Sound as a Method: Creative Textual Practices as Critical Re-writings

The ‘performance lecture’ (cf Cage, 1961) suggests itself as a method for the articulation of practice research, combining performance and/or creative practices with the potential discussion and exploration of the themes, ideas and knowledge that emerge from them. This may be particularly effective when the work itself can be considered a ‘creative textual practice’ (Kristeva, 1984; Barrett, 2011); a practice that offers the potential to rethink the ways that written and spoken texts can be performed. In this chapter, I contend that the performance lecture does not only offer an intuitive method for the exploration and articulation of knowledge in practice research, but is itself a further site of enquiry into the nature of creative practice as a process of transformative action. I do this by considering my experiences of delivering performance lectures that present and develop creative textual practices in my practice research by combining these with improvisation, sound performance, and their critical evaluation. I further explore this through additional creative textual practices and performative writings that place the ‘evaluative’ and ‘creative’ aspects of my work in dialogue with each other on the page. In doing so, I reflexively examine the process of creation, considering creative textual practice as an experimental means of investigation. I combine improvised practices and prepared texts—that have been created using Oulipo-inspired techniques—to derive new meanings from existing texts through critical rewritings, or translations, of work that addresses historical, political, aesthetic, and gender-based themes, and their relation to art and listening. Where, in sonic performances, this translational process seeks new and hybrid musical forms that draw upon the ambiguity of the spoken voice—between the everyday, the performative and the musical—in their written form, I seek out similarly and deliberately non-mimetic strategies that serve as a parallel to the spoken word, often consciously tenuous in exploring the extremes of difference within texts and sounds. As a result this chapter stands between presentation and evaluation; writing and performance; text and sound.