ABSTRACT
The Introduction(s) chapter undertakes an ambitious and necessary task of situating the AHRC-funded Aural/Oral Dramaturgies (A/OD) project at a theoretical intersection between a number of disciplines, methodologies, and agendas of academic knowledge production (aurality, orality, dramaturgy, anthropology, ethnography, critical theory, practice research, new materialism, decolonisation, and digital humanities). The chapter confronts the necessity for an articulation of a bespoke research methodology for the dramaturgies of speech and sound which places the artist at the centre of knowledge production not as a practice researcher but in a coalition with the academic researcher. The task is fragmented into ten sections organised as tracks of a concept album, whose title – ‘The Difficult Second Album’ – indicates connection to the author's previous work (Theatre-Making 2013; Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
Side A outlines the points of departure, contextualises the research project, and provides a literature review at the intersection of aurality, orality, and dramaturgy. It centres considerations of research methodology for the dramaturgies of speech and sound placing them within a long historical context of scientific and subject-specific research methodologies, rather than seeking radical alternatives. It also highlights emerging notions of relationality, technicity, and decoloniality as fundamental to the project.
Side B articulates a bespoke methodological approach, by reference to its emergence from the author's previous work and continued commitment to dialecticism, relationality, and reparation. It explores the relevance of relational ethnography and of Bruno Latour's actor-network-theory (ANT) to the specific digital format the A/OD project took during the Covid-19 pandemic. The research findings are based on the evidence and insights generated from the artists taking place in the A/OD project through a combination of interview, reversed engineering, and collation of other digital evidence (archived as ‘Lend Me Your Ears’ on Figshare and on www.auralia.space) in order to substitute the initially planned oral histories and rehearsal ethnography approach impeded by the Covid-19 pandemic.
