Sense Of Place
Sound design for Weave Movement Theatre at Dancehouse.
From Weave Movement Theatre, an exploration of the spaces and places in our hearts, minds, memories and everyday reality through physical theatre, soundscape, and visual projections.
Weave Movement Theatre - Janice Florence, Emma Norton, Trevor Dunn, David Baker, Anthony Riddell and Greg Muir. Main photo by Vikk Shayen.
16 Aug - 19 Aug 2023
Dancehouse, Melbourne
Co-creators & Performers: Anthony Riddell, David Baker, Emma Norton, Greg Muir, Trevor Dunn
Creative Team:
Co-Director & Choreographer Janice Florence
Co-Director & Sensory Theatre Zya Kane
Sound Design Lisa Greenaway
Lighting design Brad Vaughan
Set & costume design Sophia Burns
Media & Projection design TAN Kang Wei
Digital artist (for some images) Bixiao Zhang
Support Artist Joshua Lynzaat
Producer & Web, Graphic Design Taka Takiguchi (滝口貴)
Weave Movement Theatre is a bold, diverse dance/theatre company made up of disabled and non-disabled performing artists. Since its formation in 1997 the company has helped pave the way for inclusive practices to become the norm - making the stage an area for dynamic and exploratory performance. A space to challenge power and celebrate movement.
Collaborating with WMT, Zya Kane and Impermanence Productions, I designed sound for this one-hour performance work, “Sense of Place”. A long and dynamic development process began in May 2022, when the ensemble performed previews for feedback, and culminated in a one week season at Dancehouse, Melbourne, in August 2023.
“While our senses are never assailed, they are always engaged - our minds are never overwhelmed but are always challenged. Lisa Greenaway and Brad Vaughan (the sound and lighting designers respectively) should be awarded for creating an ever-evolving place for performance that compliments the cast rather than overshadows them.”
— Thomas Gregory, Theatre Travels
The sound design made full use of the Dancehouse theatre’s sound capabilities, consisting of three pairs of speakers onstage and behind the audience, and a large sub underneath the audience risers. I pushed the spatial aspects as far as I could, to evoke an immersive sound field for each scene, or focus the sound onto a performers’ movement around the stage.
The two development periods allowed me to get to know all six performers, their stories and their perspectives. I was able to listen to them and learn over a long period of time, and work with them to find the right sounds, the right senses, the right timings. WMT are seasoned performers and they all have a sharp wit, great humour. Sense of Place as an ensemble piece has moments of deep pathos and hilarious surrealism. Finding the ways to enhance or colour these moments with sound was often instinctive and serendipitous, and the openness of the performers is a huge part of that, the way they fluidly work with technologies.
We recorded a series of interviews with each about place, and their memories of Carlton - the Melbourne suburb in which we were working. These voices became intrinsic parts of the show, from a soundscape as the audience entered, to a ‘call and response’ scene where the performers respond to their own voices reminiscing about their experiences in this place.
For the final, climatic scene in which the performers dance with an enormous, flowing piece of fabric, I composed a piece of music that samples and deconstructs Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’ (a prompt from one of the performers), reversing it and spinning it along with other sounds that had been foreshadowed throughout the show, building to a rhythmic dance propelled by heartbeats, with the performer’s own voices woven in.
Listen
A binaural mix of an excerpt of the final dance. (Listen with headphones).