Background
Butterfly Hips (BH) is the result of a collaboration between CaDance, a contemporary dance festival, and Crossing Border, a music and literature festival, both held in The Hague. In 2008, Crossing Border selected Dutch writer Bianca Boer to collaborate with Portuguese choreographer Pedro Goucha Gomes.
The work is a solo dance piece created in collaboration and performed by Genevieve Osborne (dancer), with Goucha Gomes appearing in various theatrical roles. The sound design features a spatialized nine-channel audio system, including five movable loudspeakers on stage and a quadraphonic speaker setup in the audience area.
When I was invited to compose the music for the choreography, the project and its preliminary concepts were already in progress. Goucha Gomes and Boer envisioned seven loudspeakers that could be moved on stage, allowing the text to be fragmented and acoustically spatialized.
The theme of the choreography and text was not clearly defined in advance, and to Pedro’s and my surprise, Boer submitted an explicit short story about sexual abuse. Before receiving the text, Pedro Goucha Gomes and I were already working on potential musical and choreographic ideas. At this point, Boer submitted a text written as a script, where each loudspeaker represented a specific character, with clear descriptions and a defined sequence of events. Each character portrayed different versions of the abuser, as an inner-voice remembered by the victim. Our first reaction was, to question our suitability to address this subject matter, and we also felt inhibited by the defined structure of the script like text.
Love you speaker 7
A choreographer and a writer are joining forces to combine dance and text.
The festival’s theme is ‘Territory’.
7 speakers in 7 black wooden coffins are spread across the stage. There is a big red button on one of the speakers, which is visible to the audience.
There is a female dancer on stage.
The speakers, which together form to make a man, are one half of the dialogue and the dancer is the other. (The fact that the dancer dances and doesn’t speak makes this project literally a dialogue between text and dance.)
The subject of the dance: The man (whose voice comes through the speakers) sexually abused the dancer when she was 12. Seven years later, the dancer still hears his voice in her head.
The 7 speakers represent one man, the man in the barn who abused the young girl. The speakers all talk with the same male voice.
Each speaker has its own number and its own mood (see drawing above).
Speaker 1: sounds or music.
Speaker 2: the angry man.
Speaker 3: the sad man.
Speaker 4: sounds or music.
Speaker 5: the mean man.
Speaker 6: the charming man.
Speaker 7: the ‘love you’ button
(Boer 2008, shared text file, p.1)
The challenging and sensitive topic conditioned our approach to the creative process, acting as a generative problem.
For me one of the crucial moments was when we read the text the first time and shocked wondered what are we going to do with this? And you came up with an idea that influenced the whole process. I remember you said, why don’t we focus on the environment that it creates, because the text apart of having all these very explicit elements it was also very descriptive of where it was happening. I don’t have the text anymore but I remember there were descriptions of places she was looking while being abused, there were bricks, walls, texture of the floor and other elements which gave a sensory description to the environment. So we started to focus on the quality of the space and we proposed to Bianca that we would like to use only those parts of the text that gave a sensation of the environment, which she agreed.
So, we removed the conversations and we focused on bringing the space alive really clearly. This approach was very important in my development as a choreographer, because I realized that one of the most important elements in choreography, which I also started to recognize in other choreographers, is to define what tone, what kind of environment you are creating. Once that is clear, you can do almost anything in there. You are creating the world and then you can place things. I used to think the opposite because I was a dancer, and I tended to think what are we doing rather than where are we.
(Goucha Gomes, November 2023)
As a consequence, the main focus became translating the sensations of the text through spatial, physical and sonic elements and their relationships. This led to an emphasis on actants that might be considered noise in relation to the main themes of the story. As with noise in various forms of information analysis, some data is disregarded as non-essential or unnecessary for conveying the intended message. Our approach, along with the question of our suitability to address the topic, led us to reverse these categories, perceiving and therefore treating the explicit information and main story as noise, and focusing instead on the liminal spaces of sensation, which are more commonly considered as outomes of the main narrative.
Problematizing Interdisciplinary Performance Through Noise
Although "noise" was not the term we originally used for this approach, I describe it that way in the previous sentences to clarify the method of analyzing collaborative dynamics through the lens of noise. Noise problematizes the analysis of collaborative artistic methodologies, revealing the problems and tensions from which those methods emerge.
Drawing on Bojana Cvejić’s notion of "choreographing problems", which emphasizes starting from a "problem" or problematizing question, BH and other works mentioned throughout this exposition emerge from a conceptual challenge that precedes traditional tools and practical processes of creation. Cvejić advocates for using problems as generative devices in performance-making, where the creative process is driven not by pre-existing methods or artistic conventions, but by critical inquiry into a specific issue. In the context of this investigation, the problem itself becomes the artistic source, shaping an organic process where choreographic and compositional practices emerge simultaneously, without a clear distinction between the two. The focus is on processes that evolve together, rather than discrete, isolated practices.
From an analytical perspective, Cvejic's approach is valuable for avoiding the separation and polarization of choreographic and musical practices in analysis. In this sense, the problem functions both as a generative method and as an analytical tool that inquires beyond established creative methods and traditions.
…problems in the sense proposed here offer us an insight into a coextensive parallelism between thinking and the practices of making, performing, and attending the choreographies under question. Thus, the parallelism accounts for their dual status: the problems stem from the very process of creation, as they express the thought that guides the choreographers in their decisions; and the problems are also given by the performances, as they further provoke us, who observe the work post hoc, to account for them conceptually by a philosophical method. Thus, when we confer upon the choreographic practices discussed here the capacity to engender thought, we mean that they contribute to a philosophical rethinking of the relationship between the body, movement, and time and, consequently, give rise to distinctive concepts of their own. (Cvejic 2015: 2)
This reflection from Bojana Cvejic is particularly valuable for interdisciplinary creation and analysis because it positions problems not as obstacles to be solved, but as dynamic sites where thinking and making operate simultaneously. By framing problems as coextensive with creation – emerging both in the act of making and in the subsequent act of perceiving – Cvejic dissolves the boundary between artistic practice and critical inquiry. This is crucial for interdisciplinary work, where the relationship between disciplines is not merely comparative or additive, but entangled in processes that generate their own forms of knowledge. It invites artists, theorists, and observers to treat performance, choreography, and other artistic practices as active contributors to philosophy, rather than passive subjects of analysis.
