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Walks of Experience: Site-Specific Performance Walks, Active Listening and Uncomfortable Witnessing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2020

EMILIE PINE ,
MAEVE CASSERLY  and
TOM LANE
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Abstract

Digital-audio performance walks can be powerful performances, responding to troubling pasts, giving voice to testimony, and creating an affective geography that satisfies a participant's desire to connect with the city rather than just walk through it. Yet digital-audio performance walks also raise questions about performance and voyeurism, and the disconnection of private headphone experience, alongside issues of agency, detachment and appropriation. This article addresses key issues associated with digital-audio performance walks, using two case studies of performance walks (from Israel and Ireland), that aim to communicate politically charged and painful histories, which are at once ‘now’ and ‘then’, ‘here’ and ‘there’. The article considers some of the risks in digital-audio performance walks: dark tourism, privatization and empathic quietism. Finally, the article assesses what creative strategies are available to creators – and audiences – to make collaborative performance walks that galvanize spectators to become active witnesses.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 22 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2020

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References

Notes

1 See, for instance, Lennon, John and Foley, Malcolm, Dark Tourism (London: Thompson, 2006)Google Scholar; Stone, Philip and Sharpley, Richard, ‘Consuming Dark Tourism: A Thanatological Perspective’, Annals of Tourism Research, 35, 2 (2008), pp. 574–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Poria, Yaniv, Reichel, Arie and Biran, Avital, ‘Heritage Site Management: Motivations and Expectations’, Annals of Tourism Research, 33, 1 (2006), pp. 162–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nuryanti, Wiendu, ‘Heritage and Postmodern Tourism’, Annals of Tourism Research, 23, 2 (1996), pp. 249–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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5 For comparable discussions of performance walks as a form see Cushing, Amber and Cowan, Benjamin R., ‘Walk1916: Exploring How a Mobile Walking Tour App Can Provide Value for Lams’, Assist 2016 (Copenhagen, 2016)Google Scholar; Fitzgerald, Elizabeth, Taylor, Claire and Craven, Michael, ‘To the Castle! A Comparison of Two Audio Guides to Enable Public Discovery of Historical Events’, Pers Ubiquit Comput, 17 (2013), pp. 749–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Markwell, Kevin, Stevenson, Deborah and Rowe, David, ‘Footsteps and Memories: Interpreting an Australian Urban Landscape through Thematic Walking Tours’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 10, 5 (2004), pp. 457–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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7 See, for instance, Felman, Shosana and Laub, Dori, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (London: Routledge, 1992)Google Scholar; and Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative And History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

8 See the discussion of digital media, witnessing and memory transmission in the following: Reading, Anna, ‘Digital Interactivity in Public Memory Institutions: The Uses of New Technologies in Holocaust Museums’, Media, Culture & Society, 25 (2003), pp. 67–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pinchevski, Amit, ‘The Audiovisual Unconscious: Media and Trauma in the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies’, Critical Inquiry, 39, 1 (2012), pp. 142–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wissmann, Torsten and Zimmermann, Stefan, ‘Sound in Media: Audio Drama and Audio-Guided Tours as Stimuli for the Creation of Place’, Geojournal, 80 (2015), pp. 803–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Frosh, Paul, ‘The Mouse, the Screen and the Holocaust Witness: Interface Aesthetics and Moral Response’, New Media & Society, 20, 1 (2018), pp. 351–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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10 See also, for example, Kimbal Quist Bumstead's performance walks, which challenge the silencing of Kurdish students at the University of Batman, Mapping the Borders of a Turkish Institution (2014), at www.kimbalbumstead.com/performance-walks.

11 Gutman, Yifat, Memory Activism: Reimagining the Past for the Future in Israel–Palestine (Nashville: Vanderbilt, 2017), p. 37Google Scholar.

12 Gutman, Memory Activism, p. 29

13 See, for discussion of the politics of marching in Northern Ireland, Bryan, Dominic, ‘Ritual, Identity and Nation: When the Historian Becomes the High Priest of Commemoration’, in McGarry, Fearghal and Grayson, Richard S., eds., Remembering 1916, The Easter Rising, The Somme and the Politics of Memory in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 24–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jonathan Evershed, ‘Ghosts of the Somme: The State of Ulster Loyalism, Memory and the Work of the “Other” 1916’, in ibid., pp. 241–59; and Graff-McRae, Rebecca, Remembering and Forgetting 1916: Commemoration and Conflict in Post-Peace Process Ireland (Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

14 Myers, Misha, ‘“Walk with Me, Talk with Me”: The Art of Conversive Wayfinding’, Visual Studies, 25, 1 (2010), pp. 59–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 61.

15 For a discussion of the gap between space and narrative, see Tompkins, Joanne, ‘Site-Specific Theatre and Political Engagement across Space and Time: The Psychogeographic Mapping of British Petroleum in Platform's “And While London Burns”’, Theatre Journal, 63, 2 (2011), 225–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and High, Steven, ‘Embodied Ways of Listening: Oral History, Genocide and the Audio Tour’, Anthropologica, 55 (2013), pp. 73–85Google Scholar.

16 For a discussion of Linked and Miller's work see Deirdre Heddon, ‘The Horizon of Sound: Soliciting the Earwitness’, Performance Research, 15, 3 (2010), pp. 36–42; and Myers, ‘Walk with Me, Talk with Me’.

17 de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Rendall, Steven (Oakland: University of California Press, 1984), p. 117Google Scholar, original emphasis.

