscow, 1986, 54.

208
Paul Schmidt, a prominent translator of Russian literature into English, coined the word

“beyonsense” to denote zaum – the Futurist idiom of poetry. I am using it accordingly.

209
Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska, eds., Reading in Russian Poetics: Formalist and

Structuralist Views (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 11.

210
Ibid., 11.
211
Andrey Bely, “The Magic of Words,” in Selected Essays of Andrey Bely, Steven Cassedy, ed. and

trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 98.

212
Ibid., 93.
213
Ibid., 97.
214
Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle, eds., Russian Futurism through Its Manifestos, 1912-1928 (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1988), 80.

215
Ibid., 80.
216
V. Khlebnikov and A. Kruchenykh, “New Ways of the Word: The Language of Future, Death to

Symbolism,” 1913, in Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle, eds., Russian Futurism through Its

Manifestoes, 1912-1928 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 71.

217
Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 61.
218
Ibid., 60.
219
Ibid., 68.
220
Marinetti: Selected Writings, trans. R.W. Flint and Arthur A. Cappotelli (New York: Farrar, Straus

and Giroux, 1972), 89.

221
Nils Åke Nilsson, “Kruchonykh’s Poem ‘Dyr bul shchyl,’” Scando-Slavica, vol. 24 (1979), 145.
222
Ibid., 75/76.
223
Pomorska, Russian Formalist Theory, 120.
224
Alexander Kaun, Soviet Poets and Poetry (Berkeley: California University Press, 1943), 24.

Original in Khlebnikov, Tvoreniia, 54.

225
Velimir Khlebnikov, The King of Time: Selected Writings of the Russian Futurian, Charlotte

Douglas, ed., Paul Schmidt, trans. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 20.
226
Pomorska, Rusian Formalist Theory, 97.
227
See Nils Åke Nilsson, “How to Translate Avant-garde Poetry: Some Attempts with Khlebnikov’s

‘Incantation by Laughter,’” Velimir Khlebnikov: A Stockholm Symposium (Stockholm: University of

Stockholm, 1985), 133-50; and “Futurism, Primitivism and the Russian Avant-garde,” Russian

Literature, vol. 8 (1980): 469-82.

228
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 2002),

44.
229
Christopher Innes, Avant Garde Theatre, 1892-1992 (London: Routledge, 1966), 3.
230
Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. M.C. Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958),

70.
231
Velimir Khlebnikov, Snake Train: Poetry and Prose, Gary Kern, ed. (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis,

1976), 59.
232
Ibid., 9.
233
Nilsson, “Kruchonykh’s Poem ‘Dyr bul shchyl,’” 144.
234
Viktor Shklovsky, “On Poetry and Trans-Sense Language,” trans. Gerald Janecek and Peter Mayer,

October, vol. 34 (Autumn, 1985): 3-24, 20.

235
Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation

(New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 269, 280.

236
Ibid., 283/4.
237
Ibid., 78.
238
Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 53/54.
239
See the complete list in Mel Gordon, “Songs from the Museum of Future: Russian Sound Creation

(1910-1930),” in Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, eds., Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio,

and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 206.

240
Gordon: 1992, 209. The article also brings a compiled table of Khlebnikov’s universal

phonetic/colour alphabet. See p. 216.

241
John E. Bowlt, ed., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902-1934 (New York:

Viking Press, 1976), 101.

242
Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 14.
243
Ibid., 37.
244
Robert Benedetti, “Reconstructing ‘Victory over the Sun,’” The Drama Review: TDR, vol. 28, no. 3,

Autumn, 1984: 17-30, 17.

245
Alexei Kruchenykh, Our Arrival (Moscow: Archive of Russian Avantgarde , 1995), 66.
246
Charlotte Douglas, “Introduction,” in Velimir Khlebnikov, The King of Time: Selected Writings of

the Russian Futurian, Paul Schmidt, trans., Charlotte Douglas, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1985), 4.

247
“Victory over the Sun,” trans. Ewa Bartos and Victoria Nes Kirby, The Drama Review: TDR, vol.

15, no. 4, Autumn, 1971, 107-125.

248
Kruchenykh, Our Arrival 67.
249
Benedetti, “Reconstructing ‘Victory over the Sun,’” 17.
250
Kruchenykh, Our Arrival, 67.
251
Susan P. Compton, The World Backwards: Russian Futurist Books 1912-16 (London: British

Museum Publications, 1978), 57.

