PERFORMANCE
DRAWINGS
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Fabrizio Manco, The Acoustic Vanishing Point 1, 2005, drawing. Courtesy the artist.
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Fabrizio Manco, The Saint (The Crow), 1998/1999, site-specific performances, Italy/UK. Photo:
Fabio Pino. Courtesy the artist.
A seminal piece which is a condensed image of my work dealing with landscape
and environmental ecology. This work has been explored in different media, from
drawing, painting, film, video, and site-specific performances in Italy & England
(1998) and in India (1999). The impetus came from the imagined sound of crows
in Vincent Van Gogh’s painting Cornfield with Crows and, a year later, was linked
to the actual sound of crows encountered in India, The Crow (The Saint). This work
also related to the agricultural and “iconoclastic” gesture of burning fields of corn
and wild oats to regenerate the soil, a typical practice in my native area.
Other PAJ features in the ongoing series “Performance Drawings”—
1. “Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland and Maria Del Bosco,” by Richard Foreman,
PAJ 90 (September 2008).
2. “Geneva, Handfall,” by Trisha Brown, PAJ 89 (May 2008).
3. “The Threepenny Opera,” by Robert Wilson, PAJ 88 (January 2008).
4. “Research Events,” by Ralph Lemon, PAJ 81 (September 2005).
5. “Studio as Study,” by Melinda Barlow, PAJ 71 (May 2002).
98 PAJ 94
EAR BODIES, EAR LINES
Fabrizio Manco
In my work I seek to provide a framework in which spaces can resound with
bodies through hearing and listening, and where they can also interweave their
particular social and cultural aspects. I engage in performative investigations into
aurality in connection with architecture (spaces to play within and be played by)
and the natural and urban environment (including the natural within the urban).
These are sometimes affected by my own cultural perspective, that of a Southern
Italian who has been resident in the UK for eighteen years. This ecology between
spaces, the environment, and bodies reaches out to inform the understanding
of cross-cultural site-specificity, performance, and embodied awareness. For me,
this is an arena for communal and sustained sharing that develops a relationship
beyond what we are already able to experience and hear. A different approach from
established categorizations of the sonic, it works towards an interrogation of sound
within performance art. This would also provide a way to speak of artistic and
pedagogical means of intervention in what are often rigid categorizations of sound,
performance, and place.
Through my condition of chronic tinnitus and hyperacusis, I have come to realize
how much sound and movement are intermingled and mutually generative. Over
time, I have become more aware of this interaction, and the response and accom-
modation of it within performance training/pedagogy and practice, which produce
a reflection and a re-listening with a posthumous ear. I settle with my invisible and
constant “companion,” with its hyperactivity of neurons and thoughts, searching
for a world of acoustic resonance and a “silent” place. So, sound chose me, in my
attempt to live outside my ears and through my ears. And I, with time, chose sound:
it was simply a search for the silence that sound is.
The flattening effect of an apparent acoustic separation with the world and the bring-
ing back of hearing patterns, the existent acoustic, and my “stretched” experience
of space became my work, providing a condition and possibility for creating a new
context. My whole body is called upon when a question of hearing and listening
arises; it invests me. Sound intrudes in me, traumatizes and sometimes disturbs me,
pleases, hurts, and owns me, but I cannot own sound. My personal experience and
© 2009 Fabrizio Manco
PAJ 94 (2010), pp. 99–107. 99
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spatial positioning, which is that of also being a member of the audience and a
spectator of performance, produces particular reflections.
In summer, in beholding the woods of my native region (the Salento area of Puglia
in Italy), I constantly find myself surrounded and surprised by a thousand cicadas,
an experience similar to the image of shimmering light on the surface of the sea.
It is, indeed, a sea of noise: a change of sound frequency and a pure tone which is
hard to locate, rattling in my ears, not quite a white noise, although when in large
numbers, the cicadas could sound very much alike.
