Vera Tussing’s new piece explores the idea of the body as instrument. Inspired by Al Jolson’s famous line ‘You ain’t heard nothing yet’ from The Jazz Singer (1927), the first words ever uttered on screen, it deconstructs the relationship between sound and image in the cinematic landscape.

Tussing’s piece considers editing processes and ways of constructing meaning in the language of film. These experiments have been transposed to the stage, where the gestural, physical and auditory can interact, rather than be perceived by the gaze.

You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet capitalises on affect as the key discursive tool onstage. The three performers – Andrew Hardwidge, Ann Pidcock and Petra Soor – begin by creating a series of soundscapes using their bodies; their meaning rests on our immediate aural associations. As the performance progresses, more elements are added: the physical actions compliment the sounds produced, and the recorded and live sound begin to mix. Images emerge in these visual disruptions which can finally be pieced together into a particular scene.

Tussing’s piece also engages with the cinematic and poetic qualities of Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin. If the novel relies on the intimacy of a narrative voice, Tussing extracts a particular scene between Onegin, Vladimir and Tatyana and turns its poetics into a cinematic encounter in which sound guides the action, and vice-versa. This provides a section of the performance with a dramatic specificity, grounding its lyrical explorations into character-based theatricality. Choreography becomes the key deconstructive vehicle- bodies are at times active meaning-makers, and at others foley objects.

The stage becomes a space where meaning is constructed in the interaction between sound and image, yet the tension arises from the cinematic referencing and its linguistic appropriation on the site of the stage. Based on theorist Michel Chion’s articulation of the audio-visual contract in cinema, Tussing’s piece explores the hypothesis that when sound and image work together on the same site, it’s impossible to deconstruct the two without losing their intertwined determinacy. Tussing’s aim was to devise two tools to explore the language of the sensorium onstage, bringing affect as referential to these structural components. The Acoustic Body, where movement becomes sound, which then becomes symbol, and the Edited Body, in which action deconstructs and redefines physicality.

If at the onset, the simplicity of the actions producing sounds is engrossing- we hear water drips, men riding on horses, the arrival in a deserted desert town- this narrative specificity begins to fragment the more tools are brought onstage. In the repetition of action, the sound begins to gain character, yet within the same equation, time is of utmost importance, finalising the space in which this character can become narrative. As the piece progresses, the moments of exploration begin to feel too brief, twisting meaning without engaging with its affective qualities.  Tussing is constructing a space at the meeting point between description and representation; when image and sound begin to mingle, the performance feels more like it’s describing a particular meaning rather than representing and toying with its symbols.

In this creation of sounds and images, some actions become symbolic in the framework of a series of screens- the edge of the stage becomes a framing device, the cyclorama lining upstage a different semiotic space, and the rigged white sheet which is also used to great effect in a variety of soundscapes a transformative, liminal boundary. The same action repeated in different collisions of movement, sound, image and text- for example, a woman reacting to the death of a family member-is contoured by the different associative qualities of each mechanism. Albeit clinical, this experimentation manages to aptly deconstruct these meaning-making processes, taking into account the composite elements of narrative and symbolism onstage, whilst dismissing all too suddenly the role of the durational onstage.