Listening with My Eyes Wide Open: Researching Music Theater in Artistic Research Environments

In Pia Palme’s “Mattetoline” (2019) the composer-performer brings on stage reverberations of a deserted island and its impact on her perception, which is acted out through different media and with two further musician-performers.
In my paper to the panel, I will reflect on my own attempts to approach this production as an example of contemporary experimental music theatre through the employment of listening, observations, writing and taking photographs as practices of my research as a theatre scholar. While I will focus on movement as a means of mediating between different modes of perception, I will also reflect on inevitable lacunae of the research process and impossibilities of capturing what is going on.