We define ourselves by the spaces we are comfortable entering, and that we assume, imagine or enact as accessible to us. We also define ourselves by the kinds of space we want to access. As we have seen with the recent rise in heritage tourism to dark sites, painful memory attached to particular locations has proved attractive to audiences and consumers.Footnote 1 In parallel, recent years have seen the rise of site-specific theatre work, taking spectators out of theatres and immersing them in street theatre, promenade pieces and site-responsive and site-specific work; where the performance happens is vital to the meaning of the production. These performances bring audiences to different venues (making them both comfortable and uncomfortable), adapting performance to these new spaces and, arguably, leaving traces of meaning on the sites themselves. As Mike Pearson puts it, site-specific work ‘recontextualises … sites’.Footnote 2 When the site is recontextualized to reveal a hidden layer of troubling history (as in the case of the two site-specific performance walks discussed here), we see the potential of site-specific work, as Charlotte McIvor argues, to perform ‘the ethics of memory as a lived experience of the present’.Footnote 3 In undertaking site-specific performance walks, then, the audience members act as spectators, but also as potential witnesses. Though site-specific performances are less common, as Joanne Tompkins argues, they are ‘no longer an alternative or fringe genre’, their rise a sign of the ‘increasing diversity in art forms’.Footnote 4 This article considers two performance walks: Echoing Yafa, an audio walk around the former Arab Manshiyya district of Tel Aviv; and Echoes from the Past, an audio walk around the former site of a residential institution for children in Dublin. Performance walks may be summed up as a form of site-specific production that merges the drama of site-specific theatre with the medium of digital-audio tours (more commonly associated with museum and history tours).Footnote 5 These performance walks thus represent another layer of ‘diversity’ in site-specific productions.
While movement is key to site-specific work, this article particularly highlights the role of active listening in digital-audio performance walks. Paul Ricoeur's statement on listening is instructive in this regard: ‘some witnesses … never encounter an audience capable of listening to them or hearing what they have to say’.Footnote 6 In Ricoeur's formulation, forgotten or hidden histories are not due to the failure of the original witness to speak. It is not, as some critics suggest, that trauma has prevented the original witness from articulating the events of their life.Footnote 7 Rather, the failure is on the part of the audience for not listening. Interpreting audio performance walks within this framework shifts the balance of duty from the speaker to the listener, to make up for previous failures of listenership. Reanimating listening has a political function in the context of both these walks in particular, given that they both mediate urban locations that have been redeveloped – redevelopments that have caused their former inhabitants and ways of life to be forgotten, to become unheard.
Our aim in this article – as a multidisciplinary team made up of a theatre academic, a public historian and a composer interested in the ethical possibilities of exploring place and listening – is thus to illustrate the witnessing potential within two audio performance works that introduce audiences to hidden and affective geographies. These two audio performance works are founded on the idea of the city as a palimpsest that echoes through time, and work to defamiliarize the city by revealing these layers. In analysing digital audio as a relatively new way to engage listeners, this article pays attention to the digital medium and considers the meaning-making role of technology for listeners,Footnote 8 combined with the site-specificity of the walks. Crucial to this is consideration of the effect of disembodiment and dislocation on audiences. Do performance walks, as Sarah Gorman suggests, ‘through a process of defamiliarization and disorientation … ask the viewer to consider his or her place within the context of the changing environment’?Footnote 9 This question is pertinent to these works as they negotiate the multiple relationships between sound and place, and the ways in which each informs and produces the other – so that sound shapes how the audience-listener navigates and apprehends the space, and the space shapes, in turn, the ways the audience-listener comprehends the sound narrative.