252
K. Tomashevsky, “Victory over the Sun,” The Drama Review: TDR, vol. 15, no. 4, Autumn, 1971,

102.
253
Ibid., 103.
254
Quoted in Gerald Janacek, Zaum: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism (San Diego State

University Press, 1996), 190.

255
Benedikt Livshits, The One and a Half-Eyed Archer, trans. John E. Bowlt (Newtonville, Mass.:

Oriental Research Partners, 1976), 164.

256
Paul Schmidt, “Introduction,” in Khlebnikov, Collected Works, vol. 2, xi.
257
Khlebnikov, Zangezi in Collected Works, vol. 2 (331-384), 331. Original in Khlebnikov, Tvoreniia,

473.
258
Khlebnikov, Collected Works, vol. 2, 338 and 341.
259
Ibid., 340.
260
Ibid., 340.
261
Ibid., xi.
262
Ibid., 277.
263
Ibid., 345.
264
Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation

(New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 270.

265
Dokhlaya Luna. Stikhi, Proza, Stat’i, Risunki, Oforty [Croaked Moon: Verse, Prose, Essays,

Drawings, Etchings] (Moscow: Pervyi Zhurnal Russkikh Futuristov), 1914. Quoted in Zbigniew

Folejewski, Futurism and Its Place in the Development of Modern Poetry: A Comparative Study and
Anthology (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1980), 76.
266
Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, 269.

267
Quoted in Gerald Janacek, Zaum: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism (San Diego: State

University Press, 1996), 301.

268
“Destruction of Syntax -- Wireless Imagination -- Words in Freedom” in Richard J. Pioli. Stung by

Salt and War: Creative texts of the Italian Avant-Gardist F.T. Marinetti (New York: Farrar, 1972), 47.
269
Ibid., 75.
270
Antonin Artaud. Selected Writings, Susan Sontag, ed., Helen Weaver, trans. (New York: Farrar,

Straus and Giroux, 1976), 110.

271
Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 130.
272
Ibid., 133/4.
273
Ibid., 129.
274
Kazimir Malevich, Essays on Art, Troels Andersen, ed. (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1968), vol. 1, 73.
275
Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, 110.
276
Ibid., 287, 124.
277
Helga Finter, “Experimental Theatre and Semiology of Theatre: The Theatricalization of Voice,”

Modern Drama (1983), no. 26, 501.

278
Ibid., 504.
279
Günter Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 1900-1944 (New York: Clarendon Press, 1997), 235.
280
Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 236.
281
Quoted in Lista, La scène futuriste, 132.
282
Ibid., 132.
283
Francesco Cangiullo, Piedigrotta, parole in libertà (Milano: Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia”), 1916.

284
Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 144.
285
Danela Fonti, “Depero ‘mimismagico’ (mimica, declamazione, teatro cabaret, marionette) e

motorumorismo,” Depero: Dal Futurismo alla Casa d’Arte, Il catalogo (Milano: Ed. Charta e MART,

1994), 61.
286
Le Théâtre Futuriste Italien, vol. 1, 49. Lista made “la transposition phonétique” from a fac-similé,

while in my quote the French spelling is replaced by the Italian found at

http://www.paoloalbani.it/BiblioNazionale.html. Audio available at

http//ubu.artmob.ca/sound/balla_giacomo/Balla-Giacomo_Discussione.mp3, last accessed 27 May

2010.
287
www.ubu.com/sound/balla.html, last accessed 27 May 2010.
288
Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), 23.
289
Connor, Emotion in Postmodernism, 156.
290
Eric Salzman and Thomas Desi, The New Music Theater: Seeing the Voice, Hearing the Body (New

York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5.

291
Russolo, The Art of Noises, 27.
292
Marinetti: Selected Writings, trans. R.W. Flint and Arthur A. Cappotelli (New York: Farrar, Straus

and Giroux, 1972), 87.

293
Russolo, The Art of Noises, 23.
294
Michael Kirby, Futurist Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986), 33.
295
Ibid., 57.
296
Ibid., 28.
297
Ibid., 87.
298
John J. White, Literary Futurism: Aspects of the First Avant-garde (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990),

344.
299
Russolo, The Art of Noises, 60.
300
Wassily Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, eds. (Boston:

G.K. Hall & Co., 1982), 261.

