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Abstract

This dissertation focuses on contemporary performances that exemplify the intersection between sound and madness, with an overarching interest in mad aesthetics, affects, and acoustemologies. Its central aim is to explore the phenomenological and ethical limits of simulating madness through listening-as-other. In addition to a literature review, the project’s core structure comprises three case studies, each of which addresses one particular facet of mad aurality. Building upon these close analyses, my sixth chapter is an autoethnographic essay framed around my lived experience. The first of these case studies considers the role of acousmatic sound in Ridiculusmus’s The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland (2014), which serves as an example of the troublesome dramaturgy of approximating so-called auditory hallucinations. The second case study is a comparative analysis, focusing on the “theatre of the mind” in one of Janet Cardiff’s audio walks, Her Long Black Hair (2004), and its approximation of mad phenomenology. By contrast, I examine the composition of listening in Katie Mitchell’s Ophelia’s Zimmer (2015), wherein Foley artists craft a live soundscape representing the title character’s mindscape, thereby attempting to position the audience within her aural frame of reference. The dissertation’s third case study considers Suvendrini Lena’s Here Are the Fragments (2019), which is an immersive production based on Frantz Fanon’s writings concerning listening. Here, immersion and simulation are shown to be slippery categories that critics have tended to conflate. Finally, I present the sixth chapter as a series of fragmentary notes that interrogate my own sensory experience while addressing pervasive sonic tropes associated with stage madness. The core theoretical tensions explored in this study include the distinction between simulatory aesthetics and lived experience; the relationship between empiricism and epistemological uncertainty within mad aural dramaturgies; the possibilities and impossibilities of intersubjective listening; and the affordances of empathy with and without sameness. This thesis offers original knowledge in the mobilization of new concepts related to mad phenomenology, including “mad auralities” and the “mad point of audition.” Ultimately, this dissertation imports existing sound studies theories into the domain of theatrical mad studies in order to speak to as-yet unaddressed representational concerns.