Walking as a performance of space
Performance walks are closely linked not only to the growing genre of site-specific work, but also to activist walking more generally – a common practice in parts of the world with contested boundaries.Footnote 10 Yifat Gutman argues that site tours in Israel act as a claiming of space, ‘conquering the land with our feet’,Footnote 11 during which Palestinian activists perform ‘not Jewish Israeli, but Palestinian ties to the land’.Footnote 12 Likewise, in an Irish context, marching as a politically unified group is understood as a political act, a claiming of control over a particular landscape.Footnote 13 The act of walking brings the walker and the space into alignment; the space claims the performer, just as the act of performance claims the space; these negotiations occur within, to use Misha Myers's term, ‘auditory space’.Footnote 14
What if, however, the narrative being performed does not seem to match up with the space it is being performed in? There is, after all, often a disparity between what is seen and what is heard on digital-audio performance walks.Footnote 15 Graeme Miller's audio walk Linked (2003), for example, transmits a soundscape that evokes through voices and compositional music the continued presence-in-memory of four hundred houses that were demolished to make way for road building in London.Footnote 16 In the case of the walks under discussion here, the built environment of the cities has also changed significantly. In following the Echoing Yafa tour the participant walks around modern Tel Aviv, while listening to a series of descriptions of Manshiyya, a district which was progressively demolished between 1948 and the 1960s. During the Echoes from the Past tour, the participant walks around modern Dublin, while listening to a series of testimonies about a children's residential school that was founded in the nineteenth century and closed in 1983, and most of which has been demolished. In both cases, then, the audio locates the audience-listener in the past tense, in a different temporal framework from the contemporary neighbourhood they are navigating with their bodies, and thus both walks require the audience-listener to make the leap to connect the present landscape they are seeing to the history they are hearing.
These acts of interpretation by the audience-listener have the potential to change the spaces themselves. As Michel de Certeau argues, spatial practices themselves create and produce spaces. It is the pedestrians of a city who define limits and relationships within spaces: ‘Space is a practiced place. Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers’, so that the movement of the walkers defines the urban space.Footnote 17 De Certeau describes this relationship when he states that stories ‘carry out a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces … [that] organize the play of changing relationships’.Footnote 18 De Certeau's spatial theories are often applied to contemporary site-specific performance practices, which ‘encourag[e] spectators to register their passage as a complex activity, simultaneously public and private, and culturally, socially and even morally loaded’.Footnote 19 The moral weight of this activity is particularly keen when the listener/walker encounters a narrative that differs from the dominant narrative of the urban space, inviting us to imagine – to listen for – something different.
Practices and technologies of listening
How do audience-listeners on these walks encounter the narrative? They listen – but how do they listen? Inevitably on a digital-audio performance walk, most audience-listeners will engage with the narrative via a technological device and headphones, an embodied experience with a disembodied voice. Jean-Paul Thibaud describes using a Walkman as ‘an urban tactic that consists of decomposing the territorial structure of the city and recomposing it through spatio-phonic behaviours.’Footnote 20 Walkman users use music to gain control over their experience of the urban environment. But what does this practice mean for audience engagement with the sites they are walking through? In the case of Echoing Yafa and Echoes from the Past, can audio performance walks encourage an audience-listener to have a sense of control over their environment, but also to engage with it?
The risk of disengagement is present for any show with any audience, but feels particularly charged for works that, as here, have an activist aim. Given that personal music devices can become an ‘involvement shield’, allowing the user to position themselves outside the social theatre of urban life, how might audio performance walks enable audience-listeners to be both outside and inside, and what might this dual positioning bring to the experience?Footnote 21 Cook argues that the use of headphones in public spaces ‘carves out a space for personal enjoyment and reflection, for being oneself: private space is “nested” within public space’.Footnote 22 The ability of personal stereos to reshape space hence ‘creates a phenomenological space that is dissociated from physical space’.Footnote 23 Does this act of dissociation have to be ethically negative, however? Given that audio works are hoping to involve the audience in active listening, is a certain distance from the cityscape an advantage to this act, creating a context for full listenership? Critics tend to stress the negative aspects of separation: Michael Bull notes that iPod users exist ‘within an auditory bubble, immune to the sounds of others’,Footnote 24 arguing that this auditory bubble has moral implications for the experience of city life since it enables individuals to distance themselves from other inhabitants of urban space. Fran Tonkiss also describes this distancing when he writes that mobile sound technology realizes the ‘logic of separation and of indifference perfectly’.Footnote 25 Whether ‘immersed in a private soundscape, [or] engaged in another interactive scene, you do not have to be in the city as a shared perceptual or social space’.Footnote 26 What implications does this have for theatre, which is more usually a ‘social process’?Footnote 27 Does the isolation of the audience member lead to greater or lesser engagement, or greater or lesser agency? To further consider some of these questions, we now turn to discussion of the two performance walks.