Consequently, for artistic research, Cvejic’s proposal offers a valuable methodological approach. It supports a mode of inquiry where knowledge emerges not only through reflective documentation but is immanent to the artistic process itself. This approach legitimizes artistic processes as epistemic practices, where embodied, temporal, and material engagements with form and media produce insights about the body, time, and movement.
In this sense, noise connects to Cvejic’s notion of problems by acting as both a condition and a method through which tensions and uncertainties within collaborative processes become perceptible. Rather than seeking to resolve these disruptions, approaching interdisciplinary performance through noise means attending to the frictions that shape the work’s development. Noise, like Cvejic’s problems, offers a way to trace how artistic methods and concepts emerge in practice, not as predetermined strategies, but as responses to the evolving dynamics between disciplines, bodies, and temporalities.
Building on this, noise can be understood not only as an analytical perspective on collaborative dynamics but also as an experiential condition within the work itself. It operates as a mode of disturbance that draws attention to the contingent relations between bodies, practices, and temporalities as they unfold. In this way, noise aligns with problematization by foregrounding the ongoing negotiation of meaning, form, and interaction within interdisciplinary creation. This connection becomes particularly evident when considering how noise manifests in specific events within performance, where the tensions it generates produce singular experiences that resist immediate interpretation.
Singular, noisy embodied events become the source of problematized meanings. Noisy singularities can manifest as a presence, a sensation, or an unsettling assemblage of stimuli. They may also arise from strange interactions between ongoing experiential layers, where their incongruous coexistence amplifies or decreases the sensation of noise over time.
In this context, the notion of singularity is articulated in alignment with performance studies professor André Lepecki's approach. Lepecki frames singularity as a dynamic and unfolding event that resists static signification, embodying a multiplicity of forces and relationships in motion. This framework applies to the experience of noise, not as an object or purely acoustic phenomenon, but as a set of noisy relationships, a network of interactions that disrupts clear boundaries and distinctions. Lepecki writes that "singularities are less bound to signification than to expressing the proper name of the event they precipitate" (Lepecki 2016: 7). For noise, the event is not the noise itself as a singular sound or disturbance, but the relationships it activates, marked by their fluidity and resistance to fixed structures.
Lepecki further elaborates that "singularities [gather] around themselves constellations of several other concepts, movements, gestures, choreographic procedures, corporealities, modes of performing, and regimes of attention" (7). This gathering of the disparate aligns with how the experience of noise operates. Noise brings into relation various elements (social, spatial, temporal, and perceptual) forming a noisy network of interconnections, where clarity is often deferred or fractured. This shifting of attention mirrors the complexity that noise introduces into relational dynamics.
The focus on noisy relationships also points to how noise impacts our modes of interacting with the world. Rather than being an isolated event, noise permeates interactions, drawing together disparate forces and bodies. It activates "modes of performing" and "regimes of attention" that resist the smooth functioning of established systems. Noise, in this sense, is a collective event, involving multiple entities that constantly shape and reshape their relationships to one another, much like Lepecki's understanding of the plural nature of singularities.
The notion of singularity offers a complementary and, in some ways, critical extension to the concept of choreomusical networks proposed by José Miguel Candela. He defines choreomusical networks (redes coreomusicales) as dynamic systems of relationships that emerge between dance and music through performance and perception (Candela 2022). Drawing on actor-network theory (ANT), Candela conceptualizes these networks as composed of diverse actants (dancers, musicians, sounds, gestures, spaces, audience perceptions and more) that interact and co-constitute the unfolding of the work. Rather than viewing music and dance as fixed categories or separate disciplines, the choreomusical network is understood as an open, fluctuating field where connections form, shift, and dissolve throughout the creative and performative process.
Candela identifies specific temporal modalities - such as simultaneity, anticipation, and reminiscence - through which these networks materialize in the experience of performers and audiences. He emphasizes the trans-sensory fluctuations that occur when movement and sound are perceived not in isolation but as entangled phenomena that influence each other across time and space. This approach allows for an analysis that accounts for the instability and variability inherent in collaborative practices, where the relationships between music and dance are continuously renegotiated rather than predetermined.
By framing these networks through ANT and sensory perception, Candela proposes a methodological framework for studying interdisciplinary collaborations that moves beyond simple correspondences or hierarchies between music and dance. The choreomusical network becomes a way to trace the emergent, contingent relations that define each performance, foregrounding the complexity of collaborative creation without reducing it to disciplinary binaries.
While choreomusical networks provide a useful framework for mapping the multiple relationships between choreographic and musical practices, the concept tends to retain an implicit reference to the two disciplines as distinct points of origin within collaboration. This can risk reinforcing a dual structure, even as it acknowledges the complexity of interactions between dance and music.
By incorporating singularity, the analysis shifts from tracing networks between predefined categories to attending to the specific events, interactions, and relations that emerge within the collaborative process itself. Singularity bypasses the need to position music and choreography as separate or even complementary entities, instead focusing on how practices, gestures, sounds, and movements coalesce in particular moments without requiring a stable disciplinary identification. This does not deny the presence of distinct choreographic or musical techniques, but it reframes their appearance as part of an evolving, transdisciplinary field of practice moving towards a postdisciplinary approach, where the distinctiveness of techniques is acknowledged but no longer bounded by disciplinary frameworks. In this way, singularity foregrounds the emergent qualities of collaboration, allowing for a methodological approach that remains attentive to specificity without being confined by disciplinary polarities.
The practical role of the choreographer extends the liminality of the context during the traditional entrance. It blurs the temporal and experiential boundaries of the performance, raising the question: When does the theatrical illusion truly begin? In contemporary performances, it is not uncommon for the action to already be underway as the audience enters. However, depending on the artistic content, this can still evoke a sense of separation. In such cases, the audience steps into an aesthetically charged space that contrasts with their “pre-performance” state, requiring time to gradually assimilate the encounter.
