Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Editors’ Introduction

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic made our planned rehearsal ethnography work impossible, the research took on the previously unforeseen form of Zoom chats, experiments, interviews, Q and As, curated conversations and documentaries, all archived as the “Lend Me Your Ears” collection on Figshare and on www.auralia.space. Julian Henriques—whose interdisciplinary exchange on call and response with Andrej Mirčev is available in Lend Me Your Ears and on Figshare—writes in his book Sonic Bodiesthat antiphony provides a primary example for “the reciprocal relationship between research, researched and the activity of researching” (102). Here, for example, Katie Beswick and Javon Johnson engage in a transatlantic exchange about the sounds of cities, assembling their own call and response from personal histories and archives of popular music into the innovative form of a mixtape article where academic references and pop lyrics carry equal significance. [...]in Peta Murray, Alyson Campbell and Meta Cohen’s experiment in queer dramaturging, voicing what after Brandon LaBelle (and Fred Moten and Stefano Harney) they term the “under-he(a)rd,” many and complex interplays are also at work, and while this too begins as a reflection on pandemic conditions, the focus shifts from the “inter” to the “play” as the article invents its own “infectious” glossary of neologisms.