In December 2005, while in the Salento countryside, I encountered a herd of sheep
with their shepherd. This encounter became the impetus for the video work I called
Jiiiiingle Beells. It is a documentation of an initial idea of improvising with move-
ment, by using the immersive environmental sound of that site, which ended up
being that of the tinkling bells of the herd gradually approaching me. I connected
with those surrounding moving sounds (indeed more than an eight-channel surround
system) as if I were the shepherd being guided and moved by the sheep, instead of
the other way around. The moving and surrounding herd functioned as a trigger for
my dance, in the interaction with my hyperacusis as body orientation and ear/head
movement “panning,” as I became almost like an instrument, a “spectrum analyzer.”
This conditioned and invisible inner experience of somato-sounds, together with
the sonic invisible power of the “outside,” makes me aware of how sound is before,
through, and after us—a multi-dimensional space which grounds us in any part
of the acoustic spectrum, where even a vertical range of sound horizontalizes me. I
favor a horizontality of non escape, versus a vertical transcendence of the acoustic
landscape.
Rather than serving the auditory performance, or creatig sound works for perfor-
mance, I use a basic production of sound and aural interactivity in performance,
engaged and made by systems of sonic corporeal, cultural, neural, land/soundscape
ecologies. In many ways, my visual and performance work is generated and regen-
erated by having within sound a direct source. For instance, the employment of
this acoustic awareness is to be specifically used as a destabilizer of preconceived
assumptions and habits in performance.
In my performances, research, in-situ, and studio-based physical-aural explorations,
I try to create a link (often through itinerant participation), between indoor spaces
and our acoustic bodies and through outdoor soundscapes, where the already active
spaces are further activated by that interaction, by walls or landscapes and by silences
(that have been sounding in spite of us). I initiate a process in which I perform
within natural landscapes and architecture taking into account its historical, aural, and
visual aspects. I maintain that in connecting with a site’s soundscape, we experience
a more embedded site-specific relation to that site, which is not an anthropocentric
imposing of the body on a landscape. It is a transversal way of highlighting a chosen
area or structural, spatial, natural element by dwelling and listening, and allowing
the soundscape to enable performance, to perform you as you pass through the wide
100 PAJ 94
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and varied angles of the perception of the space that sound creates. In my heightened
acoustic awareness, the uniqueness of every corner, nook, and cranny has a sound,
the memory of each wall where a silent testimony dwells.
My ears initiate their role of dynamization and as a situated way of recovering atten-
tion. I have developed exercises employing drawing, walking/kinhin (walking Zen),
body orientation, dwelling, positioning, and movement as undoers of positionality,
auditory discrimination, as well as unmediated and immediate responses. I wish to
convey the shifts and nuances of process, in order to reach a critical point of dis-
covering other possible approaches of performing place and space, to question the
inter-medial nature of my work in relation to the unpredictable. This is a challenge
only possible through physical and environmental interaction, an always enabling
opportunity to transform and share.
My involvement in Zen Buddhist practice, and in a very personal sense in a non-
theistic and non-transcendental form of “spirituality,” has given me a more open and
radical awareness, and an important insight into my performance and art practice.
Inevitably, trying to express one’s practice, verbally or in writing, involves a risk
because of the inherent limitations in such expression. During Zazen (sitting medi-
tation), my heightened hearing, which is actually supposed to impede the therapy
of dealing with my hyperacusis—a therapy that consists of making the sounds in
my head as non-intrusive as possible—paradoxically leads to further methods of
reconciliation.
This gives me an insight into “silence,” stillness, and listening as an embracing activity,
which, paradoxically, helps me to go through my isolated ringing and busy “phantom
mind.” This active “emptying” as listening, concentration, and breathing awareness,
informs my life and work. The tasks during my workshops are all based on these
embodied responses as well as the responsibility for one’s own physical interactions
and movements with any environment. It is a non-objectifying process, positioning in
acoustic body-based performance, of the becoming of each activity one is immersed
in, whilst at the same time being intertwined with any space and surroundings. Or
to put it differently: a simultaneous grounding and a surrendering to a constant
“coming back.” In my art practice, this is a useful means of destabilizing every fixity;
it can open up the unexpected, the aimless, and the unpremeditated.
