Walks of Experience

Site-Specific Performance Walks, Active Listening and Uncomfortable Witnessing

Bibliographic Data

ID21516993
AuthorsEmilie Pine, Maeve Casserly, Tom Lane (0000-0003-2168-3042), T O'neill Lane
Year2020
Volume45
Issue1
Pages22-36
Publication date2020-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTheatre Research International (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0307-8833 • E-ISSN: 1474-0672
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1017/s0307883319000567
OpenAlexW3007619847
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited23

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

Active listening · Aesthetics · Appropriation · Art · Disconnection · Epistemology · Linguistics · Media studies · Performance studies · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Voyeurism · Walk-in · Cinema and Media Studies · Communication · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Nostalgia and Consumer Behavior · Psychology