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June 6 - 12, 2013
The Brick’s latest theater fest shines spotlight on sound Continued from page 21 His piece, “ELE↓↑TOR”, was developed specifically for the kind of theatrical spacialization that a surround system can provide. The play takes place in an elevator in the Empire State Building, slowly ascending through a sonic spectrum on its way to the 80th floor. Elevators are awkward and uncomfortable, and Chappell sculpts his sound to evoke this feeling in the audience. “We’re trying to create a feeling of being pushed into the confinement of a closed space,” he explained. Chappell cites two disparate sonic inspirations for the piece — elevator music, and the “noise instruments” developed by Futurist Luigi Russolo a century ago. He views the former as “a really empty kind of music, with a flattening quality that dampens the sharper emotions” — a perfect soundtrack to the social awkwardness of elevators. Russolo’s influence is a bit more opaque, with pounding, electrical zapping and the sounds of “unfathomable technology” providing a counterpoint to the corporate, anxiety-mitigating quality of elevator music. Chappell says this theatrical noise “is not about soothing the modern man, it’s very loud and threaten-
Image courtesy of Roger Nasser
Director Roger Nasser’s “Commotion Collage” appropriates elements from the Dadaist simultaneous poem.
ing and unpredictable.” Another interesting sonic play on the past is “Commotion Collage,” which appropriates elements from the Dadaist simultaneous poem — a form pioneered in 1916 by Tristan Tzara at the Cabaret Voltaire, in which multiple voices and other sounds combine in a singular sonic composition. Director Roger Nasser’s appropriation liberates the original form from its historic cultural context, and yokes it into service as a building block for a more contemporary version of the acoustic collage. “I’m going to take fragments of the original poems and weave them throughout, as part of the background,” he explained. He’ll also include contemporary sounds, such as answering machine messages,
white noise and a riff from the “Family Ties” theme song — artifacts from an electronic culture that didn’t yet exist in 1916. Given the number of ways the festival’s producers are demonstrating that a focus on sound can spur such theatrical innovation, it’s unlikely that sound scape will be merely a one-off festival, and may even become a staple of the Brick’s annual offerings. “I like the idea that theatre began as an auditory experience,” Gardner said, adding that, “Today, one thinks of going to see a play. But we want to remind the audience that they’re there to listen. I hope this is an opportunity for audiences to reinterpret what the stage is to them, and to re-imagine what a theatre-going experience can be.”