Sukanta Majumdar
No-country for Aurality (2024)
quadraphonic sound composition with video
ca. 10-12’

No-country for Aurality is inspired by the ways in which Badal Sircar, a playwright and theatre director from Bengal, told stories through sound. In the 1970s and 1980s, Sircar developed an influential form called Third Theatre in which the actors’ bodies and voices became the only sonic tools, as they often performed in open fields among hundreds of people without amplification or even recorded music.

Something unique happens while watching live performances of Sircar’s plays. If the spoken word is the main source of sound, our experience of listening to the scene is constantly interrupted by fragmented sentences, repeated speech, and layered words. Listening to these meaningless elements creates a deliberate disjuncture between the brutal realism of Sircar’s plays, and the immense hope that they also provide.

Using recordings of rehearsals and performances by Sircar’s 1976 theatre group Shatabdi, along with excerpts from a 1990 documentary Pakhira/The Birds made on his practice, No-country for Aurality produces a space that further augments the fragmented nature of the content it is dealing with. As we listen to sound break down and depart from the realm of meaning, we are left to negotiate with what other possibilities sound itself might contain.