How to join the more-than-human orchestra - Introducing eco-musicality as an analytical concept in post-anthropocentric theatre

Abstract

This thesis works to establish eco-musicality as an analytical lens for post-anthropocentric theatre to examine how instances of music-making and listening can facilitate experiences of more-than-human entanglement and togetherness. Informed by an understanding of ecology that centralises more-than-human interconnection and interrelation, I have based my understanding of eco-musicality on four sub-concepts: (1) attunement, based on the definition by Ash and Gallacher, which argues for a change in perception towards recognising the nonhuman as an agentic presence and interrelated collaborator, (2) embodiment, which recognises the bodily origin of sound (human/nonhuman), placing emphasis on the physicality of sound in vibration and its effect on the more-than-human body, and (3) horizontality, which draws on Bennett’s more-than-human assemblage and builds on the physicality of music-making and listening, thereby revealing musicality as a more-than-human activity. Lastly, though not an analytical sub-concept in the same right, I also consider (4) the socio-political context of the performances as it reveals the intersectionality of the ecological thought which equally penetrates my case study performances’ musical components: prompting questions of who has a voice and who is being listened to. To test out this analytical approach, I am examining three post-anthropocentric performances which incorporate musicality in varying ways: Simone Kenyon’s Into The Mountain (2019), Kate McIntosh’s To Speak Light Pours Out (2021), and Bert Barten’s Talking Trees (2018). Based on these analyses, I highlight the ecological potential of musicality in facilitating experiences of more-than-human connectedness: music-making and listening as activities which engage all matter, which disregard the arbitrary dualism of human/nonhuman, and through which theatre may enable multiple, entangled and more-than-human ways of being. I ultimately argue that it is through an eco-musical analysis of performance that we can recognise how musical elements enable ecological experiences.