This article explores the work of choreographer Dianne McIntyre as an improvisational artist entangled in questions of intermedial relations among sounds and motions. It discusses the terms of performance in relation to emergent paradigms of Afro-pessimism, and argues for a black regard as a method of engaging with experimental performances by artists of African descent. The article explores theoretical terms of witness and encounter with black performance in relation to queer alterities, and non-normative modes of physical expression. The article suggests further need for research into the work of an outstanding black American female artist of theatre and dance.

This article explores the relation between body and voice in the performance of a contemporary opera, Ficarra and Whittington's The Empress's Feet, based on a Chinese tale relating the origin of the practice of foot binding. The tale relates the ancient practice to cure a queen from bouts of sleepwalking that afflicted her. I initially explore the opera's complex formal structure, its central themes and the way it transforms the original tale. I will then develop some of the significant aspects, imaginary as well as factual, of both the practice of foot binding and the phenomenon of sleepwalking. I suggest that the opera not only relates itself thematically to the tale and through it to the practice of foot binding, but also suggests a further parallel between foot binding and a form of bodily mutilation that is associated with the development of the medium of opera in the West, namely the phenomenon of the castrato. The threefold consideration of foot binding, sleepwalking and the voice of the castrato will serve to reveal a moment of liberation, at the heart of the opera – call it the agency or voice given to the feet ‘unbound’. I will conclude with an account of a production of The Empress's Feet which I directed in 2014, based on the interpretation suggested in this article.

Let Down (2018) is a practice-as-research (PaR) dance performance that communicates women's experiences of breastfeeding in Northern Ireland, a jurisdiction with one of the lowest breastfeeding rates in the world, due, in part, to the social stigma attached to breastfeeding in public. Choreographed in collaboration with a composer and social scientists, Let Down is a duet for two lactating women who dance alongside a digitally transposed and augmented soundscape of sonic aspects of maternal experience, and improvise to the live sounds produced by infants in the audience. The work responds to a ‘quietening’ of maternal corporeality in some Western societies through a feminist dramaturgy of sonic disruption that refigures intermedial relations between sound and movement in performance to make unheard experience sensible. Attending to the complex sociopolitical and affective terrain that informed the work's creation, I discuss how a methodology of ‘quietening’ developed during the choreographic process generated space for a dialogue between private and public spheres of experience. I propose that the methodological concept of quietening offers both an alternative approach to choreographies of affect, and a critical framework for questioning representations of socially ‘quietened’ corporealities.

Dear John is an experimental choreomusical work that reinterprets Cage's works while advancing his ideas of sound as sonic events and embodied choreography. In this episodic work, improvised movement unfolds to a soundscape of defamiliarized instruments, sound devices and sonicities of macro- and micro-movements. The correspondence and (in)congruence between dance movements and music's kinetic energy become the means to examine a politics of the body and sound, of music on movement. Additionally, in this ‘auditory architecture’ the quanta of time, its relations and (lack of) unity are exposed. This article then examines the intersubjective interplay of movement and music, body and sonicity; it considers the resonance of the performing body as intermaterial vibration and how this invites a sonic politics of relational possibility. The article will then also investigate the ways in which the interaction of motion and music, movement and stillness engenders experiences of time's indeterminacy and elasticity.

The tragedies taking place within the waters of the Mediterranean, and the simultaneous reassessment of social and cultural politics inside Europe, call for our attention as scholars, and as art practitioners in the region. I will traverse this area to discuss some choreographic experimentations dealing with migration issues, and to prove how acts of listening in performance can emerge out of a racist narrative, allowing practices of corporeal hospitality to be envisioned. The sonic dimension is here perceived as the sharing of an event that occurs in the body, and among the bodies, and reverberates in multiple dimensions and directions. At the crossroads of post-colonial and performance studies, this article engages with listening as a political and creative act for both engendering and perceiving alternative ways of choreographing hospitality in the Mediterranean area.

This conversation paper examines the visual, sonic and corporeal entanglements that inform the work of the Vietnamese-American-Japanese artist Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba. It explores the corporeal and aural qualities that are central to an understanding and sensorial experience of the artist's installations and visual practice. In paying attention to breath, sound and motion in visual art production, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba's works reveal how corporeality and sonicity can dismantle the ocular-centrism of visual art. The discussions between Jun and Prarthana map the varied traumatic histories of racial colonialism, war and forced migration that haunt Vietnam's present, and bring to the surface the artist's aesthetic and political concerns around art, performance and cultural memory.

The life and work of Umashankar Manthravadi is a history of sound and technology through the second half of the twentieth century. As a self-taught acoustic archaeologist, he began measuring the acoustic properties of a premodern performance space in the mid-1990s, and has been building ambisonic microphones since the early 2000s in order to carry out his project in further locations. Bringing together writers, choreographers, dancers, musicians, field recordists and sound designers, A Slightly Curving Place is an exhibition that responds to Umashankar's practice and proposes possibilities for listening to the past and its absence which remains. Umashankar asserts that we cannot just look for theatres in landscapes of the past; we must listen for them. In this dossier, contributors to the exhibition extend the notion of listening to an archaeological site to include practices of listening to text, textures, technologies, the body and the fields of recording.

Reassembled, Slightly Askew (RSA) is an audio theatre work which takes the audience through the visceral and embodied experience of Shannon Yee (Sickels) as she lives through a catastrophic brain infection and surgery, and eventually (as the title indicates) reassembles herself, and familiarizes herself with her acquired brain injury. Audience members experience RSA lying in hospital beds, wearing eyemasks and headphones. Sonically you, as audience member, are situated within the body of Shannon. Your focus is directed to the corporeal experience as told through sound and spoken text, providing a first-person perspective on the experience of acquiring an invisible disability. The project broke new methodological ground for the interdisciplinary artistic team, requiring a high level of collaboration and interweaving of the artists’ respective expertise: writing, directing, choreography, sound design and dramaturgy. Throughout the process of exploration and making, a seamless relay happened naturally as to which art form was leading in the discoveries and decisions. In this dossier, the artists replicate this relay to share insights from their own perspective in the creation of the project and its particular challenges in developing a highly visceral and corporeal experience through sound.

Unsettling Sound examined the at once destabilizing and liberatory experiential dimensions of sounding through three dialogue-events, opening up possible meanings, sensations, ideological and bodily potentialities of the sonic, and the sonic potentialities of bodies. This series of conversations, co-devised by Sara Jane Bailes and Arabella Stanger, took place remotely and online. Here, traces of the events are gathered into print. Alexandrina Hemsley reflects on their exchange with Seke Chimutengwende and Xana in the midst of creating an audio version of the stage show, Black Holes (2018). Rajni Shah and Royona Mitra share voice letters on the impossibilities of anti-racist institutions and dreaming new worlds. Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste shares a new conceptual score, Étude for Not Knowing #1 (2021).