Bio

GREGORY WHITEHEAD has created more than one hundred radio plays, essays and acoustic adventures for the BBC, Radio France, Australia’s ABC, NPR and other broadcasters. Often interweaving documentary and fictive materials into playfully unresolved narratives, Whitehead’s aesthetic is distinguished by a deep philosophical commitment to radio as a medium for poetic navigation and free association. In his voice and text-sound works, he has often explored the tension between a continuous pulse and the eruption of sudden discontinuities, as well as linguistic entropy and decay.

CIRCA 1985 : THE WORLD IS STILL ANALOG

At a recent panel celebrating the 100th issue of the performing arts journal PAJ, Whitehead said, “I embraced analog broadcast radio as my ideal creative home because the airwaves seemed to vibrate with the same qualities I sought to capture in my own plays, and in my own thinking: indeterminacy, fragility of signal, random access, tension between public and private, ambiguous borders, modulating rhythms, complex polyphony, and a pulse rate set by a wild heart.”

His plays have won numerous awards, including a Prix Italia for Pressures of the Unspeakable, a Prix Futura for Shake, Rattle, Roll and a Sony Gold Academy Award for The Loneliest Road, which was described by the jury as “a master class in sound”.  His 2005 BBC production of Normi Noel’s play No Background Music, featuring Sigourney Weaver, also received a Sony Gold Academy Award.

GW AND LEO BRAUN

Whitehead is a frequent performer in literary cabarets and mixed media theatre events, as well as a guest speaker at colleges, annual conferences such as Radio Without Boundaries, and at audio festivals throughout the US and Europe, often mixing texts and audio excerpts into a montage of entangled voices and ideas.

He began experimenting with audiotape while an undergraduate at Haverford College, bouncing tracks between two Superscope cassette machines, often in an improvisation context, mixing voices and other instruments, including his own saxophones. At Haverford, he was strongly influenced by seminars with Jürgen Habermas on “communicative competence”; courses with Richard Bernstein on praxis and rationality; and literature seminars with Marcel Gutwirth, who saved him from a certain theo-radical abyss. Frequent jazz forays into Philadelphia and NYC also had a transformative influence: Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, Alice Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Pharaoh Sanders, Gary Bartz, Gil Scott-Heron and many others.

He later received an MA in Media Studies at the New School for Social Research, which at the time had a strong focus on creative radio, with both Lou Giansante and Jay Allison members of the faculty. His thesis explored the work of Walter Ong regarding electronic aurality and phenomenological presence. During these years, Whitehead became intensely interested in the films and philosophies of Alexander Kluge and Chris Marker, regarding the fluid relationship between documentary evidence and imaginary counterpoint. He also became immersed in experimental voice performance and text-sound poetry through dialogue with Charles Amirkhanian and others.

In 1982-83, Whitehead collaborated extensively with Susan Stone, both on specific audio art pieces and on a radio series at WBAI called Radio Schizophonia, which explored recorded experimental voice plays as well as conceptual talk shows and live performances. His text-sound pieces centered around the “wounded” nature of the analog razor cut and in explorations of the wider technological woundscape, shaped in part by Whitehead’s own experience as a passenger in a near-fatal car accident at age sixteen. These works circulated widely through cassette networks and broadcast.

In 1987, Whitehead worked with Helen Thorington and Regine Beyer towards the incubation of an unprecedented three day “Festival for a New Radio” on WKCR FM in NYC; the three also worked on the genesis of New American Radio, a nationally distributed series of radio adventures in a wide range of genres.

THE CONFUSION OF TONGUES

In the mid-1980s, he collaborated with choreographer Karen Bamonte and percussionist Toshi Makihara on the development of Text/Flesh performances in which texts, rhythms and bodies migrated through and across each other, creating narratives such as The Confusion of Tongues and The Assassination. He later collaborated with Zaven Paré, Mark Sussman and Allen S. Weiss on Theater of the Ears, based on a text by Valere Novarina, and performed at La Mama in NYC. He has also experimented with small-scale puppet and toy theaters, presented at PS 122 in NYC within cabaret evenings convened by Great Small Works. In 2004, he worked with Sussman and Weiss once again on the creation of Danse Macabre, featuring the dolls and voice of Michel Nedjar.

During the 1990s, he initiated two research initiatives: the Laboratory for Innovation and Acoustic Research (LIAR) and the International Institute for Screamscape Studies, with its vast global scream bank.

AS WALTER SCULLEY IN THE BONE TRADE

Whitehead has been represented in numerous museum shows at the Whitney Museum, Documenta, Mass MOCA, among others. In 2001, shortly before 9/11, he created a video installation at Location One gallery titled Delivery System No. 1, which sets the complicity of synchronized media heads within the rhythms of catastrophe. His 2003 imaginary documentation of a fictive Bone Trade, centered on the buying and selling of celebrity body parts, was installed at Mass MOCA.

Whitehead is co-editor with Douglas Kahn of the influential anthology of writings on the history of radio and audio art,Wireless Imagination: sound radio and the avant-garde, and the author of numerous performance texts and speculative fictions that explore the intricate aesthetics of radiophonic space, as well as critical essays relating to memory, violence and American identity. His writings have appeared in publications such as Ear, Public, Art & Text, PAJ, TDR, Resonance and Cabinet, as well as in numerous anthologies and themed books, such as The Politics of Everyday Fear. In January 2012, he initiated an online writing project, Desperado Philosophy.

While living on Nantucket Island in the late 1990s, Whitehead collaborated with Jay Allison and others towards the creation of a new public radio station for the Cape & Islands, WCAI. He also serves as an advisor for WGXC in the Hudson Valley, a station with a strong mission-based commitment to transmission arts.

As a vocalist, Whitehead has performed in a wide array of choirs and ensembles since his days as a boy soprano, and keeps an ear tuned for the world’s varied traditions of choral singing. He plays a dozen instruments poorly, and soprano saxophone passably well. He lives in the Berkshires, not far from the farmhouse where Melville penned Moby Dick, and closer still to the Tanglewood of Hawthorne’s tales.

Transom manifesto

Mainly the Mysteries