In the entrance of BH, however, this transition feels more ambiguous, or perhaps less aesthetically charged. The space appears to remain in a process of becoming, leaving the audience to question whether the performance has begun or if they are witnessing a preparatory act. This lack of clear boundaries invites reflection on the nature of performance itself and the fluidity of its start.
The intention of this process is to extend the sense of reality that exists before the performance into the performative time, challenging the habitual rituals of the performance’s beginning and affirming the factual presence of the physical space. This extension creates a friction between multiple realities, each affected and transformed by resisting actants. The encounter between these realities, and the habits inherited from traditional performance, functions as a metaphor for noise: a dynamic where introjected habit becomes an actant within the relational constellation of noise.
The deviation from habitual performance entrances can be understood not merely as a disruption, but as an expression of difference-in-itself, a generative force rather than a negation. This difference operates parasitically, not in the sense of destruction, but as Michel Serres proposes: as a noise that both infiltrates and transforms the system from which it emerges. “The parasite is a differential operator of change. It excites the state of the system: its state of equilibrium (homeostasis) […] The difference produced is rather weak, and it usually does not allow for the prediction of a transformation nor what kind of transformation. The excitation fluctuates, as does the determination.” (Serres 1982: 196). The altered entrance becomes a parasitic noise, entangled within the habitual structure of performance, exposing its underlying codes, expectations, and ritualized beginnings.
Rather than standing apart from the system, this differential act is immanent to it, a relational modulation that reveals the system’s multiplicity. In this sense, difference is not an external rupture but a productive force within, a relational dynamic that foregrounds the contingency of what might otherwise be perceived as fixed - or not perceived at all. Here, noise is not "something else" or an opposing force, but an enactment of a multiplicity of differences. "Difference must be shown differing" (Deleuze 2004: 68).
As a result, the performance space reveals its inherent plurality, exposing a convergence of multiple temporalities, spatial logics, and affective orientations activated simultaneously. It resists the illusion of a separate reality often associated with traditional performance spaces, instead insisting on the coexistence and activation of multiple worlds.
Diverse human and non-human actants (speakers, bodies, spaces, sounds, habit) form temporary and shifting networks of meaning and materiality. Each actant enters the field not as a discrete unit but as a mobile node within a dynamic, unfolding constellation. The deviation at the entrance acts as a catalyst that refracts and repositions these relations, making perceptible the noise at the core of structured performance. In this way, the relationality of difference becomes a method of revealing the layered, unstable ontology of the performative event itself.
By blurring the starting point of the performance, the role of the loudspeaker is redefined and multiplied, becoming an active agent in the affective relationships of the performance. As Goucha Gomes moves the speakers it seems clearly that he is concerned with the visual and spatial setting of the speakers. In this way the audience may visually participate in the imaginative construction of the space.
The visual installation conditions the freedom of spatial sound design. In the interdisciplinary encounter, the speaker is no longer just a functional object for sound production, but an object with multiple purposes. Each speaker becomes a spatial entity, a presence that gradually acquires a multilayered identity. As Goucha Gomes describes, the speakers become other bodies, as if they were other dancers, and their sounds generate a field of energy that removes their “inanimate” materiality. The speakers also create a map of the performative space, and as they are moved throughout the performance, they define borders; their affective role simultaneously transforms spatial relationships and their meanings. The sounds produced - intendedly or not - also share this multiplicity of purposes and meanings.
Performative Elements in BH's Timeline
The graphic below presents noisy relationships between specific roles and actants in the process of the choreography Butterfly Hips. Each row-section specifies different performative elements:
1. Choreographer Roles: Subdivided into rows that describe different characters of the choreographer. These roles were not predetermined but are identified in relation to the choreographer’s actions.
2. Dancer: Spatial Placement and Action Description: Subdivided Organized into rows representing various stage areas. Along the timeline, descriptors of movement and bodily states (e.g., running, hectic release, slowly crawling out) trace the dancer’s progression through space and performative intensity.
3. Loudspeaker Output: Subdivided into rows indicating which set of speakers is actively producing sound. Texts along the timeline describe the acoustic output.
4. Acoustic/Aural Spaces: Subdivided into rows that articulate different sonic environments, including hall sounds, vibrating objects, and structures. These go beyond output to describe the broader aural architecture shaping the performance experience.
The analysis is a tracing of how each actant functions as a layer through time, focusing on interactions with other layers. Noise is used as an analytical tool to identify the emergence of triggers and turning points activated in a relational, network-like manner. The broken-line frames do not indicate scenes. They indicate different constellations of noise, where layers come into contact - through friction, interruption, or displacement. The frames are not static points in time but mark an in-motion process of transformation. They do not define fixed meanings but shifting assemblages that evolve into different relationships, not all of which are noisy in nature. A layer must develop a certain experiential stability for noise to occur. This temporary stabilization defines the temporal process of transformation.
Noise emerges in these points not merely as a measure of sound, but as a quality of relation, where sound is always intertwined with physical, spatial and semantic relationships. When these relationships become noise, they signal a shift in how attention, roles, or positions are distributed.
Beneath the graphic, separate text columns will delve into how noise arises from and shapes the shifting relationships within each frame, tracing moments of friction, encounter, interruption, and transformation - and revealing the forms of knowledge produced through this analytical lens.
“Filtering out noise of course is a cultural conceit and has been used literally to silence voices, sounds, and noises that the idealized listener does not want to hear, or that the producer doesn’t want to hear them”. (Dyson 2009: 130)
There is no amplified music nor intentionally produced sound in the opening four minutes of BH. As mentioned in the column to the left, the beginning is intended to create an ambiguous sensation of when the performance actually begins. The sounds of the entrance and the hall - with all its hums and buzzes from the audience, lighting, ventilation, and surrounding environment - become a continuation of experiential reality. That ambiguity is established, and its persistence depends on the unaltered conditions of the sonic environment.
