I’m standing in a queue waiting to get into my own show. The queue is a long line that loops around, resolving itself in an ellipse. I have audience members in front of, behind, and across from me, though not so close that I can touch them.
Each of us is holding a ticket that is alive, splashing a kaleidoscope of colour onto our faces and torsos. It’s all shape and form and angles, hard to read and designed for experience-only. Slowly, the moving images pixelate and reassemble into a three-dimensional holographic theatre environment, only now we’re in Zagreb where my artistic partners are co-presenting our artwork, which is immersive, transportive and telepathic, and all the codes of theatre have been re-programmed and re-configured and it’s hard to say whether it’s narrative, or genre, or media, live, pre-recorded, projected, ingested, because we’re in a deferred space, well at least our bodies are because they’re still in Melbourne but the rest of us is in Zagreb and, because it’s an avant-premiere, the audience is chock full of presenters, friends, supporters, bureaucrats, and donors who have ‘come’ from all over Europe, all over the world, only no one’s left their lounge room, office, bar, or whichever location they choose to enter the ‘performance’ from. It’s quite a rollercoaster, this show, until it stalls, stops, and then surrounds you like a meditation. One deep, long, sustained breath, exhale, and it’s over.
I let the turning turn into a low hum, warm my voice, and walk onto a dark and empty stage. I click on the only light in the space, a naked globe, small enough to hold in my hand and I say to the audience, “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished…” (or some such awesome quote from Sam B). It’s clear they don’t know what to make of it, whether it’s part of the show in Zagreb or the beginning of the show in Melbourne, and neither do I ’cos we’re all stuck together in a liminal space between the tenses, past, present, future, provisionally altered and manufactured by our collective resistance to understand where we are, what we’re doing, thinking, and feeling. It has to end of course, sanity insists on it, and all of a sudden everyone and everything has dissolved but me and Samuel who says nothing, just drills me with that quizzical baby-blue stare, waiting for the moment to strike a non-verbal blow to my sub-conscious, to prompt me into remembering his lines from whichever of his writings I’ve filed away but nothing happens. Nothing happens! Nobody comes, nobody goes, try again, fail again, fail better. Nothing happens. Bugger. Words are all that we have. What is that unforgettable line? Oh yes. The end is in the beginning and yet you go on. Audience applauds, or would, if they were still there.
Notes from the floor
(Transcribed from the sound designer’s notebooks, final rehearsal, date not marked)
So, we’re on the floor for this new show. Not new because it hasn’t been done. A new type of show. The start time is translated for the 37 global time zones, but we can’t actually run the show – we’ll just slip side-ways from where we are (meetings, email, home, commuting, reading, talking, making) to where we’ll be to start be-ing. And there’s a huge spatial sound design.
In a satellite lecture for ACMI, Peter Weibel was asked ‘What is the future of cinema?’ He starts, “When images are transmitted directly into the brain … oh, but that would be sound.”
So, we’re running a 48 channel system through the space and the audience sit on a mesh floor above eight of the loud-speakers. The others sit on three levels around and above the audience, concealed inside the shadow lines. We can produce vistas, point sources, and project sound images into the minds of the audience. It goes black and I track David’s footsteps over the stage. Glad we changed his shoes to leather so we can hear his path, and the cue; his final steps crunch into a recessed tray of sharp pebbles layered over a resonant box. The 12 miniature blue-tooth microphones in the tray shoot off every footfall or shuffle into granular lines we process and spatialise in the theatre.
The mics across his body amplify every breath, rustle, or shift in position. The audience can barely see him, but his body extends to their ears. It’s intensely intimate with no space between us – just a shared sound-filled presence.
On-line a binaural mix from the theatre – the pebbles, the body mics, his voice, the spatialisation – is projected in a stream for headphones and a multi-channel mix for spatial sound systems in theatres, arts spaces, and museum spaces around the globe.
Since 2018 we’ve worked as a sonic-spatial ensemble: 2 source navigators, 4 spatialisers, and a spatial director. We rehearse in semi-darkness enough to see the table of data-controllers and heighten our auditory imaginations to better auralise (think visualise) sonic geometries and landscapes. Each syllable of David’s voice becomes a volumetric entity. Orbiting morphemes from every word stay draped throughout the theatre.
The sonic bed lingers as sounds from the pre-show audience queue rotate in pianissimo layers through the theatre; a cough, a shuffle, a ‘hmm’, murmurs from people who were somewhere and are now here (hear?). Peripheral auditory awareness is speeding and my attention is like a still focal point. Each time dp tries a line from Sam B we snapshot the utterance and stream it to the sonic vortex building in the space. Our headphone mixer signals ‘gravity moment’; the sound makes it difficult to tell which way is up.
David keeps on with the Sam B syllables – each try, fail, try, drops another layer into the surrounds and this incessant movement drives to stillness.