Spending two days working on both what is silence and how it is created has resulted in a renewed interest in the quality and potential of sound in performance. Just opening up what could be overlooked as a simple task, has resulted in varied perspectives and multiple viewpoints coming out of those in the workshop. Today's work evolved from a practical exploration of Maeterlinck's L'Intruse (The Intruder), with a collective attempt to stage the necessary and numerous silences, into a discussion about the qualities of hearing and the complications of performing silence.
Ross Brown, leading the workshop carefully developed the points made to widen the scope of today's session and has left me now with many ideas on my own approach to the text and previous engagement with sound in my work.
I have worked previously with an electroacoustic composer and developed work with scores that accompany the text (The Yellow Wallpaper, Manchester Museum, 2008), bringing life to the performance in a dynamic way. This sound was very much a living element, mixed live from pre recorded elements, voice recordings and following a theme or tone established through workshops and rehearsals. Similarly, I worked with the same composer to develop a final score to a scene staged in an abandoned gymnasium (A Question of Everything, Site Specific, 2009). This second piece was composed and arranged and then provided for playback (and can be heard here http://www.robdrummer.com/www.robdrummer.com/Sounds.html). The two were very different and yet inspired and interacted with both performances in as much a way as the live bodies in space or dramaturgical ideas provided through workshop and rehearsal.
I have also used numerous work by Steve Reich and Philip Glass in rehearsal and consider them large influences on my sonic creativity. Both composers create work that seems to fit with my understanding of the making of sound and more than anything perhaps are pleasing to my ear. This sense of hearing came up a lot today and seemed to develop as the argument moved towards the place of sound or its role as determined by those who manipulate it. Here is where I wish to pick up, the manipulation of sound, for is it not, in performance, a manipulation of a "thing" we are immersed in at every waking (and sleeping) moment?
The sound designer or composer must effectively translate the world of the performance event and work either to embed sound in this world or use it as character that inhabits it. This dichotomy is fascinating and reflects the evolution of theatre sound. I think I am a believer in sound that is characterful, sound that does not just underscore but works at the very least, alongside live action. To immerse the audience or spectator in a world that plays to all senses is an exciting challenge and as we discovered today there are numerous personal choices and beliefs as to how this should be achieved. Working with sound that is mixed live facilitates a performance that on more levels is fluid, organic and breathing with each evolution, with each new audience.
I believe that the oppositions amongst the workshop group today were broadly falling into two categories in relation to silence - one advocated the exclusion of created sound and presented silence as heard by both audience and characters within the performance but taken from the REAL ENVIRONMENT and not manipulated or designed. Maghsood offered an interesting interpretation of Maeterlinck's text that developed perhaps the outmoded symbolism in favour for a contemporary performance that utilised torchlight and the absence of sound to represent the inner world of The Grandfather and went on to suggest that creating silence with ticking clocks was not perhaps necessary nor useful for a "modern" audience all to aware of a cliche. Conversely, Jamie and others discussed the potential for extending the soundscape and defining more clearly the opening moments of the extract to differentiate between the created silence (the clock) and further moments (a chime) to signify the beginning of the scene for an audience. Ideas were offered where the sound was introduced earlier or later and developed to include environmental/elemental sounds in order to promote the design of the silence further.
How much should sound be used and to what effect is, it seems more than a stylistic decision and can fundamentally impact upon an audience's reading of the performance text. Simply testing the two different ways of creating silence at the beginning of the extract proved to ignite debate amongst the group. I do believe that our first attempt, with an audience entering to pre established action and sound (silence as crafted through a ticking clock) was effective and could prove fruitful in those moments when the silences are performed, as the audience will be reminded of their own role at the play's opening.
I look forward to hearing the many presentations of Shakespeare not in the English language at tomorrow's workshop.
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