Shake That Thing: Early Modern Liner Notes and the Dark Lady of the Sonic
Join P.A. Shantze and Professor Fred Moten in a coversation about Skantze's new book.
Liner notes like so much making and writing demand a translation, a transformation, a transubstantiation: how do you communicate what the record Kind of Blue by Miles Davis does in your ear? The work of liner notes is a work of listening to performed sound and then inventing a form of writing that flips metaphorically, imagistically, raucously and seductively over and over in the air above your writing. So your listener can shift and move, hearing for a moment with you the writer listener, and then listening and hearing differently. Any work with sound, anytime and anywhere, requires linguistic acrobatics without a net: we follow in sound artist/theorist Ella Finer’s words ‘a method which relies on keeping faith in the absence of fact, of feeling the trace elements of something in the air, on the air, of listening to the materiality of vibrations and hearing imagination as information.’ In this talk, method, motion and Shakespeare meet at the intersection of that most Elizabethan of forms, R&B.
P.A. Skantze is a director, writer and spectator of theatre and performance based in London and Italy. She works internationally with her performance company Four Second Decay. Her performance projects include All that Fell, an experiment in physical radio, Audible Montage or Eurydice’s Footsteps, and Stacks. Author of Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth-Century Theatre (Routledge, 2003) and Itinerant Spectator/Itinerant Spectacle (Punctum Books, 2013) Skantze also writes on sound and the sonic arts, practice as research as a method of considering 17th-century theatre, questions of reception and representation of race and of gender, the practice of spectating across nations, across centuries and across media. Her most recent research project explores the epistemology of practice as research. Currently she is Reader in Performance Practices in the Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance at Roehampton University.