Silica is being produced as part of Development Lab at Theatre in the Mill, Bradford University and will play from 27th to 29th May 2010.
I’m in the process of sound designing a new piece of experimental theatre: Silica.
Written and directed by the lovely Victoria Pratt (you can follow her Silica Blog here), here’s a little bit about the show…
Silica is a highly visual theatre installation that merges live performance, composed sound, sculpture and film. The piece explores erosion, both of landscape and of the mind, presenting shifting, beautifully surreal and blurred perceptions of reality. It uses the language of landscapes to discuss disappearance and the ephemerality of moments within our lives and looks at memory not as a link to the past but the construction of a present “reality”.
Not my usual line of music-for-narrative-led storytelling, but all the more fun for the variety! 🙂
What’s been unusual about this show, which is much shorter in duration than a lot of my recent projects, is the mammoth amount of planning I’ve done on the plotting of the sound.
Even though the sounds themselves are quite concrete, vocal dialogue, nature sounds, the sea, wind, leaves etc with subtle effects to create a nostalgic and sometimes disturbing atmosphere, in order to get my head around the abstract nature of the piece I’ve also had to be really concrete and precise as possible with the plot. For my own sanity if nothing else. 😉