Introduction
The essay below was a vital ingredient in creating Silent Cacophony. After viewing all the films of the 2-minute silences on various London Underground stations during the 2012 Platform-7 Remembrance event, no man’s land, John McKiernan began researching public silence. Professor Ross Brown discusses here performative silence and carried out an experiment in London’s Piccadilly, funded by the Arts Humanities Research Council in 2010.
Ross Brown
Formerly a painter, then a professional composer, performer and sound designer in theatre, Ross Brown holds the first Chair in Theatre Sound in the UK. Since 1994, the aim of his research has been to establish the subjects of theatre sound and aurality and advance their study by locating them within a broader epistemology of sound and a framework of relevant theories and histories.
As Dean of Studies at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, he oversees Central’s BA and MA degree programmes.
Essay on Performative Silence
TUESDAY, 22 JUNE 2010
Memory, Noise and Silence
– adapted from ‘Noise, Memory, Gesture: the Theatre in a Minute’s Silence’ in Counsell, C and Mock, R, eds. (2009) Performance, Embodiment and Cultural Memory, Newcastle-upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars
Ross Brown, ross.brown@cssd.ac.uk
2633 words / 20 mins
Preamble
Memory is a form of noise. It is incidental, ever-present and fugitive: it cannot be observed directly, it shrinks from the gaze; it is always there, and is interdependently implicated in the circumstance of the present moment of our daily journey through space-time
Silence is like remembrance or memorial, nothing other than a performative, a gesture, a ceremonial aural communion with a present state that celebrates the noise and anxiety of our life. Any claimed form of silence or to the remembrance of things past, is an ideology
Given that memory is like noise, ever-present in the background, fugitive to the gaze, necessary, celebrated by stilling or silencing the body, then how do we forget it. Noise is not silenced by silence because it is in the living body, silence amplifies it, as John Cage discovered in the anechoic chamber at Harvard, to the point where we question the possibility and relevance of intention. I suspect the same with memory. Intentional silencing of memory won’t work. My father has advanced Altzheimers, and even in this unintentional state of oblivion, his body and world are not silent, but long-term memories are somehow made strange by what I think of as a lack of resonance in his short-term time-space.
In my AHRC-funded project Noise Memory Gesture, the Theatre in a Minute’s silence, I set about, through a series of flashmob-style performances of silence and a number of disseminatory workshops, looking at the minute’s silence as a modern ritualised practice of cultural remembrance, and in particular at the ways in which it connects the inner selves of participants, through the energetically inscribed tissue of the body, to the external environment.
However, empirical ‘silence’ is neither acoustically nor pschychoacoustically silent, but a continuum or plenum of local environmental noise. Its effect, phenomenologically speaking, is not one of silence, nor negatively of sound, but of present noise and the body’s relationship with it. Silence itself is a performative—etymologically originating in a verb – to silence or still—rather than a noun. My proposition is that the ‘thrall’ experienced in the minute’s silence and other theatrical pauses is an aural embodiment of moment, made possible by the suspension of everyday activity, and the conventional constraints of having to hold the body still in a particular way. I also propose that, within a formal silence, memories and other thoughts are experienced aurally, within the body, as a kind of noise. This recalls different hearing cultures in which sound is ontology, and the human body a microcosmic extension of a universe understood through sonic tropes—the Upanishad mantra nada brahma, ‘the universe is sound’, or Boethius’ conceptual trinity of musica mundana (the sound of the material universe), musica humana (the sounds of the human microcosm) and musica instrumentalis (sound which is heard.)
CUT
MEMORY AND CIRCUMSTANCE
Culturally, the minute’s silence is a political event, but the civic honour made to the deceased or the missing is largely a performance made discursively around it: in the scheduling, the preparation and the traces left afterwards. The dedication might be to the deceased, but the act of remembrance that resonates in the individual psyche is transacted in a live, fleshbound moment of being ‘alone in a crowd’ and in an aural and mnemonic circumstance which one experiences in a solitary dialectic between body, perception and noisy environment.
Entering this personal state in the company of others is a pleasure, although in a thrilling, not a mawkish way. The ‘football silences’ that have been an growing cultural phenomenon during the early twenty-first century, although genuinely intentioned and usually faithfully observed, also function a little like preludinal cheerleaders or fireworks, ramping up the theatrical excitement before the game. Silence – or perhaps more particularly the absence of anything programmatic to listen to other than background noise, seems somehow to forefront liveness in the crowd and occasion. Silence, once again, is a performative, a gestural stilling of activity: not an acoustic state, although it draws attention to the acoustic state, and the role of the aural self within it. To the outside world of non-participation there is no silence, and in this sense it is a theatre.
