In-yer-Ear: Performing in the Headphone era

Open CFP:  Contemporary Theatre Review Upcoming Special Issue 
https://www.contemporarytheatrereview.org/upcoming-special-issues/

Guest Editors:
Maria Ristani (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
Sotirios Bampatzimopoulos (Ankara University)

In recent years, private listening devices – headphones, earphones, or earbuds – have become an essential component of contemporary performance, evolving into what critic Matt Trueman (2009) calls a ‘must-have theatre accessory’. Writing in the Guardian over a decade ago, Trueman expresses his astonishment at the increasing prevalence of theatrical experiences that deliver information and instructions to participants via headphones. Headphone-mediated performance has produced new modes of spectatorship – or perhaps listenership – while simultaneously disrupting conventional structures of ‘theatre-proper’. This is, perhaps, no surprise given ‘the postWalkman normalisation of headphone use’ (Roquet 2021) as well as our wider audiophile culture of highly advanced listening technologies, of portable music players and smartphones, of streaming platforms and personalized music curation, or of increased need for friction-free, noise-clean isolation and comfort.

In-yer-ear theatre makes, at least at first glance, an uneasy coupling; this is in light of the privatized, bubble-like logics that we inevitably correlate with headphone modes. Jason Farman refers to headphones as ‘[o]ne of the most ubiquitous mobile media that accomplishes this “distancing through-proxemic”’ effect, enveloping listeners in what he reads as sealed-off, privately controlled ‘cocoons’ (2012). Ross Brown describes headphone listening as an experience of hearing through and within the ‘acoustic blanket’ of the ear/headphone device – one that brackets off the ‘exterior world of the here and now’, closing in on ‘the personal space of individual audience member, even into the “intracranial” sonic space between the ears’ (2016). This is a shift from listening to the wider environment to an experience of listening in: ‘in’ as immune to referents of surroundings, ‘in’ as immersed in a private auditory space.

That said, the connection with live, communal theatre may seem incongruous. Yet this seemingly uneasy pairing has given rise to remarkably creative works in recent years by artists and collectives such as Simon McBurney and Complicite, the British-Swedish artist duo Lundahl & Seitl, Darkfield (David Rosenberg and Glen Neath), Rimini Protokol, Slung Low, Ant Hampton, and Tim Etchells. This special issue seeks to zoom in on such practices – not to impose a rigid genre classification, but to document and critically examine how performative encounters with headphone culture challenge or re-imagine the possibilities of performance experience.

In this context, we are seeking contributions that explore the artistic, technological, and cultural significance of headphone-mediated performance over recent years. This special issue welcomes contributions that engage headphone-mediated performance across diverse cultural spaces that foster broader dialogues orbiting around several key questions: What are the working logics of headphone-mediated performances? How do they negotiate conventional emphases on the liveness, presence, or communal experience of performance? How do they restructure and mobilize performance experience, and how do they work with performance space or with audience engagement and perception? To what extent does ‘in-yer-ear’ theatre draw from and embrace the specificity of its medium? In other words, how does it harness the enclosed nature of its wired listening to envision new futures for expanded stages and “liveness-plus” performance? How do the private stages of headphone listening reflect contemporary emphases on individual experience or reproduce algorithmic echo-chamber logics? In what ways do they engage with neoliberal ethics and the cult of individualism? To what extent do they position headphones as cultural references, fashion statements, or commodities within consumer culture?

Contributions might approach questions including but by no means limited to:

• Historical antecedents of headphone-mediated performance including headphone verbatim
• Intersections with current audio culture (or more specifically with podcasting, ASMR, and other headphone-based media forms)
• Possible future directions of headphone-based theatre
• Space and place in walking-based headphone theatre or audio/video tours
• Role and influence of personal audio technologies in theatre practice (from design to performance)
• Headphone-based theatre and audience experience
• Audience and/as performers in headphone performances
• Digital listening and embodied perception
• Wired spectatorship, digital bubbles, current algorithmic culture
• Inclusion and Accessibility in headphone-based performances
• Aesthetic and narrative elements of headphone-based theatre
• The politics of headphone-based theatre
• Role of headphone theatre in intimate or one-to-one performance
• Digital theatre listening as/and eco-minded practice
• Questions of liveness in headphone-mediated theatre

The issue welcomes research articles (6-10,000 words) as well as a range of other types of submissions, including, but not limited to, artistic reflections/interventions, interviews or manifestos (3-6,000 words) that align with the theme.

If interested, please submit 300-word proposals by Tuesday 15 July 2025 to the guest editors: mristani@enl.auth.gr and sotirios@ankara.edu.tr.

If successful, full articles will be due in April 2026.