'"George Home-Cook's Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves ... is a must-read for students and academics of all things dramaturgical. It calls for an attention to the invisible and offers an earnest contribution to the quest for a listening beyond dialogue in the atmosphere of the performed." (Salomé Voegelin, timeshighereducation.com, December, 2015)"This is a rigorous, innovative piece of scholarship that forgoes conventional wisdom about sound and hearing in favour of a new paradigm of theatrical attendance that demonstrates the complexity of this act, especially in productions that challenge audiences sonically. George Home-Cook articulates thought processes, bodily experiences, and ways of interpreting acoustic phenomena
that often go unnoticed or may only be partially understood. This book demonstrates how much there is to learn about, and from, self-reflexive attention to the act of listening in theatre." - Adrian Curtin, University of Exeter, UK'Theatre and Aural Attention is a landmark study of theatrical listening. It is also a bracing, nuanced account of the spectator's attentional attunements to his or her theatrical environments. Drawing upon the work of contemporary sound designers, the extensive recent scholarship in Sound Studies, and his own phenomenological examination of theatrical listening, George Home-Cook revises deeply-held assumptions about seeing versus hearing, attention versus distraction, theatrical immersion, and the nature of theatrical silence. Its methodology is rigorous and its analysis convincing. As a demonstration of what theatrical phenomenology can accomplish, Theatre and Aural Attention is nothing short of revelatory.' - Stanton B. Garner, Jr., University of Tennessee, USA'But What does it mean to attend theatre? For George Home-Cook it means to be a 'listener-spectator': theatrical attending consists of an encompassing, multi-sensory, participatory experience. Accordingly, this insightful book proposes a new paradigm of theatrical reception-perception from the perspective of attention. By reconsidering listening not as a passive and detached operation, but as an enactive process and as a specialised mode of attention, it proposes that we understand theatrical experience as a dynamic, intersensorial, inter-subjective, bodily engagement with the affordances of the theatrical environment. Home-Cook develops his argument through a vivid engagement with a number of theatrical events and examples and by paying particular attention to (theatre) sound. Theatre and Aural Attention offers a ground-breaking perspective to many fields of research, including the anthropology of sound and the senses, theatre and aurality, spectator studies, and the aesthetics of atmospheres.' - Tonino Griffero, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy'Theatre and Aural Attention is an inspiring model for how one might do performance philosophy now: producing new understandings of 'attention' and 'listening' in and through paying attention to theatre and its sounds (as well as to the process of attending itself). That is, Home-Cook does not just describe but performs attention as a dynamic, embodied and creative act and in so doing, he provides a welcome corrective to the idea of attention as 'spotlight,' but also the false opposition of attention and distraction. Clear as a bell, Home-Cook's lucid account leads the reader through the 'messy reality' of theatrical listening with a modest authority, promising to make a real contribution to the kinds of thinking we do about and as theatre audiences.' - Laura Cull, University of Surrey, UK'To listen is to attend; to attend is to stretch from where you are towards an ever-moving target; in the tension of this stretch lies the dynamic of environmental engagement. For Home-Cook, the theatre is not just a place we visit to witness a performance; it is an expe