How can this ambiguity remain once music starts?
As described in Frame 1, music of low tones with overtone swells begins to emerge from the PA. The slow, layered music creates a clear spatial and aesthetic shift. The digitally processed acousmatic material is crisp and traditionally well-produced. Occasionally, some lower frequencies caused objects in the hall to resonate, producing unintentional sounds. Initially, these were not produced deliberately, but once we recognized this happening in the hall, we enhanced the frequencies that produced those resonances - thus allowing the hall to insist on its physical presence.
The theater technicians questioned whether the sound was correct, whether we needed to EQ it to remove those noises. This reflects a common perception shaped by traditional theater sound design: a sense of what is appropriate or inappropriate. As mentioned in the opening quote of this column, such a reaction is the result of a cultural conceit, rooted in a tradition of rights and wrongs. In BH, the hall “noises” are part of a multilayered construct that activates diverse affective relationships, highlighting noise as the creative potential of difference: difference as difference in itself, but also as difference from the simplified duality that defines noise merely as the opposite of good or acceptable sound.
In BH and in From Far to Deep (2014) I thought of the theater as a skin, the skin of the theater, like a living womb, the body of the dancers not only occupies the inner space, but as it moves it occupies and changes the empty spaces. In this way we not only focus on the body as moving but as the space also moving and transforming simultaneously. I also think of the body that touches the floor and other physical surfaces as a way of extending oneself into space. This is also related to the vibrating sounds, the low frequencies, and how the dancer feels the vibration, is the floor and the building vibrating simultaneously, the dancer’s body becomes the space, not only as a sense of the stimuli perceived internally, but as those extensions extending through space, the sensory identity is not only from the dancer but the dancer connected to the space, to the vibrations that arrive to the audience.
(Goucha Gomes, December 2023)
The noisy relationship between the PA music and the hall’s sounds allows the open space of the hall to remain present. The resonance of the hall asserts its permanence. This noisy interaction does not turn the sounds themselves into "noise"; instead, the contrasting nature of each sonic layer multiplies the experiential realities.
The insisting choreographer's role functions as a constant thread. His resistance to transformation generates friction; rather than achieving continuity, it amplifies the multiplicity of the noisy network at play. In this action, the choreographer is always watching the hanging bone hips - this remains a continuous presence that interacts with and affects all transforming choreographic actions and sonic/spatial realities.
As Goucha Gomes describes, the dancer’s identity is blurred, belonging as part of a spatial and experiential multiplicity. The noisy constellation created by the musical sound, the vibrations of the hall, the spatial relationship with the loudspeakers on stage, and the choreographer’s presence allow the dancer to access sensations and physical movements from multiple perspectives.
From Far to Deep
That thing about certain sounds that we can’t really consciously hear, but because the objects around us resonate, we can somehow locate them in space and make these connections. I was searching for something very similar within the body.
If you have a body in front of you that is not moving - because a lot of the thingsin From Far to Deep were very static - in other choreographies where you see people clearly moving and dancing, you have a direct impulse to perhaps feel something. But the interesting thing is when people are not moving - how can you feel something inside?
This was a whole experience - like, “but they are not doing anything.” They are not moving but I am feeling so much - just like those low frequency sounds. I can locate it, not just in space, but in myself.
(Goucha Gomes, December 2023)
For the first few minutes, you knew there was music, but it was almost inaudible as sound. It was something playing at so low a frequency that you first really became aware of it because it was rattling every loose metal fitting in the small, narrow, ascetic room where the piece plays.
(Haydon, review of Amongst Millions 2014)
These ideas were further developed in Amongst Millions (2013) and especially in From Far to Deep (2014), where the hall was intentionally used as a musical instrument. The process began by playing low frequencies through the speakers and listening for how different parts of the architecture responded. Columns, walls, metal structures, and the floor each reacted differently, producing hums, rattles, or vibrations. These noises were not recorded as material to be used later, but classified according to the frequencies, speakers, and sound intensities that would activate them. This allowed us to build a sonic map of the hall, where each sound emerged from a specific spatial and acoustic condition.
The composition of the electronic track was then designed to reproduce this map. Rather than composing a piece of music to fill the hall, the track was composed to excite the hall’s own resonances, using the speakers as instruments that played the building itself. The desired noises of the architecture shaped the structure of the electronic sound.
The dancers moved within this vibrating field, where the hall’s resonances, especially the higher frequencies, helped define spatial relationships - audible cues that made the space perceivable as distances and directions. At the same time, the low frequencies propagated through the floor and surfaces, entering the dancers’ bodies as physical vibrations. This created a state of multiplicity, where perception was both internal and external, not split but blurred between sensing space and feeling embodied sound. The dancers navigated these overlapping experiences as part of their physical tasks, extending the choreography beyond visible movement into the shared sonic space between bodies, architecture, and sound.
An "actant" is, in semiotic terms, a class of actors that share a characteristic quality (Bal 1990: 34), which can be quite broad and is grouped together for the fulfillment of a single function (Beristáin 1995: 18). Latour adopts this term to avoid embodying the generator of the action (through their performance) in a single individual (Latour 2008: 84). Thus, the term allows for the inclusion of both possible human figurations (for example, a dancer) and non-human ones (for example, a group of loudspeakers).
This emphasis opens up the debate about the extent to which an actant can be dehumanized, considering that it has ultimately been determined by humans.
For the purposes of the present research, we have considered "non-human" as those elements that extend a determination of human characteristics. For example, a loudspeaker, as an extension of the creative act determined by the composer.
(Candela 2022: 80-81, my translation)
The stage speakers start with tone swells (mirror swells in diagram) that emerge from niente, making it difficult to pinpoint their location until they peak. The peaks were designed to sound precarious, as if the speakers were malfunctioning. Given the poor quality of the speakers, the loud sections sounded saturated and distorted. As the speakers appear defective, or simply of bad quality, they expose themselves as objects, shifting the listener's focus to their physical presence rather than their virtual function. This complements the visual role assigned to them at the opening of the work and reaffirms their spatializing relationship with the dancer, contributing to a complex acoustic design.
