The history of theatre, from ancient Greek amphitheatres to modern theatrical forms, has shown that ‘watching’ in theatre happens through sound, because it is the voices that make the spectacle visible. Theatre relies on the effective transmission of sound waves to reach the audience’s imaginative ear, whether through the performer’s voice and movement, sound design, or even the noise of the audience piercing the silence.
In philosophy, on the other hand, sight and hearing are often contrasted: the eye makes sense of the world, while the ear perceives it in a limited way. “Schema” explores the interaction between visual and auditory information, their potential collision and mutual enrichment. One of the points of departure for “Schema” is the technical and poetic description of historical artworks, as well as performative and affective interpretations. It is a musicality that unfolds from the description of images.

“Schema” explores the phenomenology of hearing and listening in theatre. “Sound is to be understood as inherently disturbing, and theatre is to be understood not as an uninterrupted programme of reception, but as a constant oscillation between ‘engagement and disturbance’” (Ross Brown). It can be argued that audiences hear everything but listen selectively, and that these selections are the result of the physical peculiarities of audience members’ hearing, dramaturgical setting, subjective preferences, and cultural choices. Involvement and distraction are not limited to hearing, but extend to general fluctuations in attention and the bodily activity that accompanies them – a physical oscillation which in turn forms a new background noise: audience noise. This cyclical process feeds back to the collective ‘scene analysis’.

“Schema” is a dialectical interplay between the observable, the audible and the intelligible. However, this dialectic is not an end in itself – it paves the way to pure experience. It sharpens the viewer’s impulsive and innate empirical perception, inviting them to trust it. The world is not, and cannot be, finitely describable. What matters is what is chosen to be described – and how.