Performance walks
The two performance walks under discussion here differ in their digital formats. The first, Echoing Yafa, is a tour of a historic district of the city of Tel Aviv, Israel. It is available as an mp3 which is free to download from the website https://echoingyafa.alllies.org (users are asked if they would like to make a donation). The tour is in three parts, and each part is under twenty minutes in duration. The narratives are recorded by actors and include a music soundtrack and sound effects to complete the creation of an acoustic geography; the main narrator gives the user verbal instructions on where to walk, stop and so on. Additionally, there is a PDF map that users can download in order to guide themselves around the area. The distances covered are short and easily accessible, and include rest points along a terrain that varies from quiet streets, to a busy marketplace, to the seafront and beach. The audio performance walk was created by Palestinian activist Miriam Schickler, with a team of researchers and designers, and the script is based on interviews conducted with Palestinian refugees and former residents of the district. The walk is a strong example of the Palestinian cultural response to the Nakba, the term for the dispossession of Palestinian land by Israeli forces in 1948. The Nakba, as Schejter and Tirosh argue, is ‘both a symbol of loss and destruction and a political tool disseminating Palestinian national consciousness’.Footnote 28 The Echoing Yafa performance walk is hence part of a larger cultural ecosystem of Nakba-related digital projects, such as Zochrot's iNakba app, which navigates users to destroyed Palestinian villages in Israel, and more local projects such as Autobiography of a City, a Yafa-based video archive with Palestinian residents of Yafa/Jaffa.Footnote 29
The second performance walk, Echoes from the Past,Footnote 30 is a location-triggered digital app, designed for mobile (cell) phone or tablet. The app is free to download. The performance walk centres on the former Goldenbridge Institution in Dublin, a residential school for girls run by the Catholic religious order of the Sisters of Mercy nuns (1880–1983). In the mid-1990s allegations of serious abuse emerged from former residents of the school – these allegations were subsequently upheld by an official government investigation. Goldenbridge Institution is located in Inchicore in west inner-city Dublin and audience members follow a fifteen-stop walk around the local streets, listening to a script created by historian Maeve Casserly, which is based verbatim on the 2009 Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (www.childabusecommission.ie). The script is recorded with actors’ voices, and accompanied by original music by composer Tom Lane. The app is unique in terms of its genesis as an Irish verbatim project based on a documentary source, but is comparable to audio tour apps in the Dublin area, including Story Map,Footnote 31 an app offering verbatim location-triggered content based on real-life conversations and anecdotes.
It should be noted that we have a very different experience of the Echoes from the Past app, as we are its co-creators. We thus write with in-depth knowledge of how it was designed and intended to be received, as well as positioning ourselves as users and critics of this digital-audio product.Footnote 32
Encountering the performance walk: Echoing Yafa
Manshiyya is deserted. It is a Saturday afternoon and though it is only April, the sun is hot. The bus station is closed. The normally busy market is shuttered. It is the Sabbath, and that is why it is so quiet on the street. But actually Manshiyya is deserted because it no longer exists.
Established in the late 1870s, by the 1940s Manshiyya was one of Yafa's largest Arab neighbourhoods, to the south of the new district, Tel Aviv. Stretching along the sea from the Yafa Old Town towards the newer Jewish settlements to the north and west, in 1944 the area had a population of ‘12,000 Palestinians and about 1,000 Jews, on an area of some 2,400 dunums’.Footnote 33 In April 1948, the Jewish Etzel forces launched an attack on the neighbourhood, expelling its Arab population. Following Etzel's clearing of the area, many homes were taken over by poorer Jewish families, while other buildings were razed (such as the police station). Several decades of neglect followed, until in the 1960s the remaining structures were demolished to make way for new residential and commercial developments. Today, the Hassan Beq mosque is the only building remaining from the period when the neighbourhood was an Arab quarter.
