Hearing Difference across Theatres: Experimental, Disability, and Deaf Performance

Abstract

This essay investigates connections between hearing and deafness, focusing on how to articulate a Deaf aesthetic and how to grasp the meaning of moments of deafness in theatre works that do not simply reinscribe a hearing bias back into one's analysis. The author employs a model using a device for cross-sensory listening across domains of sound, silence, and the moving body in performance that she calls the "third ear." An analysis of two performance examples—British deaf performance artist Aaron Williamson's Phantom Shifts and Deaf West Theatre's Big River—are used to help articulate the potential of a Deaf aesthetic to remake the very notion of the multiple soundscapes found in experimental, disability, and deaf performance.