301
Russolo, The Art of Noises, 32. For a detailed description and analysis see Hugh Davies, “The Sound

World, Instruments and Music of Luigi Russolo: The Expanding Medium,” Lmc, vol. 2, no. 2 (1994) at

http://creativetechnology.salford.ac.uk/fuchs/theory/authors/hugh_davies.htm, last accessed 29 May

2011.
302
Marinetti’s article in L’Hérault Beliers, October 1913, quoted in Russolo, The Art of Noises, 18.
303
Marinetti’s letter to Pratella quoted in Lista, La scène futuriste, 78.
304
Russolo, The Art of Noises, 29.
305
Quotted in Hugh Davies, “The Sound World, Instruments and Music of Luigi Russolo…”
306
Russolo, The Art of Noises, 26.
307
Ibid., 5.
308
Weekend (Ein Film ohne Bilder/Film without pictures) Regie: Walter Ruttmann. Premiere: 15 Mai

1930 (Berlin/Haus des Rundfunks) -- Radio Sendung “Hörspiele auf Tonfilmen” am 13. Juni 1930.

Available on Youtube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=O34DaUfmjI4&NR=1, last accessed 31 May

2010.
309
Koyaanisqatsi was released on DVD together with its sequel Powaqqatsi by MGM in 2002. Its

trailer can be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=PirH8PADDgQ, last accessed 4 June 2010.

310
See Reggio’s interview at www.koyaanisqatsi.org, last accessed 4 June 2010.
311
Mel Gordon, “Songs from the Museum of the Future: Russian Sound Creation (1910-1930),” in

Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, eds., Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-

garde (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992) (197-245): 223.

312
Erik Levi, “Futurist Influences upon Early 20th Century Music,” in Günter Berghaus, ed.,

International Futurism in Arts and Literature (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2000): 322-

52, 338.
313
Quoted in Levi, “Futurist Influences,” 339.
314
Carol Oja, “George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique and Transatlantic Modernism,” in Townsend

Ludington, ed., A Modern Mosaic: Art and Modernism in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 2000), 185.

315
Christopher Schiff, “Banging on the Windowpane: Sound in Early Surrealism,” in Douglas Kahn

and Gregory Whitehead, eds., Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-garde (Cambridge,

MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 140.

316
Schiff, “Banging on the Windowpane,” 151.
317
Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-art, 33.
318
Erickson, Dada: Performance, Poetry, and Art, 76.
319
Mel Gordon, Dada Performance, 55.
320
Torben Sangild, The Aesthetics of Noise (DATANOM/UBUWEB, 2002), 9,

www.ubu.com/papers/noise.html, last accessed 29 May 2010.

321
Levi, “Futurist Influences …,” 351.
322
Ibid., 352.
323
John Cage, Silence (Wesleyan University Press, 1958)…?
324
Levi, “Futurist Influences…,” 412.
325
Ibid., 412.
326
Ibid., 413.
327
F.T. Marinetti, Critical Writings, Günter Berghaus, ed. (New York: Farrar, 2006), 413.
328
Klaus Schöning, “The contours of acoustic art,” Theatre Journal, vol. 43, no. 3, Radio Drama (Oct.

1991): 307-24, 312.

329
Steven Connor, “The Modern Auditory I,” in Roy Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self: Histories from the

Renaissance to the Present (London: Routledge, 1997).

330
Le Théâtre Futuriste Italien, vol. 2, 57.
331
Rudolf Arnheim, Radio: The Art of Sound, trans. Herbert Read (London: Faber & Faber, 1936), 14.
332
Ibid., 15.
333
Salomé Voeglin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (New York

and London: Continuum, 2010), 201.

334
Ibid., 195.
335
Marinetti, Critical Writings, 413.
336
Arnheim, Radio, 29.
337
See Le Théâtre Futuriste Italien, vol. 2, 55-7. Two are published in Kirby, Futurist Performance,

292-3.
338
Kirby, Futurist Performance, 292.
339
Arnheim, Radio, 196.
340
Kirby, Futurist Performance, 144.
341
Marjorie Perloff, “The Music of Verbal Space: John Cage’s ‘What you Say …’” in Adelaide Morris,

ed., Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies (Chapel Hill, N.C./London:

University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 129.

342
Ibid., 131.
343
“36 Mesostics Re and not Re Duchamp,” in John Cage, M Writings, ’67-’72, (Middletown, Co.:

Wesleyan University Press), 1973, 27.

