The Theatre of Victoria Szpunberg as a Poetics of Listening

Victoria Szpunberg is increasingly recognised as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Catalan theatre. Even though her work reflects many of the features associated by Carles Batlle (2020) with contemporary experimental dramatic writing, it stands out because of the audacity of her commitment to range across linguistic, aesthetic, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries. While she does not overtly present her writing as feminist, her plays return persistently to the vulnerability and precarity of women especially in the context of heteropatriarchal neo-liberal capitalism. They counter necropolitics with an appeal to a politics of the commons and a relational ethics of care. Attending to her output across the entirety of her career as a theatre practitioner, this article sets out to explore the development and impact of a poetics of listening in her work as a distinguishing feature of her practice, placing it in dialogue with scholarship on sound art, communication studies and philosophy that calls for greater academic attention to the phenomenon of listening. The article draws in particular on Lisbeth Lipari’s notions of interlistening, listening otherwise and attunement, as key steps towards formulating alternative politics and ethics of care