Sonic Art, Brain Injury, and Intimate Ethnography A Review of Reassembled, Slightly Askew Reassembled, Slightly Askew, Performance directed by Anna Newell and written and produced by playwright Shannon Sickels

It is hard to describe what Reassembled, Slightly Askew actually is. As an art form, it defies categories and definition. Since first viewing/hearing/participating in it, I have recommended it to dozens of people and each time I do so, I refer to it as something else. A sonic installation, an experiential sonic performance, sort of a play, an autobiographical art installation, or maybe a multimodal art production? I was invited to see it in 2018 with some colleagues while on sabbatical in Vancouver, where it was part of the PuSh Festival, showing at The Cultch, an annual international performing arts festival. I did not know what to expect and, so was really excited to participate in the experimental installation. We were asked to show up a little early, at which time we were directed to sit outside the venue room. There are just eight chairs for eight audience members/participants. An actor playing a nurse arrived to take our information for our admittance (as if we were being admitted to the hospital) and we were given a medical wrist band. When everyone had completed their forms, we were taken into the venue. There we saw eight hospital beds, four lined along each side of the room. We were asked to pick a bed, take our shoes off, lie down on the bed, and wait for the attending nurse (Illustration 1). The nurse sees each “patient,” covers them with a blanket, asks them to put a blindfold over their eyes, and provides them with over-ear headphones. You are directed to continue to lie on the bed until the audio ends. This sonic art installation was directed by Anna Newell and written and produced by playwright Shannon Sickels [Yee]. It is based on her experience with an acquired brain injury in 2008. The aim of the interactive audio performance is to provide the sensorial experience of being inside the artist’s head during the treatment and subsequent recovery. Her brain injury started with a sinus infection that went untreated and then progressed into her brain. Suffering from lethargy, intense headaches, visual auras, and then eventually finding her speech and balance affected, she was taken to the emergency ward, where they quickly diagnosed her with a dangerous bacterial brain infection. The infection had resulted in a massive buildup of puss that was putting pressure on her brain, so a neurosurgeon performed a craniotomy, draining the puss and removing a portion of the skull to alleviate the pressure. The most compelling component of the performance is not so much the story itself (though of course one feels for the challenging emotional and physical journey that Sickels endured), but the use of three-dimensional sonic techniques that create the conditions which allow participants to feel immersed within Sickels’ mind. Perhaps a perfect example of what Steven Feld has called “acoustic epistemology” (Rice and Feld 2020), Sickels’ sonic performance allows for knowing through soundscapes. It is the work of Paul Stapleton, sound designer and Professor of Music at the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen’s University in Belfast, that I find most intriguing. Through the use of binaural microphones, Stapleton spatializes sound. When you put the headphones on, you hear what Sickels heard as she lay in her hospital bed during a coma and her recovery: the slow drip drop of the liquid in the intravenous line a few feet away from the bed, a doctor leaning over the bedside to talk directly into Sickels’ ear, nurses talking on the other side of the room, and Sickels’ delusional voices talking about her planned trip to Mexico. You …