344
Giovanni Lista, ed., Le Théâtre Futuriste Italien, anthologie critique (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme,

1976), vol. 1, 178.

345
Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical

Writing, Peter Demetz, ed. (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 335.
346
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1978), 191.
347
Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 108, 119, 124.
348
Benedikt Livshits, The One and a Half-Eyed Archer, trans. John E. Bowlt (Newtonville, Mass.:

Oriental Research Partners, 1976), 191.

349
Marinetti: Selected Writings, trans. R.W. Flint and Arthur A. Cappotelli (New York: Farrar, Straus

and Giroux, 1972), 85.

350
This is an anglicized version of compenetrazione that appears in Flint and Kirby’s translations of

Marinetti’s texts. I use the term accordingly.

351
Giovanni Lista, La Scène Futuriste (Paris: Editions du Centre de la recherche scientifique, 1989),

10.
352
See Günter Berghaus, “A Theatre of Image, Sound and Motion: On Synaesthesia and the Idea of

Total Work of Art,” Maske und Kothurn, vol. 32, no. 2 (Universität Wien: Institut für

Theaterwissenschaft, 1986): 7-28.

353
Robert Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1981), 25.

354
Hugo Ball, Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary, John Elderfield, ed. (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1996), 56.

355
Blago Bung Blago Bung Bosso Fataka: First Texts of German Dada, Malcolm Green ed. (London:

Atlas Press, 1995), 55.

356
Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets, 26.
357
Ibid., 26.
358
Raoul Hausmann, “Poeme phonétique” in Courrier Dada, édition établie par Marc Dachy (Paris:

Éditions Allia, 2004), 57.

359
Ibid., 57. In this quote I follow the poem’s page/typeset found at

http://www.artpool.hu/Poetry/soundimage/Hausmann.html, last accessed 8 November 2011.

360
Hausmann, Courrier Dada, 58.
361
Ibid., 59. Poems are available for listening at www.ubu.com/sound/hausmann.html, last accessed 8

June 2010.
362
Magazine Merz, no.13, 1925, included a Merz-Grammophon-platte, a recording of Schwitters

reciting his Scherzo der Ursonate. A later recording, a result of his cooperation with the Suddeutscher

Rundfunk Stuttgart in 1932, is preserved in the German Radio Archive in Frankfurt/Main. Fragments

of Ursonate, published by WERGO, Mainz are also available at www.ubu.com/sound/schwitters.html,

last accessed 10 June 2010. In 1958 Lords Gallery, London, produced a record that together with a

selection from Ursonate includes Schwitters’s recitation of An Anna Blume.

363
Hausmann, Courrier Dada, 1958, 116. [Michael Webster, Reading Visual Poetry after Futurism:

Marinetti, Apollinaire, Schwitters, Cummings (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 100.]
364
Kurt Schwitters, PPPPPP: Poems, Performances, Pieces, Proses, Plays, Poetics, Jerome

Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, eds. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), xxi.
365
Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets, xxviii.
366
Klaus Schöning, “The Contours of Acoustic Art,” Theatre Journal, vol. 43, no. 3 (Radio Drama,

Oct., 1991): 307-24, 311.

367
Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets, xxix. See Appendix, Figure 20 (and 20a).
368
Schwitters, PPPPPP, 236.
369
Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets, xxix.
370
Hans Richter, Dada Art and Anti-Art, trans. David Britt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965), 152.
371
Schwitters, PPPPPP, 218.
372
John D. Erickson, Dada: Performance, Poetry, and Art (Boston: Twayne, 1984), 98.
373
Schwitters, PPPPPP, 218.
374
Mel Gordon, Dada Performance (New York: Performing Arts Books, 1987), 100.
375
Ibid., 100.
376
Mel Gordon, Expressionist Texts (New York: Performing Arts Books, 1986), 18.
377
Ibid., 210.
378
David Kuhns, German Expressionist Theatre: The Actor and the Stage (Cambridge and New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1997), 153.

379
Kuhns, German Expressionist Theatre, 156.
380
Ibid., 154.
381
Quoted in Kuhns, German Expressionist Theatre, 166.
382
Quoted in Gordon, Expressionist Texts, 18.
383
Kuhns, German Expressionist Theatre, 57.
384
Walter Gropius, ed., The Theatre of the Bauhaus, trans. Arthur S. Wensinger (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1996), 9.