But as we stand on Kalisher Street, the starting point for the Echoing Yafa walk, we do not know any of this history. We can only see that we are standing on a clean and affluent street. We found out about the performance walk through the Zochrot organization, who suggested that if we were going to stay in Tel Aviv then we should engage with some of this city's hidden history. The walk is split into nine scenes, with six main narrator characters, and is designed to give an insight into the daily life of the district, as well as its violent demise.
We are not sure what to expect, and perhaps other street users think we seem strange, standing still, with our headphones on, together but separate, looking at the buildings and the streets leading off in different directions. Are we, in Bull's terms, ‘immune’ to the others around us? It's hard to think that we are, given the way the verbatim testimony keeps bringing us back to the duty to notice the here and now, to be witnesses of the context and the testimony.
As we stand on the street, the only non-moving people on this wide strip of pavement, a female narrator tells us, ‘this is where they decided to draw the border line between Yafa and Tel Aviv’.Footnote 34 The narrator gives some historical background to the area, but always roots her narrative in her position as one of the neighbourhood's residents. She remarks that the area was first settled by Egyptians, that for years it was under the rule of the Turkish, and ‘now’ of the British. As she puts it, ‘all of this time we've been dealing with all of this shit’. This line illustrates the balance in this walk between the educational and the historical narrative and the creation of an affective psychogeography, in which the audience-listener is expected to connect to an experiential history.
Though Manshiyya was predominantly an Arab neighbourhood (the narrator gives the population figure of ‘some 15,000’), the narrator also points to its diversity, with Jewish, Christian, atheist and communist residents, and a mix of both rich and poor people (though, again, it was predominantly a poor and overcrowded neighbourhoodFootnote 35). Then, ‘all of a sudden these people come along with barbed wire and decide that some of us belong on this side and the others on the other’. The informality of this line relies on the audience knowing some of the history of the region, and sharing its political outlook, assuming an audience-listener who is engaged.
The shifting time frame of Echoing Yafa positions the audience-listener in both the past and the present. At one point the narrator says, ‘if it wasn't for that damned barbed wire, we could almost think we were one city’. The somewhat bitter irony is that the audience-listener is standing, in the present moment, in one city. Tel Aviv, once just a district encroaching on Manshiyya, is now all-encompassing. While the spread of the city makes it easy for audience-listeners to traverse the cityscape in the present, it underlines the disappearance of the former Arab neighbourhood. The narrative of the walk is thus defamiliarizing to the listener who has to travel back and forth temporally as well as to travel the walk's literal spatial route, illustrating the palimpsestic nature of the city.
We walk towards a park, which used to be, as the narrator tells us, ‘a built-up area’, but is now the ‘Park of the Conquerors’. In the centre of the park there is an imposing stone monument, dedicated to the Jewish ‘conquerors’ of Yafa. Those who were conquered were, of course, the Palestinian citizens of Manshiyya. As we stand at the rear of the monument, the voice in our headphones changes, to the whispered tones of a man recalling that ‘while a mother buries her child, they keep erecting monuments … marble blocks of guilt’. The modulation from the matter-of-fact female narrator to this male-narrated scene marks a shift into melancholia, encouraging reflection on what ‘we can choose to remember … [and what] we also choose to forget’. This is reminiscent of Fintan Walsh's point that site-specific work encourages audiences ‘not only to encounter the past, but to question their responsibility for the events presented’.Footnote 36 For these reasons, this scene is uncomfortable to listen to, as we stand here as tourists in Israel.
