This is Day 5 for me at the Sundance Theatre Lab at White Oak Plantation, Florida. I’m here as composer with a great bunch of artists from Punchdrunk Theatre developing ideas for their epic, immersive, experiential, theatre adaptation of Woyzeck.
Creatively, it’s fantastically freeing not to have to worry about the everyday domestics of life and just get on with playing and developing ideas with sound and dance, and working on new systems of working collaboratively. Every artistic whim is taken care of – the Sundance team don’t want anything to get in the way of the free expression of theatrical ideas.
As a newbie to the Punchdrunk team, I feel so welcome and it feels like I’ve known all these talented people for longer than the two weeks it’s been. I also think that the Big Brother-esque (Channel 4, not 1984!) environment, being chucked in at the deep end, has really helped to make me feel at home.
It’s been hard work but I feel like we’ve really started to find a new collaborative method, an integrated back-and-forth of ideas driven from both the sides of dance and sound. It’s always great fun to splurge music ideas and just make crazy soundscapes!
Here’s a short section of one of the pieces of music, entitled ‘Monkey Dance’.
The fantastic weather, the amazing grounds at White Oak and the incredibly friendly staff here really makes it feel like Disneyland for grown ups . The food is delicious and varied, and I’m especially impressed with how they’re catering for my vegan proclivities!