On aural pleasure
Recently, I went to see Punchdrunk’s Viola’s Room. Well, when I say see – I predominantly listened. Abandoning my standard Punchdrunk strategy (identifying the sexiest actors and then trotting dutifully behind them until getting pulled into a sexually charged one-on-one performance), I instead donned a pair of headphones and removed by shoes as instructed (this is undoubtedly a show for foot fetishists).
I then fumbled my way through a maze-like series of dimly-lit rooms, led by Helena Bonham-Carter’s sonorously plummy narration of two parallel lives – a princess from a past age, and a teenage girl from today. My bare feet intensified the sensory experience, as each landscape gave way to another underfoot: First the plush, shag pile carpet of a bedroom, then the damp grass of a garden at dawn, followed by deep, cool sand at the centre of a maze. Whilst the story told managed to be simultaneously gripping and soporific, it was the experience of listening in this way – of being immersed in sound – that appealed to me most. I became aware of my body in a different way – moving uneasily through space, having no idea where I would be taken next and whether I would be able to squeeze through increasingly small gaps. But I trusted the voice in my ears (wouldn’t we all trust a voice like Helena’s?), feeling like it was inside my head, transposing my own inner monologue and leading me forwards.
After seeing Viola’s Room, I went to an evening of performances at a small gallery space in South London under a railway arch. The night was fun, anarchic, breaking the rules of the theatre through escaping its normal confines. The room was sweltering; this was mid heat wave, and famously London doesn’t believe in air conditioning. Contained with such a sticky space, I was acutely aware of everyone’s bodies - of their summer outfits and bare skin, their collarbones pricked with sweat. The penultimate show of the evening took place almost entirely in the dark. Again, my attention was grabbed – by the sound more than the visual. An amplified, recorded voice filled the room, giving out instructions that the performer onstage followed silently. Her movements were minimal – I found myself leaning back and closing my eyes, giving in to the aural experience. While part of my mind thought about the form of this art piece, its histories in late 20th century performance art, instructions being given to performers and audiences who can choose to follow them if they wish, my mind was drifting away from conscious focus. I felt the vibration of the voice in my body in the heat of the room, and I reached a state of what felt like being asleep and awake at the same time. I let the sound fill my mind and move into the rest of my body – there was something vulnerable about this; in this space full of strangers, close to one another in the room. This kind of sound is like another way of being inside someone – of you being inside me.
The piece led me to Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1972) – an infamous piece of performance art made in a New York gallery, that involved Acconci lying under a low wooden ramp, masturbating as he watches the gallery attendees in the room. As the public entered the space, they can’t see Acconci – but they can hear him, narrating his fantasies as he jerks off, his voice projected into the room around them.
As you might expect of a show featuring a man with a scraggly beard furiously masturbating under the floorboard, Seedbed caused outrage. But it also captures something about the sexiness and the power of sound: how hearing can be as arousing, as disturbing, as seeing. Not for Acconci, lying there underground, but for the viewer – listening and being watched. I imagine being in this space, the sound filling the room, filling my ears, hearing the voice of a stranger as they look at me, getting turned on by the sound of my footsteps above them. Both hidden and public. Secret and depraved.
On the handful of hot summer days we’ve been granted, I’ve retreated to the park, my body baking in the sun while my mind wanders. I love to close my eyes and tune in to the sounds around me: the sound of the leaves moving in the faint breeze; the voice of people around moving into and out of focus. I love to listen in to conversations as they pass by – these voices float into my consciousness, my mind extending like my body on the grass. They become distorted, sometimes loud and sometimes so far away, wrapping around me as I drift. I think of phonecalls with lovers, my body hot in other ways. A voice filling me and entering me, desire poured into my ears like honey by the voice on the end of the line.