In December 2008, at Roehampton University in London, I presented The Acoustic
Vanishing Point, a performance work-in-progress divided in three parts, involving
sound and the audience, listening, drawing, and burnt toast. Here, I focused my
reflection on the monocular and mono-auditive “perspective,” that of the fixed punto
di fuga and its authority. The audience was invited to find the (and their) “auditory
vanishing point” by spending two minutes or so in a corridor to just listen to the
space, then once they had found it, they were invited to place a sticky red dot on
the wall where exactly they thought their point was. In the second part I lay on
the floor of a second corridor, transversally positioned, almost impeding the easy
passing of the audience. I placed a board on my right ear and face, upon which a
MANCO / Ear Bodies, Ear Lines 101
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black sheet of paper was fixed, on which I had drawn/mapped my acoustic experi-
ence and outdoor soundscapes. This type of drawing was a sort of “seismograph,”
a graphic recording of my experience and struggle of listening through my veil of
noise, the sound of the space enhanced by an electrical generator fixed on a wall
and the outdoors soundscape, while I was paying attention and drawing at the same
time the sounds of the surrounding and interacting audience. This was a possible
way of bridging my experiential performance research, my hearing condition, and
the experience of the audience.
I see drawing as a direct improvisation, emerging from context and place. I use this
as a way both towards and out of performance improvisation by applying conceptual
and physical framings. The ambiguous nature of the concept of improvisation is for
me a way of allowing intuition through guided structures. Since each movement is
a result of the previous one, it is linked to a corporeal stratification of memory, as
with sound, changing while travelling from its sources through the atmospherics of
a landscape, taking its qualities and conditions that enhance acoustic propagation.
It is an important form of investigation in my work, for its dynamism, temporality,
and as both a performative and visual medium itself. In my workshops, I use this
to enable the participants to have a further insight and approach towards move-
ment, seeing it on paper (usually five-meter long scrolls), as well as experiencing it
as performance.
I propose to perform the sonic experience and to document it through drawing,
rather than record sound as my main practice. I believe that in connecting with a
site’s soundscape, a more physically embedded and specific relation to that site is
possible. It becomes a tool for documenting each sound-specific experience as, for
instance, through my drawing soundwalks: as a drawing while walking practice.
Drawing is an essential element in this dis/recovering as performative medium and
as a form of engagement with perception. What I call “earlines drawing” is the
visualized space between sonic sources, their locations, and movements towards
dispersion. With this “taking a line for a walk,” the free movement of a line, in the
famous words of Paul Klee, I am interested in mapping, as a sort of “stenography”
of sound, through the sonically being-moved, oriented, or sound-choreographed,
in exploring horizontal and vertical landscape acoustics. I explore line drawing not
only in its link with movement and walking, but also as walking. This is the focus
of what I call “Acoustic Shadow drawing.”
In psychoacoustics, an acoustic shadow is an apparent absence of sound in a specific
area where sound waves don’t circulate. In my research and workshops, this becomes
an exercise of process, which refers rather to the actual image of shadowing and sound,
and to scansion and flow: walking as close as possible, following the perimeter of a
building (indoors or outdoors), maintaining the same flow of pace (medium walk-
ing speed), embodying the image of a shadow sliding through the walls, eyes not
closed and not too open. The idea is that of concentrating on adherence to objects
encountered, adherence to the surroundings, starting from the architectural ones.
Underlying this is both reference and attention to the acoustics of the architectural
102 PAJ 94
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space/environment, and what happens to our conscious ear when it gets closer to
a vertical surface.
How is the sound refracted? Does it happen at all? How site-specific is our moving
and positioning to it? An invisible relationship exists—in this case with the walls
of a building, while my ear-body slides and “scans” the surface. The scope of the
exercise is not to hear anything necessarily, but instead to be led towards an acoustic
embodied state, where each person is subjectively and physically affected (by weather
and environment) in their exploration of the differences, interruptions, qualities
of environmental sound, and as a sort of peripheral line “drawing” following the
perimeters of a building, done with a group of workshop participants.
