Gaël Le Cornec's solo show on Mana, a refugee girl who, faced with horrors and trials too hard for her to rationalise, invents a magical story of her escape from her war-torn home to a place of supposed sophistication and safety, reaching instead a country of uncaring bureaucracy.

 

Sound is prominent throughout the telling of the story, through a mixture of soundscapes, supporting and destabilising drones, self-contained composed pieces, Satie piano works and deafening sounds of war and gunfire.

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The mixdown above is a compression of these sounds, separated into themes.

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Theme 1: The Two Planets
The allegory of the two planets, Red-Yellow and Blue, is used as a way of roughly representing, respectively, the underdeveloped nations of the world and their overdeveloped "western" cousins. The sound here tracks their path from originally together to separating until their sounds are distinct both texturally and spatially. The gradually evolving sounds of each planet, slowly revolving in the listening space, are composed to go with the imagery created by coloured torches on a backlit screen.

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Theme 2: Storytelling SFX
In addition to the soundscapes and compositions which underscore the majority of the piece, the moments of storytelling - narrated though voiceovers, shadow puppetry and object play - are supported by sound effects ranging from field recordings of water, piano gestures, synthesis and electronic manipulation of cello.

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Theme 3: The Pumpkin Headed Soldier
The pumpkin heads, a monster who devours children, is an invention of the girl Mana's grandmother, a metaphor for the brutality of the powerful against the weak in places ravaged by war. Like a villain in a pantomime, whenever the soldier appears we hear the same thematic material, recorded from a broken violin and manipulated children's voices. The idea was to create not just a chilly sound but to have a leitmotif, a memory in sound which lingers and unsettles long after, by contorting what should be sources of beautiful music and voices into something inhuman and bone-curdling. It was specifically developed in mind of Gaël's crooked, uncanny physicality as the soldier.

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Theme 4: War
The closing gesture of the sound and video is the warzone, the samples all taken from sounds of real modern warfare. In the space the sounds are designed to be very loud and are spatialised to make it feel like the gunfire is coming from everywhere, to partner with the flashing lights and physical actions.