Our aim was to understand the important role that each sense plays in terms of allowing the audience member to recreate a memory. By reading Stephen Di Benedetto’s The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre we gained knowledge of how to exploit each sense and use the storytelling within our performance to highlight each sensory experience. “An understanding of physiology and neurology of the human body as a receiver of outside stimuli can assist the artist in using sensorial stimuli to compose a live theatrical event and create in in-between state of experience and awareness.” (Di Benedetto 2010, p.1)
The sense that we decided to focus on the most was sound. As the audience would have no sense of sight we thought that the most effective way to perform would be through sound, “Sounds fill our lives and communicate to us about the world around us. Theatre that makes use of these sounds captures our attention and has the potential to evoke emotions and feelings.” (Di Benedetto 2012, p.125) The audience would wear headphones throughout the entire performance which meant that every sound would be intensified. We not only wanted to use the spoken word as a key sound but also other environmental sounds that would be relevant to each story. This would allow the audience members to build up different sounds and piece them all together thus creating a physical landscape in their mind, “There are many types of sound productions during a performance beyond the spoken word, such as sound that is generated by voice or musical instruments and environmental sound. The uses of these sounds demonstrate how sound triggers visceral sensations, which in turn evoke mood in the context of performance.” (Di Benedetto 2012, p.125) we also wanted to build up a sense of layering sound throughout the performance. We used the headphones to create internal sound and played music in the room to create external sound. We decided to do this because we wanted the audience to still be aware that they were in an unknown location, watching a performance.
When getting feedback from audience members they felt that the use of the headphones was key to the use of sound throughout our performance. I don’t think the sounds would have had as much of an effect if we decided not to use the headphones. However, if I were to develop this piece further I would like to experiment with the concept of layering sounds. Perhaps using just internal sounds throughout the performance and see how the audience would react. One thing we did learn from this performance that we hadn’t anticipated was that each audience member felt very isolated. Even though we were focusing on the theme of celebration they felt detached and felt that they weren’t able to properly interact with the performance. This was an interesting result as we thought using the headphones would help us bring the audience into the world of headspace. When thinking about developing this piece further I would experiment with how we would go about involving the audience members more. Maybe instead of leading them outside the room at the end of the performance we would take their blindfolds and headphones off and leave them to enjoy a party with each other, to perhaps share their experiences.
Word count – 550
Claire Partington
Works cited
Di Benedetto, Stephen (2010) The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre, Routledge.