(Un)Setting the Stage

In the small, proscenium-arch theatre of Attis in central Athens a geometric installation of fourteen white doors occupies the entire length of the stage for Theodoros Terzopoulos's Nora (2019).1 This architectural construction, designed by the director, is placed in intimate proximity to the auditorium, leaving only a small corridor in front of it for the actors to perform. The pre-recorded sound of a ticking clock fills the acoustic field for several minutes while the audience sits in silent anticipation of onstage action. Such soundless waiting and sensory honing-in of attention – presupposing ‘physical restraint, “engaged” listening, [and] limited vocalization from the audience’ – is, as Adrian Curtin reminds us, historically situated and only became part and parcel of a by-now-familiar ‘behavioral etiquette’ that emerged alongside modern European drama.2 In this instance, such silence is not (exclusively) a strategic mechanism for facilitating a zooming-in towards the stage. Forceful, warm light refracts against this visual backdrop of whiteness and reflects its brightness back to the spectators’ seats, making audience members watch each other fall silent and listen, individually and collectively, to the acousmatised clock: we hear its sound but cannot affix it to any visible source. This long moment of focused attentiveness to the ticking – a ‘symbol of time passing, but […] also a cipher of silence’, as Ross Brown posits in relation to modernist sonic dramaturgy – undermines the separation of stage and proscenium and its conventional sonic ‘detachedness’. As audience members, we are, on the one hand, obliged by the end-on architecture to turn towards the slightly elevated stage, but at the same time, the unexpected proximity of the scenographic installation, the brightness that seems to spotlight both the doors and ourselves, and the ostinato of sound that surrounds us without any pretension that it emanates from a visible onstage object make us look and listen to ourselves and experience an uncanny ‘sharedness’ with the stage. We are rendered markedly aware of our ingrained modernist theatre-going etiquette and, although operating within the confines of a given architectural context that demarcates stage and auditorium, this durational beginning works to undercut division and seed the potential of unification, or at least of a more fluid rapport, between scenic and spectatorial space.