385
Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 195.
386
Quoted in Günter Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 1909-1944 (New York: Clarendon Press,

1997), 178.
387
See Lista, La Scène Futuriste, 196.
388
Le Théâtre Futuriste Italien, vol. 2, 97.
389
Michael Kirby, Futurist Performance (New York: Dutton, 1971), 232.
390
Il teatro futurista sintetico, a supplement to Gli avvenimenti, Vol. 2, No. 15 (2 - 9 April 1916),

Milano. Quoted in Riconstruzione futurista dell’universo (Roma: Mario Bulzoni, 1968), 84. My

translation.
391
Le Théâtre Futuriste Italien, vol. 2, 52. Kirby, Futrist Performance, 256/7.
392
“Marinetti’s Short Plays,” trans. V.N. Kirby, The Drama Review: TDR, vol. 17, no. 4, 124.
393
Il teatro futurista sintetico creato da Marinetti, Settimelli, Bruno Corra... Piacenza: Ghelfi

Costatino, 1921, 24-26. Translation is mine.

394
Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 114.
395
Ibid., 118.
396
Lista, La Scène Futuriste, 206.
397
Kirby, Futurist Performance, 278.
398
Daniela Fonti, “Depero ‘mimismagico’ (mimica, declamazione, teatro cabaret, marionette) e

motorumorismo,” in Depero: Dal Futurismo alla Casa d’Arte (Milano: Ed. Charta e MART, 1994), 63.
399
Pontus Hulten, Futurism and Futurisms (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 548.
400
Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 199.
401
Ibid., 197.
402
Kirby, Futurist Performance, 230.
403
Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 313.
404
Kirby, Futurist Performance, 203.
405
Quoted in Günter Berghaus, “A Theatre of Image, Sound and Motion: On Synaesthesia and the Idea

of Total Work of Art,” Maske und Kothurn, vol. 32, no. 2 (1986), 24.
406
Ibid., 24.
407
Enrico Prampolini, L’impero, 11 July 1923.
408
Ibid., 14.
409
Filiberto Menna, Prampolini (Rome: De Luca Editore, 1967), 111.
410
Ibid., 111.
411
Le Théâtre Futurist Italien, vol. 2, 120.
412
Ibid., vol. 2, 118.
413
Marinetti, Critical Writings, 391.
414
Patrice Pavis, Analyzing Performance, trans. David Williams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Press, 2003), 207.

415
Patrice Pavis, Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of the Theatre (New York: PAJ

Publishing, 1982), 186.

416
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, “Theatre, Circus, Variety,” in Oskar Schlemmer, The Theatre of the Bauhaus

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 52.

417
Ibid., 52
418
F.T. Marinetti: Critical Writings, Günter Berghaus, ed. (New York: Clarendon Press, 2006), 391.
419
Richard Kostelanetz, On Innovative Performance(s): Three Decades of Recollections of Alternative

Theatre (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 1994), 8.

420
Kostelanetz, On Innovative Performance(s), 73.
421
Judith Malina, “Directing The Brig,” in Kenneth H. Brown, The Brig (New York: Hill and Wang,

1965), 106.
422
Charles Bernstein, ed., Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (New York and Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1998), 13.

423
Martin Welton, “Seeing Nothing: Now Hear This ...” in Sally Barnes and André Lepecki, eds., The

Senses in Performance (New York: Routledge, 2007), 146-55.

424
Emily Greenwood, “Sounding Out Homer: Christopher Logue’s Acoustic Homer,”

http://journal.oraltradition.org/files/articles/24ii/14_24.2.pdf, last accessed 20 May 2010.

425
Welton, “Seeing Nothing,” 154.
426
Lyn Gardner, “The Watery Part of the World,” The Guardian, 28 June 2003.
427
Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. Saskya

Iris Jain (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 128.

428
www.ubu.com/ubu/wilson_opera.html, last accessed 10 September 2010.
429
The audio recording of the scene is available at www.ubu.com/sound/big_ego.html, last accessed 20

July 2010.
430
Arthur Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996),

45.
431
Quoted in Arthur Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1996), 45.

432
Maria Nadotti, “Teatro d’artista: Conversazione de Robert Wilson,” Teatro in Europa, no. 7, 1990.
433
Caryl Churchill, Plays, 3, introduced by the author (London: Nick Hern Books, 1998), 2.
434
Julia Kristeva, Revolutions in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1984), 34.

435
Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, trans.

Paul Kottman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 148.