The fade-in of the sound initially appears as acousmatic material from a digital virtual space. As the sound grows, it begins to resonate with the physical space, inhabiting the plurality of its resonance. The musical timespace permeates the environment, and the listeners experience a space mediated by an acoustic/aesthetic force. When the crescendo peaks, the speakers sound as if they might break - the VU meters briefly surpass their limit, producing a short, distorted pop. The loudspeaker becomes the wooden box, the tool that might fail, and with that possibility, the performance is momentarily at risk. The critical attention towards the apparatus interferes with the immersiveness of the previous layers, as a new space overlaps the aesthetic environment.
How long can this mode of presence, this exposed materiality, be sustained? There is a threshold between failure and aesthetic choice, but it is not fixed. As friction persists, the presence of failure remains unstable, never fully settling. Its permanence risks normalising the presence of noise, turning it into just another part of the musical material. As the sound unfolds and regularities emerge, the critical awareness of noise may start to fade, absorbed into the continuity of the performance. What remains is a transformed sonic environment, where noise blurs and perception becomes layered, distributed across multiple planes.
Still, the potential of noise lies in its capacity to expose difference and multiplicity, even temporarily. It reveals prior orders, makes audible what was previously unnoticed, and reassembles the space from a shifted perspective. The constellation of factors that produce a noisy experience enhances awareness of the systems it emerges from. Noise is not a stable category but a condition that insists intermittently, contingent on its relations and the listener's shifting attention.
The fetishization of failure in electronic and noise music has objectified sonic material itself, disregarding what noise does. Glitches, pops, extended techniques, and other sounds beyond traditional practices are often used like any other musical material. Even in contexts of randomness and uncertainty, these sounds may still be treated as the primary musical object. The intentional failure of the speakers in BH did not arise from a fetishized aesthetic, but from the intention to provoke a relational sensation that is not limited to the musical. Goucha Gomes describes the speakers as becoming other beings on stage, as failure reveals their material nature, removing the perceived virtual soundscape and rendering the speaker as an object. The failure increases critical awareness of the apparatus. The speakers become other bodies with the dancer, while the dancer is removed from the aesthetic distance of the stage, reducing the sense of performative separation and suspending the fictional gap between performer and audience. The noise disrupts the acoustic spaces already present and redefines how the dancer relates to her space, while the audience shares that coming closer through redefining the meaning of the speakers and the dancer’s presence.
Therefore, noise in this interdisciplinary context is not necessarily the perceived failure of the speaker, but the sensation that emerges from the tension between the speaker’s failure and the aesthetic presence of the dancer. Noise is the sensation of the relation itself, whether its poles are objectifiable or not. The acoustic noise fails to be noise, as it exists simultaneously as sound with a multiplicity of meanings and as an element of the multiple factors that shape the experience. As an audience member, the dancer’s aesthetic body turns into that body with me in this theatre, the body beside the object. For the dancer, the musical machine becomes the wooden box with her. Suddenly everything becomes objective proximity: the dance floor, the individuals on stage and in the audience, the doors, lights, walls, and any other object we are able to acknowledge. This event is a rhizomatic shift that multiplies and reshapes the relations between the elements that create the artistic environment.
This reshaping of relations within the performance can be further understood through Lepecki’s notion of singularities, conceived as modes of collective individuation that avoid stabilization into fixed identities, resisting the reproduction of disciplinary norms (Lepecki 2016: 6).It also resonates with Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of being singular plural, where existence is always already shared, and any being is constituted as a being-with (Nancy 2000). There is no singularity without plurality; existence is co-existence. In this sense, the intentional failure of the speakers in BH, and the relational sensations it generates, articulate a space where sound, movement, and object shift beyond their assigned functions, suspending the separation between fields.
Returning to Candela, his proposal of choreomusical networks becomes even more relevant when viewed from this perspective. The speakers appear not just as sound sources but as actants that expose their materiality, interrupting the fictional distance that separates performer, apparatus, and audience. Noise is no longer a musical resource but a condition that reorganizes presences and relations on stage.
Seen from the perspective of singularities, this framework precedes the analysis itself: it does not assume music and dance as separate domains, but as practices already entangled. The notion of the actant within choreomusical networks responds precisely to this need to trace relations without reducing them to fixed categories, making audible and visible the fluctuating agencies that constitute each performance.
Living Objects / coexistence of human and non-human actants
This entanglement of presences finds a parallel when we place side by side an image from Butterfly Hips - the dancer encircled by three loudspeakers -and Goran Djurovic’s painting Three in a Circle (2013), where three human figures gather around a chair. Both configurations stage a circular relation of attention, yet invert the distribution of subject and object. In Butterfly Hips, the non-human actants - the loudspeakers - are positioned as if they address or scrutinize the dancer’s body, while in Djurovic’s painting, it is the human figures who orient their gaze towards the chair, charging it with a gravitational presence that exceeds its utilitarian function.
This resonance between the two images reveals a shared condition: the oscillation of agency and the instability of categorical boundaries between human and object. The chair in Three in a Circle appears more than an object; it becomes a silent participant, a materialized absence. In Butterfly Hips, the loudspeakers perform a similar inversion, their material failure and sonic emissions positioning them not merely as instruments but as entities capable of directing presence, of reconfiguring the dancer’s space and the audience's perception.
The multiplicity of noisy relationships within the performance blurs distinctions further. What emerges is not simply an interaction between humans and objects, but a coexistence where each actant - whether dancer, loudspeaker, chair, or even the space between them - take part in the redistribution of attention, presence, and agency. In these configurations, presence is less a fixed attribute than a dynamic relational state.
These relational assemblages further reflect a mode of being-with. The human and non-human are not opposed categories but nodes in a shifting network of affects and agencies. Noise, in this context, is not just acoustic but ontological, it is the interference that makes these relations audible and visible, revealing the fragile and temporary nature of presence.