I maintain that our experience needs more of the contingent moment, more of this
world. The transpositions of recorded soundscapes fill space with their freely ambulat-
ing ghosts, away from the sensuous nature and physical properties of sound. I seek
that depth in performance—in R. Murray Schafer’s terms—the “hi-fi” quality of
soundscapes, its spaces and layers of foregrounds and backgrounds. My experience
of sonic memory and loss is constantly one that I/we live and engage with in the live
event, the experience of the invisible within the visible (and audible), as a ghostly
coming forth to me of an auditory image that I find problematic to locate.
Our ear bodies are already in tune with, and moved by, any space, in spite of our
awareness. In my work I seek to create more awareness of this impermanent and
constantly dynamic sonic nature, and I believe that technological capturing and
controlling of sounds is a bit like ghostbusting: They need to be reminded that they
are already here. We need to be reminded that we are already here.
FABRIZIO MANCO is a London-based artist whose practice includes
visual and performance art, drawing, installation, and video. Exhibitions of
video and performances include: Practicing Thoughts (Finland), “Emotional
Cities” (Tranz-Tech Toronto International Video Art Biennale, Canada);
To Open the Eyes (Worm Festival II, Singapore); Outskirts (Visura Aperta
Festival, Momjan, Croatia); Stalks (UK/Italy); Initinere exhibit (Casarano,
Italy); “Gaylitteram” poetry event (Laltrasponda, Rome); Melissa (Home
Bee) (Melissano & district, Italy). Ear Bodies was recently featured in the
Theatre Noise conference, Central School of Speech & Drama, London.
He is a Visiting Lecturer and PhD candidate at Roehampton University in
Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies.
MANCO / Ear Bodies, Ear Lines 103
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Fabrizio Manco, Earlines drawing, from a four-day workshop at Middlesex University; on the
right, still of a participant, 2007, Trent Park, London. Courtesy the artist.
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Fabrizio Manco, Earlines, detail from drawing on scroll, 2009, Michaelis Dance Studio,
Roehampton University, London. Courtesy the artist.
104 PAJ 94
EARLINES
Part of the Earlines workshop consisted of drawing exercises: here, a long strip of
paper was placed on the floor, parallel and of the same length as a wall of windows
behind the workshop participants. The drawing was produced by listening, focus-
ing on the outdoor sound fields and binaural inputs. The source, speed, distance,
intensity, duration, tone/frequency and rhythm of the external sounds were drawn
using one or both hands. A two minute drawing period was timed by the blip sound
of a watch; this was the indication to roll once onto the next section of paper and
start drawing again until the whole acoustic experience of the outdoor landscape
was drawn onto the scroll.
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MANCO / Ear Bodies, Ear Lines 105
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Fabrizio Manco, You and You, extending into freedom—freeing from isolation, 2006, AAS
End Festival at Oxford House, London. Photo: Christian Kipp. Courtesy the artist.
You and You was a durational performance-installation in collaboration with Rainer
Knupp, about the relationship between the immediate soundscape of the gallery
space and the artists’ physical response. Drawing with different materials on various
surfaces, we responded to our own visual and auditory world with movement.
106 PAJ 94
Fabrizio Manco, Citizen, 2006, Perspectives at Chisenhale Dance Space, London. Photo: Helly Minarti.
Courtesy the artist.
In this performance, sound was produced by two different shapes of tea cups, sau-
cers and teaspoons placed in two wooden boxes that I wore as platform shoes while
walking in the space and exploring its acoustics
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Fabrizio Manco, Dolmen site-specific improvisation, 2007, Minervino (Lecce), Italy. Photo: Fabrio Pino.
The image documents my experimentation involving improvisation in connection
with a specific landscape—the “Scusi” countryside (“Scusi” in the local dialect
means “hiding”) in the vicinity of a prehistoric dolmen near Minervino (Lecce), in
Puglia, Italy.
MANCO / Ear Bodies, Ear Lines 107
