During recent rehearsals we have begun working with microphones, to discover what effects our voices and sounds have on an audience through headphones. We use three microphones, one that leads through both the earphones, and the other two to one specific side of the headphone each; thus creating a encompassing and claustrophobic atmosphere for the audience.
In rehearsals today, as we begun working through each of the 5 monologues, along with the sound effects, and uses of touch, smell and taste, each of us took a passive role of the audience member to experience our performance and see what elements of our work are successful or not. This rehearsal technique has enabled us to cut out elements of our piece which do not correlate to our primary question… What happens when we take away the sense of sight in our performance?
In our upcoming rehearsals we plan to continue to explore possibilities through our text, influenced heavily by Proto-type Theatre’s performance Whisper.
Whisper explores sound, headspace and visual ambiguity to explain a story to an audience, who are watching a screen with the three actors creating interesting shapes and perspectives, which are extremely compelling combined with the use of headphones. Proto-Type pull the performance away from the stage and into the headspace of the individual audience members, and successfully delivers a multi-dimensional narrative full of imagery correlating to multiple senses.
Caitlin Clark
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