Therefore, these images and performances enact a choreography of co-existence where objects become bodies and bodies become objects, not through the elimination of difference but through the continuous redistribution of their roles and functions. What is performed is not merely a dance or a sonic piece, but a living constellation of presences, always shifting and carrying the potential for new configurations with each encounter.
The "fuzz fast beat" sound mentioned in Frame 3 is a moment where new musical material is introduced: a recording of percussively repeated notes on glass fishbowls begins to emerge from the stage speakers, each speaker playing its own musical layer. The recording was processed with a fuzz sound that I designed to resemble a speaker with a broken tweeter and woofer, intended to continue the malfunction introduced in Frame 2. The goal was to create the illusion, or at least the doubt, that the distortion coming from the speakers might not be intentional. The intended effect was about accepting the failure of the speaker, to give in to the idea that the performance would continue with broken speakers, rather than proposing the distortion as an intentional aesthetic or transgressive element.
The sound of percussed glass remains recognizable, retaining the potential of its clean tone. The glass and fuzz sounds do not merge into a homogeneous sonic thread. The distortion and the glass remain distinct, and this separation activates a friction that might be perceived as an unintentional effect.
As we, as listeners, have become familiar with various forms of distortion across different musical styles, it is difficult to assume that the audience would actually perceive failure. Nevertheless, the intention in the creative process was, again, to maintain the multiplicity of roles of the speakers, allowing the dancer to relate to them simultaneously as objects (dancers in space), as emitters of music, and as a living spatial architecture.
In this way, noise is not approached as a subversive action or a transgressive effect, but as a generative force that emerges from within the network of actants in space. At this point, noise is understood as insistence - one that resists immersion as a form of escape into a separate performative world, and instead intensifies the presence of all the layers of reality participating in the shared performative space.
Why failure, though? Certainly not to stand in awe before the 'ineffable object of noise', or to claim noise fails because it is fundamentally misguided. It is not a bad failure – noise fails to be noise, even as, hopefully, it fails in being music, and this is its condition – not exactly what it sets out to do, but how it could function, if it did or does. This double failure – not being noise, not being music – is the only fleeting success noise can have. This is not negative, except at the level of noise being a negativity – i.e., noise does not positively inhere in a specific piece or style of music, it occurs in a relation. (Hegarty 2006: 2)
Hegarty’s quote proposes a way of understanding noise not as a defined category, but as something that operates through a kind of structural failure: failing to be fully noise, and also failing to be fully music. This failure is not framed as a mistake, but as a condition that allows noise to exist in a space of uncertainty. It’s not about claiming a position, but about remaining in tension.
This perspective helps clarify the approach taken in the distorted glass recordings. The fuzz effect was not meant to fully transform the sound or to present distortion as an expressive layer. Instead, the separation between the clean percussive attack and the unstable fuzz was intended to produce a slight friction in how the sound is perceived, something that exposes the difference between materials through sensation, without resolving it. This creates a space where the sound could be read as an error or a malfunction, but without being confirmed. The distortion is not proposed as a statement, but as a condition that complicates the status of the speakers and the sound they emit. Hegarty’s idea of noise occurring in a relation, rather than as a property of a sound, points to this kind of ambiguity, where the sound does not settle, and where that unsettled relation becomes its mode of presence.
The presence of the dancer’s body further emphasizes the plurality of roles that the speakers already inhabit. Through her movements and interactions, the human body complicates the identity of these objects, reinforcing their status not just as emitters of sound or scenic elements, but as entities that acquire new meanings in relation. At the same time, the dancer’s body itself begins to blur its traditional function within performance. In navigating between the speakers, she becomes less a representative figure and more an in-between presence - neither fully subject nor object, neither entirely performer nor merely body among other bodies.
Her trajectory across the stage traces these shifting proximities, moving closer to one speaker and then another, engaging with their discrete sonic outputs and spatial weight. The dance emerges not as a choreographic response to music, but as a negotiation within a field of forces where sound, object, and movement co-constitute the space. As she moves, the distinction between the virtual soundscape and the physical materiality of the loudspeakers becomes unstable, and the dancer is folded into that same ambiguity. In this entangled space, the roles of sound source, object, and body are not fixed but distributed, and the performance sustains itself in this unresolved interplay.
In Frame 4, the sonic landscape becomes denser as multiple layers start to overlap in a fragmented way. The sound materials remain distinct, but they coexist at the same time, creating a sense of simultaneity between the different actants on stage. At this point, the five speakers start to emit whispered words and short phrases, which appear suddenly and seem to move randomly from one speaker to another. This creates a spatial pattern, although the whispers are not choreographed in a precise path. The words are drawn from Bianca Boer’s text, consisting of fragments that describe spaces, gestures, and movements, but never provide a complete or continuous narrative.
The whispers introduce a different type of material into the sound field. Until this point, most of the sonic elements could be perceived as abstract or musical. The whispered words bring language in, which inevitably introduces the question of meaning, even if the fragments are incomplete. However, the whispers do not articulate meaning fully, they suggest something personal or secretive, but without clarifying who is being addressed or what is being said in full.
The whispers complicate the space created by the other sound layers. They disturb the more abstract or sensory experience of the performance by inserting the potential for language to communicate something. At the same time, the way the whispers are presented (quiet, partial, and spatially dispersed) prevents them from becoming explicit messages. There is a friction between the presence of language and the desire to withhold it.
This friction contributes to the multiple roles that the speakers take on in the performance. They are still part of the space as objects and emitters of sound, but now they also act as ambiguous narrators, as if they were conveying a message that is not meant to be fully heard. The performance does not offer clarity, but instead introduces meaning as a problem, something that interferes with the experience without resolving it.
In this sense, the whispers behave similarly to noise in the way they resist full integration. They introduce complexity without offering a path to immersion or understanding. They activate curiosity, or perhaps frustration, because they suggest that something is being communicated, but also make it impossible to fully grasp what that is.
By remaining in this in-between state, the whispers intensify the multiplicity of the performative space. They do not aim to reveal, but to add layers - keeping the audience attentive to what might be said, while simultaneously reminding them that not everything will be made available.