One might be tempted to cite this kind of ‘energy in mere presence’ as a retort to Auslander’s scepticism about ‘clichés and mystifications concerning the aura, presence and the “magic of live theatre,” etc’ , but it should be recognised that the convention of the minute’s memorial silence, in its twentieth century history, was from the very beginning, also a media(tised) event. The memorial Armistice Day silence, introduced in Britain in 1919 in order that domestic survivors might honour those who had perished in the distant, terrifying noise of the Great War, originated in a London newspaper campaign for
a very sacred intercession, [... ] church services, too, if you will, but in the street, the home, the theatre, anywhere, indeed, where Englishmen and their women chance to be, surely in this five [sic] minutes of bitter-sweet silence there will be service enough?’
(‘Appeal for a memorial silence on armistice day’, London Evening News, 8 May 1919)
The words ‘bitter-sweet silence’ themselves suggest that the tribute was conceived as pleasurable sensual experience, despite its solemn occasion. The campaign proved so popular that the government had to move quickly to endorse and control it. The initial idea of a populist ad hoc five minute silence was subtly modified because the idea of tools downing, or cessation of daily travail, carried obvious threats: five minutes became two, and the idea of a secular, civilian eleventh hour, eleventh day Armistice Day event was transformed into a national showcase, with heavy militaristic and religious overtones, receiving celebratory media coverage and promoted by official rhetoric about ‘united Empire’. While local pauses continued, the ‘official’ silence became a state-sponsored media event—some might say a propaganda exercise. In cinema newsreels and, from 1923, as an immensely popular ‘live’ outside broadcast, it became intertwined in the public consciousness with hierarchically regimented scenes of the Remembrance Sunday service in Whitehall, with wreath-laying, twenty-one gun salutes, uniformed bodies stood to attention by rank, salutes, and the monolithic centrepiece of the Cenotaph. That whole scene, it should be noted, was dramaturgically orchestrated and monumentally designed in double-quick time by Sir Edwin Lutyens, to an urgent cabinet brief, and made ready for the November 1919 event in response to the May newspaper campaign.
Political subtext and pomp aside, it is clear that the experience of collective silence at the heart of the ceremony—even when experienced through the media, in cinema seats or gathered around the radio at home— achieved its ‘bitter-sweet’ effect. Reviews of the 1919 event remarked on its potency, and the silence became an annual moment of shared, and mediatised, human experience. As a broadcast, the silence was anything but ‘dead air’. As a BBC technician described in the Radio Times 1935:
…here is one of the great paradoxes, that no broadcast is more impressive than the silence following the last dashing strokes of Big Ben. Its impressiveness is intensified by the fact that silence is not a dead silence, for Big Ben strikes the hour, and then the bickering of sparrows, the crisp rustle of falling leaves, the creasing of pigeon wings as they take flight, uneasy at the strange hush, contrast with the traffic din of London some minutes before. Naturally, vigilant control of the microphone is essential. Audible distress near to the microphone would create a picture out of perspective as regards the crowd’s solemn impassivity and feelings. Our job is to reduce all local noises to the right proportions, so that the silence may be heard for what it really is, a solvent which destroys personality and gives us leave to be great and universal.
BBC broadcasts clearly show the minute’s silence not to be a period of acoustic inactivity –far from it— nor a generic two minutes of ambience, but an ambience energised by static corporeal energy (literally the energy of bodies standing). Even on the radio, their presence is palpable in the ‘strange’, noisy hush.
Its latter history (after ‘Diana’ and 9/11) has seen the ‘dramaturgy’ of state-sponsored silences like the 7/7/06 event return to the initial premise of the ad hoc, culturally immersive event. Simultaneous memorial tableaux taking place nationwide fill the news-cycle with images of local contexts showing a country getting on with life, accompanied by the familiar ‘soundbite’ of a speech-free open microphone channel.
In the pictures, it is hard to judge the extent to which the characteristic arrangements of the body—hands held loosely together in front, heads bowed in semi-secular supplication, eyes shut, or staring into the vague distance—have become imitative of a ‘genre’ self-propagated through news media. From a detached position of non-participation, the scenography of memorial postures might be said to ‘remember’ nothing more than other news montages of politicians standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the public; parents clasping children to their sides; shopping bags set down temporarily on the floor; fire-fighters, tube-workers, sports teams, hand-linked in circles to show that through teamwork they will overcome.
The occasional old soldier in ceremonial red may salute, but these days there are fewer images of massed, ceremonial ranks. The plain-clothed public, whom contemporary minutes’ of silence more frequently mourn, stands in irregular congregations of individual silence, eyes front or down or closed, never meeting. What else would one expect during a time of embedded warfare against an immersed terrorist threat? The scenography of remembrance—flowers or personal items tied to railings or lampposts, particular organisations of the limbs, heads and eyes—are not designed like Lutyens’ stone Cenotaph, but are visible traces of contemporary aural states.
