Chris Wenn is a committed and creative educator and researcher in the field of sound art and live performance, as well as a creative practitioner with over 20 years experience in sound art, sound design, music, and theatre. He obtained a PhD in the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University in 2017. Chris’s thesis, ‘Sound Design: A phenomenarchaeology” explored the intersubjective relation between sound designer and audience through a metaphor of phenomenological and archaeological investigation. His research primarily examines the intersection of technical theatre and practice/research. His investigations look to the phenomenology and ethics of the audience-designer relation: how are we co-present with audience as designers and performance makers? What are our responsibilities with and for audience? Can audiences be given space to consent to sound in performance?
In 2019, Chris was elected to the Board of Performance Studies international in the role of Web Officer and oversaw a major renewal of the conference organisation’s web presence in 2020. In 2021, he was appointed to the Steering Committee for PSi’s 2022 conference.
Until January 2022, Chris was Tutor in Production (Technical) in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music at The University of Melbourne’s Southbank campus, specialising in sound production, sound design, and theatre practice. The intensive, 3-year program in the BFA (Production) gives students practical training in design, technology, and construction for live performance, including hands-on experience as designers, technicians, and crew on professional-scale productions. Chris taught into or coordinated subjects incorporating theoretical elements in theatre and performance studies, design theory, and technology. He has led, or taught into, a number of subjects in the BFA (Production) program which developed local and international collaborations, such as with Science Gallery Melbourne, the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio, the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space 2019, and SRH Berlin University of Applied Science. In 2020, Chris completed a Graduate Certificate in University Teaching specialising in curriculum design and the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Publications
Towards a Post-Pandemics of Sound in Performance
In Australasian Drama Studies, no. 79 (December 2021): 194–230.
In this essay, I examine my own sound design and the evolution of a pandemic-restricted solo practice as a site in which a ‘post-pandemics’ of performance might become possible. If 2020 in its upheaval and chaos showed the all-too-narrow limits of our care for others, what is the role of performance design in the recovery of that care? I engage a poetics of care and consent in performance design through notions of Pirate Care, xenofeminist action, and the relation to Other proposed by Jean-Luc Nancy. I reflect on and dissect my own response to pandemic time and space, and the shapes that vulnerability, fear, and uncertainty build in our performed worlds. Deploying this knowledge I look to a way forward for performance design and live performance, real-time and asynchronous, physically distant and present, that can engender this ‘post-pandemics’.
Sound Design: A phenomenology
In Grant et. al., 2019 Performance Phenomenology: To the thing itself
Phenomenologies of sound are, in general, phenomenologies of listening or performing—that is, they privilege the moment of sound’s making or the moment of its hearing. This chapter broadens this to include the process of the sound designer, integrating the experience of the audience in an account of the complex temporalities and intentionalities of the full experience of sound in performance, rooted in our intersubjective understanding of other beings in our world. It argues that sound design and other design disciplines within performance are an integral part of the performance, not an afterthought. Further, the work of design is figured as a work of phenomenology itself, as an intersubjective transcendence of designer, actor, director, audience as individual hearers—a coming-into-being of ‘listener’ and ‘listened-to’ in the time of a work’s creation as well as its presence on stage. In the work of sound design for performance, the designer must be open and turned towards an audience that does not yet exist—the designer must render the thinkable imaginary of design as the knowable of performance. The philosophies of Badiou, Heidegger and Nancy are brought together with leading theorists of sound to address notions of truth and the temporality of performance in the role of the designer in theatre, exploring the movement of meaning between listener and listened-to, and positing that the rules and conventions that are shaped in the rehearsal and performance process are unique systems of meaning which imagine an intersubjective audience for an other.
The Rush of Real World Sound: Acoustic Ecologies of Independent Theatre in Melbourne
Critical Stages/Scènes Critiques, Issue no. 16, December/Décembre 2017
Our world is increasingly sonified. Our pockets and bags filled with devices that beep and trill our every interaction – a mealtime, a message, the number of steps we’ve taken. The sounds of our devices blend with the noise of our machines and vehicles, with voice and with nature, in what Ross Brown calls ‘an immersive theatre of sonic ambiguity’ – a world permeated with acoustic and sonic design. This article aims to navigate an acoustic ecology for performance as it incorporates modern technologies, modern cities, and modern crises. Gernot Böhme asserts that “the characteristic experience of a lifestyle, of a city’s or a countryside’s atmosphere, is fundamentally determined in each instance by the acoustic space.” By examining the acoustic worlds of two key independent theatre venues in Melbourne, La Mama Theatre in Carlton and fortyfivedownstairs in Melbourne’s Central Business District, I ask that if ‘theatre noise’ is the characteristic sound that emerges in our performance spaces – from the performer’s breath to audience laughter, air conditioning, the crash of bottles from the restaurant next door – is the role of sound design to make this more meaningful, or less? Are our performance spaces immune to ‘noise pollution’ or should we bring the sonified world to the work of sound design as a response to ecological reality?
Headphone listening in live performance: a phenomenology of sound design
Theatre and Performance Design Volume 1 Issue 3 (January 2015)
What is it to wear headphones as Audience? In recent years the availability of relatively low-cost wireless headphone technology has meant an increase in performances that use the phenomenological potential of intimate, ‘secret’ listening as a theatrical element. However, the very mode of headphone listening - personal, private, ‘interior’ is at odds with the plural sharedness of Audience. In this essay, I propose that headphones fundamentally disrupt the act of listening as Audience, by enclosing individual audience members in their own acoustic space. However, I argue that headphones can also fundamentally change the way that private, personal and public spaces can bleed into each other, and that different technical modes of listening (amplified, unamplified, public-address, personal-stereo, monophonic, spatialized…) produce differing phenomenologies of performance.
How I Heard: The 'phenomenarchaeology' of performance
Australasian Drama Studies 64 (April 2014)
This article is a meditation on the phenomenological potential of Mike Pearson's Theatre/Archaeology in the practice and experience of sound design for performance. Performance, like sound, is 'the capture of that which is lost' - a recompense of understanding, a knowledge brought and a knowledge earned -simultaneously, sound and performance are 'a pyrrhic victory: … forever elsewhere: it has always already escaped'. In recomposing the left-behind traces of sound, through my score for I Am the Wind by Jon Fosse (directed in 2012 by Sapidah Kian for Turtle Lab, Melbourne), is there an insight into the experience of performance as theatre-goer and theatre-maker?