18 Ibid., p. 118.

19 Wilkie, Fiona, Performance, Transport and Mobility (London: Palgrave, 2015), p. 17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Thibaud, Jean-Paul, ‘The Sonic Composition of the City’, in Bull, Michael and Back, Les, eds., The Auditory Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2003), pp. 329–42Google Scholar, here p. 329. See also Rosemary Kilch's discussion of Shuwei Hosokawa's work on ‘The Walkman Effect’ (1984), in ‘Amplifying Sensory Spaces: The In- and Out-Puts of Headphone Theatre’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 27, 3 (2017), pp. 366–78.

21 Thibaud, ‘The Sonic Composition of the City’, p. 330.

22 Cook, Nicolas, ‘Classical Music and the Politics of Space’, in Born, Georgina, ed., Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 224–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 230.

23 Ibid., p. 230.

24 Bull, Michael, ‘The Audio-visual iPod’, in Sterne, Jonathan, ed., The Sound Studies Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), pp. 197–208Google Scholar, here p. 208.

25 Tonkiss, Frank, ‘The Ethics of Indifference: Community and Solitude in the City’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 6, 3 (2003), pp. 297–311CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 304.

26 Ibid., p. 305.

27 White, Gareth, Audience Participation in the Theatre (London: Palgrave, 2013), p. 57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Schejter, Amit and Tirosh, Noam, A Justice-Based Approach for New Media Policy (London: Palgrave, 2016), p. 103CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 For more information about iNakba and Zochrot see http://zochrot.org/en/keyword/45323. For information on Autobiography of a City see www.campusincamps.ps/projects/autobiography-of-a-city. Unfortunately this project is no longer accessible online as its website has been taken down, a sign of the vulnerability and sometimes ephemerality of digital products.

30 This audio tour is part of a larger project on institutional child abuse in Ireland, Industrial Memories, which was funded by the Irish Research Council New Horizons scheme (2015). See https://industrialmemories.ucd.ie for further information.

31 See www.storymap.ie.

32 For a comparable approach see Markwell, Stevenson and Rowe, ‘Footsteps and Memories’, passim.

33 Zochrot, at www.zochrot.org/en/village/56077, accessed October 2017. One dunum is approximately a quarter of an acre.

34 All quotations are taken from the Echoing Yafa audio walking tour. This tour is free to download (donations are accepted) via their website at https://echoingyafa.alllies.org.

35 Radai, Itamar, Palestinians in Jerusalem and Jaffa, 1948: A Tale of Two Cities (London: Routledge, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Walsh, Fintan, ‘The Power of the Powerless: Theatre in Turbulent Times’, in Walsh, , ed., That Was Us: Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance (London: Oberon, 2013), pp. 1–18Google Scholar, here p. 13.

37 Ciara L. Murphy, ‘Audiences: Immersive and Participatory’, in Jordan and Weitz, The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance, pp. 717–36, here p. 720.

38 Harvie, Jen, Theatre & the City (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Salverson, Julie, ‘Change on Whose Terms? Testimony and an Erotics of Injury’, Theater, 31, 3 (2001), pp. 119–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 122.

40 Heddon, ‘The Horizon of Sound’, p. 39.

41 Vinitzky-Seroussi, Vered and Teeger, Chana, ‘Unpacking the Unspoken: Silence in Collective Memory and Forgetting’, Social Forces, 88, 3 (2010), pp. 1103–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Goldenbridge or St Vincent's Industrial School was chosen as the case study for this digital tour because it was a relatively well-known industrial school as a result of the prominent campaign for redress led by Christine Buckley, a resident of Goldenbridge in the 1960s. Christine Buckley was a major contributor to the television documentary Dear Daughter, dir. Louis Lentin (Crescendo Concepts for RTÉ), screened 22 February 1996. This documentary was one of the first major investigations into the allegations of abuse in Irish industrial schools. Buckley also contributed to the RTÉ series States of Fear (1999), produced by Mary Raftery, which led to the official state apology to victims of abuse by the taoiseach, and the founding of CICA.

43 Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, Government of Ireland (Dublin: Office of Publications, 2009). See ‘Goldenbridge’, chap. 7, St. Vincent's Industrial School (‘Goldenbridge’), 1880–1983’, at www.childabusecommission.ie/rpt/02-07.php.

44 Groot, Jerome De, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 87–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Kavanagh, Una and Lowe, Louise, ‘The Audience Is Present’, Irish University Review, 47, 1 (2017), pp. 119–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 119, original emphasis.

46 Salverson, ‘Change on Whose Terms?’, p. 120.

47 Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism, p. 5; see also Skinner, Jonathan, ‘Walking the Falls: Dark Tourism and the Significance of Movement on the Political Tour of West Belfast’, Tourist Studies, 16, 1 (2016), pp. 23–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and De Groot, Consuming History, pp. 146–8.

48 Available at https://industrialmemories.ucd.ie/project/echoes-from-the-past.

49 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London: Verso, 2009), p. 4.

50 Gorman, ‘Wandering and Wondering’, p. 83.

51 See Myers, ‘Walk with Me, Talk with Me’, for a discussion of Platform's And While London Burns (2006) and the difficulties posed in navigating a changing urban landscape.

52 Myers, ‘Walk with Me, Talk with Me’, p. 59.

53 Harvie, Jen, Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (London: Palgrave, 2013), p. 36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.