"Brilliantly unsettling sound design"
- Catherine Love
​
A visceral, non-text performance starring three polar bears forced to adapt to a world of polluted water and plastic icebergs. Set, costume, lighting and sound design fed off each other and I worked closely with Powder Keg to narrate the brutality of starvation, and the comedy of its hyperreal depiction.
What my role entailed:
1. Creating original music and ambiences to be diffused in a quadrophonic PA.
​
2. Recycling broken speaker drivers to play a soundscape of the tundra from within the set itself.
​
3. Leading instrumental and vocal workshops with the peformers, where we listened to polar bear vocalisations and imitated them using voice and violins.
​
4. Using a motion capture system hacked from an early noughties PC golf game to play piano using gesture.
​
5. Amplifying the recycled metal and plastic stage using seven contact microphones, and triggering buttkickers (yes) to vibrate the stage.
​
Interactive/generative processing bound the elements together, using Max/MSP as its show control, in a patch fully of my design, set up to be operated conventionally. All sounds are manipulated or raw original piano, violin and vocal recordings of myself and the performers. The limited sonic material was in order to bring in the idea of sustainability into the actual compositional process.
In the foyer I also set up an interactive installation: a tub of ice water with assorted sound objects. The audience, while waiting for the house to open, would be invited to "Play & Listen" with the objects. A pair of hydrophones would pick up these interactions and pump them back into the foyer, allowing them to hear the ice cracking and metal on metal, and into the main space - where they later heard their interactions fairly violently interrupt preset. The incredibly unhidden environmental message about the consequences of playing with an environment was timed to match the duration of ice's melting - once the ice has melted, the interactions are far more dull (as the hydrophones don't pick up any collisions or breaking sounds). I called it Ice, winning the Velastin award for the least thought given to any naming ever.
​
BEARS was ridiculous and beautiful.
Director-Bears Emma Geraghty and Josh Coates
Performer-Bears Jake Walton, Hannah Mook, Ross McCaffrey
Designer-Bears Liz Sheard (Set & Costume), Louise Anderson (Lights)
Stage Manager-Bear Sophie Tetlow
Production-Bears The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester
Funding-Bear Susan Hodgkiss
Filming-Bear Luca Rudlin of People Staring