This discomfort is added to by our awareness of our visibility as we stand looking up at the monument. Whereas during live site-specific performances, actors and audiences are highly visible and public – as Ciara Murphy puts it, ‘the immersed audience member is not only watching the performance … she is also being witnessed’Footnote 37 – it might seem as if the headphone-wearing audience is invisible. Indeed, it is this invisibility that enables the audience-listener to access a narrative that might create conflict if performed live as street theatre. The privacy granted by headphones thus, as Jen Harvie argues, affects ‘the audience member [who] becomes a solo performer [who] is deliberately isolated in the city’.Footnote 38 Yet though the experience of being audience-listeners to this performance walk is isolating in terms of its auditory privacy, at the same time it requires us to be connected through an act of noticing. What we notice is not only the buildings and monuments that the narrative draws attention to, but also ourselves. It is awkward to stand for several minutes in the centre of a deserted park. This awkwardness and discomfort cause us to, as Julie Salverson puts it, ‘notice’ and ‘implicate’ ourselves ‘in the picture’.Footnote 39 This kind of self-implication may be one way, Salverson suggests, of avoiding the one-way projection of victimhood onto the ‘other’, by observing not just the presence, but the meaning-making role of the audience. In this way, though the headphones do create platforms for isolation and separation, the combination of the social awareness of the audience-listeners of their bodies in space and time, combined with the ‘silent but committed listening’Footnote 40 that headphones enable, can work to counteract the alienating effects of headphones. Moreover, this kind of overt silence, which enables listening, negates the covert silences that in the Israeli context Vinitszky-Seroussi and Teeger have argued underlie social forgetting.Footnote 41
The scene at the monument ends as the female narrator returns: ‘Let's walk on. Go back to the path.’ This trick of the narrative, and the audible footsteps on the soundtrack, serve to make the audience-listener feel that this is, indeed, a guided walk. Throughout the narrative, the speakers engage with the audience-listener directly, eliciting their reactions. While walking around the Hassan Beq mosque, we are asked to imagine ourselves as defenders of the area (like the snipers from its minaret). Young narrators describe the vibrant life of the district, and then engage our sympathy as one young girl finds the corpse of a murdered man in the park, but ‘it's not the first time I see a dead body’.
This girl's line about seeing dead bodies comes fairly early in the walk, as we are crossing the marketplace. Her voice returns later on, when we are closer to the seafront. She describes the night of the main Etzel attack, and how her family are driven from their house by bombs and shooting. Poignantly, as they are packing to leave, they cover their furniture with tablecloths, so that it does not get dirty, and leave some food in the larder so that there will be something to eat when they return. The family take shelter in her grandparents’ house but that becomes too dangerous when a bomb demolishes part of the building. The local resistance are out of ammunition and cannot defend them. The young girl says, ‘That's it, I thought, I'm going to die.’ One of the resistance fighters helps the family to flee, and they get on a truck and drive away. As the girl says at the end of this scene, ‘when we arrived, only a couple of kilometres away, we had become refugees’.
The performance walk ends on the seafront, standing by the sculpture that marks ‘the Liberation of Yafa’, a sculpture of a woman, the angel of history, which the narrator says has ‘turned her face to the past’. We listen to the final scene sitting in the shade of a derelict building, watching the IDF patrol the beachfront sidewalk. The rubble of Manshiyya lies below the dunes. Sitting and gazing towards the Old Town, we listen as the narrator brings the story up to date:
Those of us who managed to stay in Yafa … to move into the emptied homes in the Ajami ghetto, keep on wandering. Today five hundred families in Ajami, many of whom are refugees from ’48, face house evictions and house demolitions. Once more they will be dispossessed and displaced.
This is not a benign or innocent landscape, no matter what side of the political and religious ‘barbed wire’ you find yourself on.
The production of active listeners throughout Echoing Yafa and the engagement of the audience through different voices performing verbatim testimony are key to its double success – the enlisting of audiences as witnesses to a troubling past, and the reshaping of the urban space through site-specific performance. As with other site-specific work, Echoing Yafa uses emotionally affecting content to guide audiences to consider the spaces they walk through anew, their relationship in and to them. The performance walk further combines strategies of defamiliarization and discomfort in order to make the audience-listener notice themselves in the space, and thus take responsibility for their shaping role within it.
Making our own performance walk: Echoes from the Past
The audience-listener stands at Drimnagh Luas tram stop, she presses play, the first scene starts. A male narrator's voice describes how St Vincent's (known as Goldenbridge) residential school for girls was founded on this site in 1880 by the Sisters of Mercy nuns. Her phone screen shows an ordnance map from 1911 and on it she can clearly see the industrial school site. Today, however, as the audience member follows the tour, she realizes that little trace is left of Goldenbridge – there are no plaques or memorials to the school buildings, which were demolished in the 1980s and replaced with a housing estate. The convent is now owned by Dublin City Council and is an administrative building. As the listener reaches stop four on the tour and presses play, new voices emerge from her headphones: testimonials about the hardship suffered by the girls who were resident in the schools, including emotional and physical abuse.