THE AURAL BODY
As a street or place-specific theatre, the silence is wholly an event of audience participation; its bodies are objects and subjects, performers and audience. While the postures of silence are performed according to generic convention, their corporeal attentiveness to circumstance belongs to a generic state of audience, where one’s attentive gaze is focused in the direction of a mise en scène but one is resistively aware of one’s material surroundings—through the occasional sideways glance, but mainly through the ‘skin/air interface’ senses of hearing, smell, touch.
Even though the word has specific associations with the ear, I describe the sum of this circumstantial sensual awareness as aural, because the etymology of the word connects with the Latin word aura (breeze or zephyr – that airborne, tactile, mnemonic sense of place). This synaesthetic, general background awareness of ambient environment, of noise, resonant space and others, is the atmosphere within which any perception is made, and modifies the meaning of any received communicative signal. It is a perceptual experience of the whole body and one which creeps into the perceptual foreground during moments of pause. And again, just to remind ourselves, silence is a performative, a corporeal gesture; silence is an active state.
I wish, also, to implicate the auditory imagination and memory within my holistic concepts of audience and the aural body, but I realise that for many people this would seem to be stretching the meanings of audition or aurality a little too far. But I am going to persist with this, because my experience of theatre sound leaves me in no doubt that hearing has an interdependent relationship to the imagination, memory, and the synaesthetic air/skin sense of corporeal placement in ambient environment. This cannot, in my view, be discounted from any full definition of the term hearing.
CUT – SUMMARY OF SENSUAL CULTURE, HOWES ET AL, NOISE THEORY, IHDE PHENOMONEOLOGY OF SOUND AND SMITHS ‘O’ FACTOR
LISTENING THROUGH THE MNEMONIC BODY
We live in the flesh but also the sound of our own bodies; we all continually inhabit our own breathing, wheezing, rumbling, swallowing, sniffing, coughing and so on. Sound is kinetic, so it follows that hearing is very close to haptic sensations such as itches, or to physical pleasure or pain. The sound of a low bass frequency is defined as much by the tingling vibration it causes within the chest and lower body as it is by its auditory appearance. A shrill sound can hurt. Try swallowing some saliva. Where does the sound end and the tactile sensation begin?
The aural body is the intimate theatre we live in, and all wider theatres are experienced through it. Listening out from the point of sentient awareness that is the constant, blinking cursor point of me being awake (located, it seems, somewhere behind my sinuses) I have largely learned to be deaf to my own constant noise, only becoming aware of it in moments when I am alone or silent. But when I am alone or silent I am also aware that there is sensation other than acoustic sound within my aural body—the sound of my internal monologue, the ghosts of sounds and notions of sound yet to happen.
Partly this is phonomnesis—imagined or recalled sound. These sounds are within my body as thoughts, but have the potential to be spatial. I can imagine a sound to my left or right; above me or below me. I can remember the sound of my parents downstairs as I lay in bed as a child and the imagined sounds come from the direction down. As part of the workshops I ran for my research into noise and memory, I asked participants to remember sounds such as these. I then asked them to listen to something in the room and remember something else at the same time, which proved an impossibility, as if trying to remember was the same as trying to listen (and whilst one may hear polyphonically, one cannot listen to two things at the same time).
But the sonic ghosts in my body are not only mental projections; there are also bodily sensations, corporeal imaginings of aural feelings: the recollection of the internal vibration of standing by the sea or the roadside; the impetus to wince remembered from a shrill sound; the complex emotional arrangement of vibration, flushes, prickling skin and adrenal activity of music. Auyogard and Torgue (2005, p.85) describe a phenomenon they call anamnesis: the physical recollection – literally the re-membering – of sound through the body. This might be triggered empathetically by sensual perception or through imagined or remembered sound. One might remember music in one’s head (phonomnesis) and also experience its effect in the body (anamnesis). Anamnesis is produced either by sound or memory; indeed, one might view it as an embodied form of memory experienced in the aural body. Memory, as the noise surrounding the internal monologue, is aural.
CUT
underground voices condensing walls not rush yet voices animated tourists near images in papers strewn and imagined people dying faces commemorate lost life lives counted body the rhythm of city walking breathing pace calming muted chaos angel gates shut tube instead walk angry blares sound sun shining good london time transport clank tube grunt slowing american russell square beep yeah green park change clink eros early friend waiting energy boost inspiration waiting teacher next direction cacophony school french laugh tease push am middle whirl fifteen year-olds perch step getting stand lillywhites exposed breathe nose separateness noise increase travel deeper find my spot shade rails piccadilly regent st buses warm chest shake rattle tremor alone breathing slowly staring space trying sleep record needle dust flecks curtains front door voice mother’s home breathe hands pockets shut hard eyes flex toes head down blanket pillow block light lost virginia gun traffic exit tube time calm cacophony foreign and visiting very far away sounds inside me pretty little clumsy glasses a million knew shaft measles something going to happen there more than statue pavement downstairs steps and human life immersed in my the statue walk right into me as if covering them camera invisible lost child watching my daughter