The whispered words that emerge in the choreography occupy an ambiguous position between language and noise. Their form suggests representation – through the recognisable structure of speech and syntax – yet their fragmentation, low volume, and spatial dispersal prevent them from fully functioning as conveyors of meaning. Instead, the whispers remain incomplete, partial, and deliberately elusive. This ambiguity opens a reflection on whether these whispered elements are intended to represent, or whether they instead operate in a different register, closer to what Cécile Malaspina describes as “normative uncertainty” (Malaspina 2018). In her Epistemology of Noise, Malaspina critiques models that view noise as merely a failed or degraded signal. She argues that noise is not external to information or representation but is constitutive of the conditions under which representation is even possible. As she puts it, “knowledge is not the reduction of uncertainty because it is constituted by it” (Malaspina, 2018: xii). Noise, in this sense, “is a normative rather than a natural category, which is to say that it is made not given” (xi). It exposes the instability of systems of meaning by foregrounding their reliance on thresholds, conventions, and interpretative decisions, the very judgements that decide what counts as noise or information.
In this sense, the whispers in the choreography do not simply fail to represent, they perform the limits of representation itself. They remain on the threshold between signal and noise, meaning and opacity, creating a space where the audience is compelled to listen, but without the satisfaction of complete comprehension. This aligns with Malaspina’s view that the distinction between information and noise is not fixed but “a problem of ground or foundation of knowledge” (26). The whispers, then, are not vessels for hidden messages, but material instances of this indeterminacy, they mark the conditions of listening where meaning is both approached and deferred. The spatial movement of the whispered words further complicates this distinction, introducing an “inconceivable freedom of choice” (xii, 198) that noise embodies, meaning that cannot be pinned down, only encountered for a moment.
Marie Thompson’s work further helps frame this dynamic. In Beyond Unwanted Sound, Thompson critiques the tendency to frame noise solely as unwanted sound, a view she associates with what she calls “aesthetic moralism.” She writes, “The ‘beyond’ of Beyond Unwanted Sound connotes a getting past, a moving on from, but it is also a nod to the Nietzschean ‘beyond’ of ‘beyond Good and Evil’. It points to an aspiration to move beyond ‘aesthetic moralism’ – that is, the tethering of noise to ‘unwantedness’ and ‘badness’” (Thompson 2017: 3). She argues that conventional definitions of noise often rely on binary divisions - such as wanted/unwanted, meaningful/meaningless - which “are asymmetrical and hierarchical, with one side subordinate to the other. The signal is more valuable than the noise that stands against it, wanted sound is prioritized over unwanted sound and meaning is placed above non-meaning” (44).
Instead of accepting these hierarchies, Thompson proposes an approach that shifts focus toward the affective and relational capacities of noise. She introduces “a materialist, relational and affective understanding of noise,” emphasizing that “what characterizes noise, I argue, is not negativity but affectivity” (42). This reframes noise not as the opposite of meaning, but as an active and productive force within auditory experience.
Crucially, Thompson aligns this perspective with what she calls an “a-signifying register.” She explains that an affective approach deals with “the modulations of intensity, sensation and feeling that occur at the level of matter and constitute an encounter, happening or event” (9). This perspective moves beyond viewing noise as merely the absence of meaning, instead framing it as a dynamic presence that operates beyond the constraints of language and symbolic representation.
Applied to the choreography, this perspective suggests that the whispered fragments do not function as signs waiting to be decoded. Instead, they act as affective interventions that reconfigure the spatial and perceptual conditions of the performance. Their presence alters the audience's mode of listening by introducing friction into the otherwise abstract sound environment - a friction that sustains a dynamic of tension and ambiguity rather than resolving into clear statements or messages.
By situating the whispered fragments within these frameworks, it becomes clear that their function is not to represent a hidden narrative or secret meaning. Instead, they mobilize the problem of representation itself, making the audience aware of the processes and limitations of listening, interpretation, and sense-making. The whispers act less as communicative speech and more as a form of noise in both Malaspina’s sense of “normative uncertainty” and Thompson’s affective approach, which foregrounds the material and sensory intensities that shape encounters beyond symbolic interpretation. They operate as productive disturbances, complicating the experience of the performance space.
Malaspina and Thompson, while working from different perspectives, both offer useful tools for thinking about noise in the choreography. Malaspina’s focus on noise as epistemic uncertainty helps to frame the whispered fragments as elements that test the boundaries of representation, exposing the fragile structures on which meaning relies.
Thompson, in contrast, emphasizes the affective and relational dimensions of noise, highlighting how the whispers function, not as messages awaiting interpretation, but as forces that modulate perception, space, and attention. This shifts the focus from what the whispers might mean to how they intervene in the audience’s sensory field.
Together, these perspectives allow for an analysis that accounts for both the instability of meaning and the dynamics of perception. They complement each other in offering a layered understanding of how noise (in this case, the whispered voice) problematizes the experience of the performance space.
“…they are broken down to such small units that is impossible to say what they were before they got splintered. I mean they are exactly the opposite of a clear object that has a clear function and utility…” ( Ingvartsen, quoted in Lepecki 2016: 71).
In this section of the choreography, the dancer's body is caught between the encircling loudspeakers, each producing whispered words that fragment and layer over time. As the dancer begins to crawl, attempting to exit this enclosure, the whispered voices accumulate into a sonic density where individual words dissolve into an unintelligible, buzzing texture. The process resembles a sonic pixelation: where speech, like an image, loses its resolution and collapses into grains of sound. Language becomes abstracted, stripped of its functionality, yet vestiges of its communicative potential linger within the texture.
Here, the body does not merely accompany sound; it becomes implicated in the process of pixelation. Bojana Cvejić’s reading of contemporary choreography, particularly the "rupture of the body-movement bind" (Cvejić, 2015: 73), is helpful to understand this dynamic. The dancer's movement is no longer expressive in a narrative sense but operates within a logic of sensation. Her crawling is both a corporeal response to the overwhelming accumulation of sound and a continuation of the body as a site of problematization, caught between figuration and abstraction. The body, while remaining a possible vessel of meaning, is equally drawn into the affective field of sound - becoming, in Cvejic’s terms, a “part-body,” a body that is partial, distributed, and unmoored from representational stability (81).
