by M. Landon
The Journal of American Drama and Theatre
Volume 35, Number 2 (Spring 2023)
ISNN 2376-4236
©2023 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224.
A decade after her TaPRA Research Award-winning monograph Theatre-Making: Interplay Between Text and Performance in the 21st Century challenged traditional modes of theatrical authorship, Yugoslavic-British dramaturg Dr. Duška Radosavljević delivers yet another groundbreaking intervention in performance research. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age, published by Routledge in October 2022, emerged from its namesake, the Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Post-Verbatim, Amplified Storytelling and Gig Theatre in the Digital Age Project (henceforth referred to as the A/OD Project). This project was an ethnographic, “creative and methodological departure into the unknown,” (35) involving the work of four A/OD Artists in Residence. The A/OD Project (a digital compendium taking place from 2020-2021, during the first wave of COVID-19) was developed to investigate post-verbatim performance, amplified storytelling and gig theatre—three popular British “trends” that Radosavljević believes resulted from the digital age—through dramaturgies of speech and sound.
Aural/Oral Dramaturgies is split into five chapters, supplemented by the Lend Me Your Ears collection, the project’s digital archive accessible at https://www.auralia.space. The opening chapter, “Introduction(s): The Difficult Second Album,” is broken into Sides A and B, calling to mind old-school records. Radosavljević notes that the tracks of this introduction can be shuffled and listened to out of order, but that is not “crucial” to the experience of the book (39). Chapters two, three, and four are titled “Post-Verbatim,” “Amplified Storytelling,” and “Gig Theatre,” respectively. Radosavljević deploys Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field, Nic Green’s Cock and Bull, Kate Caryer’s The Unspoken Project, Rambo Amadeus’s 1991 music video, “Smrt popa Mila Jovovića,” and Wildcard’s Electrolyte as case studies to demonstrate how the myriad dramaturgies of speech, sound and technology amplify each form of performance discussed through their technicity.
Radosavljević indicts the traditional dramaturgical maxim of “show, rather than tell” as a Western-central, logocentric way of knowing. Instead, she favors an aural and oral approach that considers the performance artist central in theatrical creation. Furthermore, Radosavljević refreshingly focuses on creative strategies and processes as opposed to simple critique of the final projects (although she offers these as well for interested readers). Not only seeking to shift away from a text-focused paradigm, Radosavljevič posits her work firmly within the Covid-19 pandemic, seeking to reckon with these pedagogical questions digitally. While Radosavljević admits that she is not proposing any “radically new ideas,” (25) the A/OD Project and the book’s myriad case studies draw on a wide variety of performance scholars and ethnographers to offer an alternative and accessible methodology for dramaturgically interrogating Western theatre’s obsession with written text and developing new “meta-discursive insights” (164).
In the final pages, Radosavljević writes about dramaturgical layering – a methodology that is expertly woven throughout her narrative. She observes the resident artists’ engagement with three facets of layering: 1) metaphorically, “in reference to different types of performance material,” 2) dramaturgical methods “directly influenced by the workings of … software,” and 3) conceptually, “in relation to malleability of text enabled by… digital technologies” (167). While Radosavljević doesn’t make apparent the connection between this method and the organization of her own work, it underpins the ethic. In each chapter, she offers the reader variety in performance modalities and analysis of the effects of software and other digital variables on her examples —always grounded in a strong theoretical foundation which traces the larger genealogy of essential scholarly texts (e.g., Steven Feld, Fred Moten, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and Dwight Conquergood). She also considers the artists, art forms, and negative connotations that fell beyond the scope of the A/OD Project. Importantly, Radosavljević often acknowledges the irony of her attempt at troubling the hegemonic standard of the written word by writing about it in this book. Even as she is pressured to write within the academic framework of logocentrism, Radosavljević shakes the dominant modes of theatrical critique by providing the reader with the Lend Me Your Ears collection, expertly curated and a vital companion to any scholar’s reading of Radosavljević’s work.
Returning to the age-old dramaturgical maxim of “show, not tell,” Radosavljević concludes that theatre should be “show and tell” as performance is a “multimodal sensory perception” and a “mimesis of the thinking process itself” that together contributes to audience reception and engagement (170). Aural/Oral Dramaturgies presents a step forward in both performance and sound studies, appropriate for graduate students and academics familiar with the body of literature surrounding one or both of these fields. Additionally, any theatremaker with an interest in shifting their dramaturgical approach to the “ethos of DIY performance-making” (166) will find in this book not only a vast fountain of knowledge, but a generous guide for practice.
M. Landon
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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