Echoes from the Past is a digital-audio performance walk based verbatim on the Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (known colloquially as the Ryan Report). The Ryan Report is a long and detailed document – 2,600 pages across five volumes – and the chapter on Goldenbridge institution is eighty pages.Footnote 42 The report details how Goldenbridge officially opened in 1880 as an industrial school for girls, with certification for fifty full-time residents. A few years later dormitories, a dining hall, workrooms and extra accommodation were added and, within five years, Goldenbridge had increased its certification from fifty to 150. From 1885, the number of children accommodated in the school remained steady, although there was a significant increase over the 1950s and 1960s, up to a high of 193 in 1964. At the time of its closure in 1983, there were forty-six pupils in Goldenbridge.Footnote 43
Given that the Ryan Report goes into such detail on Goldenbridge, the script for this performance walk had to significantly compress material in order to create a coherent listening experience. Nevertheless, the process of building the script still had to capture the complex and multifaceted experience of the survivors of abuse as expressed in their testimonials.Footnote 44 Following the model of multiple voices, we concentrated on highlighting recurring features of the children's experiences – beatings, hunting for scraps, deprivation of water – in order to give insight into a range of experiences in Goldenbridge during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Casting was also important: we decided to cast female actors to deliver the testimonials about girls’ experience in the school, and a male actor to record the introductory parts of the narrative. This gender split was chosen in order to provide a clearly audible and recognizable distinction between the testimonies from the Ryan Report and those parts of the text which provide an informative context. It was also decided that the actors should have voices that sounded middle-aged in line with the ages of the women who would have given their statements to the commission, and to give a sense of the legacy of these issues beyond childhood.
The audience member listens as she walks around the streets that surrounded the Goldenbridge school. Certain features of the landscape remain – such as Richmond Barracks, a former army quarters, but even this has undergone renewal and is now a local-history museum. As with Echoing Yafa, then, this production aims for the audience member to notice the disparity between what is described on the audio, and the built environment of the present, creating a reflective space for the listener to think about continuities and discontinuities between the past and present. Temporal shifts are, as site-specific company ANU Productions argues, an important way of bringing audiences into contact with spaces and stories ‘through a lens of now-then-now.’Footnote 45
During Echoes from the Past audience-listeners encounter much difficult material: scenes that describe forced and brutal haircuts, children having to scrabble for food scraps, being deprived of education, and being beaten for minor infractions of the rules. The walk's sound design includes sound effects such as the scissors, children yelling and other background sounds, such as floor scrubbing, bead counting and bed making. All these effects are presented at a low level in order to reinforce the meaning of the words, but not overpower the information conveyed by the script. A third layer of sound design is the continuous musical soundtrack, which provides a spacious frame for the sensitive and potentially emotional content of the script. The music is presented in the high register of a piano and uses an open and simple style of harmony in C major, to avoid invoking tragedy or negativity and thus over-influencing the listener. Nevertheless, despite the warm-toned music, the content of the script about abuse is inevitably difficult for the audience-listener to pay attention to. In an attempt to balance the emotional content, the script also includes some more pleasant memories, of children helping each other, which we hope, combined with the factual information about the institution as a structural response to poverty, will ameliorate the risk of ‘simply reinscrib[ing] stories of victimization’.Footnote 46
The site-specificity of this walk was a key goal throughout its development. The area of Dublin in which the Goldenbridge Industrial School was situated continues to occupy a socially and economically marginal position in the city. One of our aims as creators was to use the performance walk to redirect attention to this neglected urban area by allowing previously silenced voices to be heard in the spaces in which the silencing originally occurred. The recordings contained in the walk are only triggered when the user is physically standing in specific locations. This necessitates a direct engagement with the real geographical locations – the audience is really there. The counterpart to the benefits of this site-specificity, however, is the risk of dark tourism and commodification.Footnote 47 In order to address this, we met with the Dublin City Council community development officer and