436
http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com/2006/09/skriker.html, last accessed 20 July 2010.
437
Peter Brook, Empty Space (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968), 49.
438
A.C.H. Smith, Orghast at Persepolis (London: Methuen, 1972), 46.
439
Smith, Orghast, 42.
440
Smith, Orghast, 172, 179.
441
Quoted in Smith, Orghast, 45.
442
Quoted in Smith, Orghast, 120.
443
Brunella Eruli, “The Space of Emotions,” at http://www.dramforum.com/?articleid=32, last accessed

16 May 2008.
444
Tadeusz Kantor, A Journey through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos, 1944-1990, Michal

Kobialka, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) 54.

445
Kantor, A Journey through Other Spaces, 51, 54.
446
Eric Salzman and Thomas Desi, The New Music Theater: Seeing the Voice, Hearing the Body (New

York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5.

447
After the revolutionary May of 1968, Marthaler, a Swiss teenager trained as an oboist and a flutist,

left for Paris, where he learned the principles of the École Jacques Lecoq: le jeu (playfulness),

complicité (togetherness), and disponsibilité (openness).

448
Benedict Andrews, “Christoph Marthaler: In the Meantime,” at www.realtimearts.net/article?

id=8246.
449
See www.festwochen.at/index.php?id=eventdetail&detail=412 and

www.teatrofestivalitalia.it/Napoli_Teatro_Festival_Italia_Programme_Riesenbutzbach_Eine_Dauerkol

onie-1014.1091.7.html?v=1&y=2009, last accessed 12 September 2010.

450
Hans-Thies Lehmann, “Word and Stage in Postdramatic Theatre,” in Drama and/after

Postmodernism; Contemporary Drama in English, vol. 14 (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2007),

37.
451
Nobel Prize in Literature 2004, press release,

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2004, last accessed 10 September 2010.

452
Karen Jürs-Munby, “The Resistant Text in Postdramatic Theatre: Performing Elfriede Jelinek’s

Sprachflächen,” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, vol. 14, issue 1, 2009, 46-

56: 49.
453
Quoted in David Roesner, Theater als Musik (Tübingen: Narr, 2003), 197; translated in Jürs-Munby

in “The Resistant Text,” 51.

454
Roesner, Theater als Musik, 197; translated in Jürs-Munby in “The Resistant Text,” 51.
455
Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance, 129.
456
See the company’s website, www.zthollandia.nl, last accessed 20 July 2010.
457
Ibid.
458
Henk Oosterling, “Hypocritical Theatre: Hollandia’s Intermedial Multiverse,” Performance

Research ‘Navigations,’ Ric Allsopp & David Williams, eds., vol. 6, no. 3 (Winter 2001).
459
Claudia Castelucci, Romeo Castelucci, Chiara Guidi, Joe Kelleher, and Nicholas Ridout, The

Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), 25.
460
Ibid., 84.
461
Ibid., 85.
462
Timothy Scheie, “Voyage au Bout de la Nuit,” Theatre Journal, vol. 52, no.1 (March 2000): 128-9.
463
Helga Finter, “Mime de voix, mime de corps: L’intervocalité sur scène,” in Théâtre: espace sonore,

espace visual/Theater: sound space, visual space, Christine Hamon-Siréjol and Anne Surgers, eds.

(Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon & FIRT/IFRT, 2003), 71-89, 71.

464
Laurence Shyer, Robert Wilson and His Collaborators (New York: Theatre Communication Group,

1989), 235.
465
Shyer, Collaborators, 326.
466
Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 156.
467
Quoted in Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University

Press, 1996), 93.

468
Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 125.
469
Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, 90.
470
Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (New York: Routledge,

2006), 148.
471
Helga Finter, “Experimental Theatre and Semiology of Theatre: The Theatricalization of Voice,”

Modern Drama 26 (1983): 501-17, 504

472
Quoted in Gérard Conio, “Les sonorités de Kandinsky et la synthese des arts,” L’Avant garde russe

et la synthese des arts (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1990), 110.

473
www.ubu.com/ubu/wilson_opera.html, last accessed 17 January 2011.
474
Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, translated by Karen Jürs-Munby (New York:

Routledge), 2006, 148.

475
Ibid., 148.
476
Hans-Thies Lehmann, “Word and Stage in Postdramatic Theatre,” in Drama and/after

Postmodernism; Contemporary Drama in English, vol. 14: 37-54. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag,

2007, 47/8.
477
Ibid., 47/8.