‘Listen to the Performance, Listen to the Voices’: Performance Lab, Maison de la Création et de l’Innovation (Grenoble, France)

This editorial presents this double Special Issue dedicated to listening to voices from the perspective of oral history and performance, within the Grenoble ecosystem that is the Performance Lab. From 2022 to 2025, the interdisciplinary community of the Performance Lab (Grenoble Alpes University) focused its research on listening to performance. This specifically auditory perspective made it possible to explore the fields of orality, aurality and sound as tools for collecting, analyzing and disseminating a range of performance practices. The importance given to the phenomenon of reception created a dynamic conducive to the exchange of scientific know-how related to various fields of investigation, interviews, recordings and podcasts. It questioned our relationships with articulated speech, writing, reading, but also with translation, composition, improvisation and authorship. It looks at how oral sources transform or reorient our research practices and how sonic attention amplifies the sensitive, emotional or cognitive quality of our gestures.