community stakeholders before the walk was launched. They raised a number of issues around the safety of audience members, as well as concern that there would be an influx of ‘dark tourists’ who would only be interested in the negative stories of the area, perpetuating its reputation as being a ‘bad spot’ in Dublin. Because of these issues, we decided that the content of the walk would be made available online also.Footnote 48 Given the toxicity of some of this material – descriptions of abuse suffered by children – and our own experience of having to be careful about our emotional well-being as we created and recorded the script, we also recognized that online access enables the listener to encounter the audio in a more secure and supportive environment than the public street. While the full experience of the performance walk is not thus available to the online user, making the walk's content remotely accessible seemed like a necessary compromise. Having said that, we also recognize that the risk of over-identifying one site with trauma is an open-ended ethical question, one that we as creators can try to manage through being sensitive about the locations of stops, the remote availability of the audio, and consultation with the community, but that, inevitably, the nature of the material – witnessing child abuse – is not emotionally neutral. Our experience of creating a performance walk, then, has demonstrated the potentialities of walking and listening, while also illustrating the pitfalls of creating work that interacts with real histories and real spaces.
Conclusions: witnessing, listening and absence
These two digital-audio performance walks require the participant to do something impossible. The audience moves through and reflects on a landscape of absence – the buildings that are described, and the experiences that are evoked, are gone, accessible only now as echoes. In reanimating these echoes, the performance walks aim to give audience-listeners a different understanding of the history of their particular locations, an understanding that is not available simply by walking, unguided, around the area. Additionally, both walks aim to give audience-listeners an empathetic connection to the lives of those who once inhabited the area through animating their voices with actors and complex sound designs. This empathetic connection, both walks implicitly suggest, may engage audiences not only as listeners, but also as witnesses of a problematic history. In turning the outside in and the inside out, the digital-audio performance walk thus has the potential to reshape how these spaces are understood and encountered.
There is a ‘however’ though – one concern for both performance makers and audience-listeners is the extent to which they really engage beyond their headphones, with the real spaces and stories of the areas they walk through. To what extent are audience-listeners performing as consumers, rather than as witnesses? Are these walks, in fact, a performance of empathic quietism – simply granting the participant a cathartic or voyeuristic emotional reaction to the suffering the walks narrate? And, as with other temporary site-specific work, to what extent do performance walks open up social space?
We cannot answer all these questions, but we suggest that considering both walking and listening as active forms of engagement may provide a counterpoint to the ethical risks of appropriation and quietism. Performance walks aim to fulfil what Jacques Rancière calls ‘a theatre without spectators’ in which audiences, ‘as opposed to being seduced by images … become active participants as opposed to passive voyeurs’.Footnote 49 Performance walks require particular kinds of labour of their audience-listeners; indeed, as Gorman notes, the act of walking itself requires the audience member to become a critical consumer and actor in the urban space.Footnote 50 Though the separation engineered by headphones creates a dislocation for the audience member, this separation may actually reinforce the narrative's defamiliarization of space. As a result, in both walks discussed here, as with other performance walks,Footnote 51 the active engagement of participants who have to navigate changing urban landscapes and contend with the disparity between what they see and what they hear can ‘activate’ agency, so much so that participants become, in Myers's term, ‘percipients’,Footnote 52 who exercise what Jen Harvie calls ‘expanded agency’.Footnote 53 This expanded agency may be a reaction to the content of the audio, to the route of the walk, or to a whole range of factors outside the performance walk, not least the motivation of the audience-listener in accessing these walks and these spaces. We argue, however, that we should not overlook the role of discomfort in creating witnesses – as the audience-listener stands on the street, they become part of the spectacle and this visibility can lead to a self-awareness that, combined with the awareness of the disjuncture between what is being heard and what is being seen, may provoke audience-listeners to move beyond empathy and towards considerations of one's own position in relation to abuse – not just in terms of the visible and audible legacies encountered during the performance walk, but beyond those limitations.