Lepecki frames such choreographic gestures as critical acts that challenge the “political ontology of movement” (Lepecki 2006: 1) – the modern imperative that bodies must remain in continuous motion, producing legible expressions and coherent meanings. Instead, the choreography here stages a slowing down of legibility, both sonically and corporeally. The dancer’s partial, resistant movement amidst a dense vocal field interrupts the expectation of clarity – whether of language, image, or gesture. As Lepecki writes, following Homi Bhabha, this interruption introduces a “lag to slow down the linear, progressive time of modernity to reveal its ‘gesture,’ its tempi, ‘the pauses and stresses of the whole performance’” (16). The choreography does not simply withdraw from meaning; it exposes and reconfigures the temporal and expressive demands placed on bodies, opening instead a space where gestures, sounds, and meanings remain suspended and unresolved.
The pixelated sound texture and the dancer’s navigation through it generate a friction between presence and disappearance. The voice, even when stripped of its signifying power, maintains an indexical trace of the human. Similarly, the dancer’s body, while abstracted into sensation, remains the tangible site where this negotiation between sense and non-sense is enacted. The human form does not disappear; rather, it flickers between being a bearer of meaning and a surface of intensities.
This duality resonates with Cvejić's notion of "choreographing problems" - a practice that does not seek resolution but rather exposes and sustains the tension between knowing and sensing. The dancer, entwined with the sonic texture, does not illustrate or explain but persists in a space where the body and sound co-produce an experience of perceptual uncertainty. The choreography does not dissolve meaning entirely but keeps it in suspension, making both the voice and the body sites of an incomplete, unresolved address.
Lepecki’s conception of singularity - which he defines not as the unique or individual, but as “irreducible, and therefore, a bearer of strangeness” (Lepecki 2016: 6), helps frame the dancer’s embodied and sonic pixelation. The disjointed crawling, combined with the accumulation of whispered voices, produces not a communicable form but a situation shaped by unpredictability and deviation. Drawing on Didi-Huberman, Lepecki describes these moments as producing “multiplicity,” “complexity,” and “bifurcations” - conditions in which all dimensions of the real are implicated (6).
Multiplicity emerges from the assemblage of bodies, objects, and spatial conditions. The loudspeakers encircling the dancer are not neutral emitters of sound; they maintain an active presence, shaped by their accumulated roles across the performance: as bodies, emitters, and spatial markers. The layering of whispered voices contributes to a dense sonic field, yet what forms is not a conversation between discrete elements, but a build-up of noise understood as the manifestation of plurality. Noise is not an object or a distinct layer within the performance, it is the perceptual expression of overlapping gestures, sounds, and spatial relations that remain in flux; "its presence relies on an assemblage of perceivers, generators, borders, vibrations, ideas, geographies, spaces and materials" (Thompson 2012: 209).
This move towards multiplicity also sustains a resistance to the normative expectations of movement and expression that Lepecki critiques. The whispers do not mask meaning; they diffuse it, forming a texture that accumulates without clarifying. The dancer’s movement through this sonic environment does not seek to stabilize meaning but carries the complexity of the situation. In connection with Malaspina’s and Thompson’s perspectives, noise here marks a condition where meaning remains contingent and perception is shaped by the ongoing negotiation between sound, movement, and space.
References
Boer, Bianca. Love You Speaker 7. Unpublished script, Microsoft Word document shared with the author, 2008.
Candela, J. M. ‘Las redes coreomusicales: Una propuesta metodológica para el estudio de las relaciones entre música y danza.’ Revista Musical Chilena 76, no. 237 (2022): 79–105.
Cvejić, Bojana. Choreographing Problems: Expressive Concepts in European Contemporary Dance and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. London: Continuum, 1994.
Dyson, Frances. Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
Goucha Gomes, Pedro. Interview by Miguelangel Clerc Parada. November 11, 2023. Unpublished.
Goucha Gomes, Pedro. Interview by Miguelangel Clerc Parada. December 13, 2023. Unpublished.
Goucha Gomes, Pedro. ‘Bailado Contemporâneo.’ Teatro Micaelense. https://www.teatromicaelense.pt/en/agenda/2009-11-14/bailado-contemporaneo/. Last accessed 21 June 2025.
Haydon, Andrew. ‘Amongst Millions – Paradise in the Vault.’ Postcards from the Gods. Blog post. Posted 6 August 2014. https://postcardsgods.blogspot.com/2014/08/. Last accessed 30 June 2025.
Hegarty, Paul. ‘Noise Music.’ The Semiotic Review of Books 16, no. 1–2 (2006): 1–5.
Lepecki, André. Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
Lepecki, André. Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 2016.
Malaspina, Cecile. An Epistemology of Noise: From Information Entropy to Normative Uncertainty. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Serres, Michel. The Parasite. Translated by Lawrence R. Schehr. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
Thompson, Marie. Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.
Thompson, Marie. ‘Music for Cyborgs: The Affect and Ethics of Noise Music.’ In Reverberations: The Philosophy, Politics and Aesthetics of Noise, edited by Michael Goddard, Benjamin Halligan, and Paul Hegarty, 214–225. London and New York: Continuum, 2012.
Performances
Butterfly Hips (2008)
Choreographer: Pedro Goucha Gomes
Writer: Bianca Boer
Composer: Miguelangel Clerc Parada
Dancer: Genevieve Osborne
Production: Korzo Theater / NL
Amongst Millions (2013)
Choreographer and performer: Pedro Goucha Gomes
Composer: Miguelangel Clerc Parada
Production: Independent
From Far to Deep (2014)
Choreographer: Pedro Goucha Gomes
Composer: Miguelangel Clerc Parada
Dancers: Chiaki Horita, Micol Mantini, Chiara Mezzadri, Arika Yamada
Production: Göteborgsoperans Danskompani / SE