ONE MOMENT
One Moment is an intimate exploration into time. What does it mean to be living in the moment? How do we handle our memories, regrets, hopes and fears? Where does ‘the present’ come into all this?
Inspired by ASMR videos (a YouTube cult garnering millions of followers), the story of Momo by Michael Ende and our personal experiences at the hands of London’s uniquely frantic modes of timekeeping, we have devised a piece of immersive binaural headphone theatre where sound, music and movement collide to explore our relationship to time. One Moment takes the audience on an intimate journey through a single moment where the everyday objects which litter our lives take on aural and physical significance, transforming into powerful relics that mold our bodies in space just as much as we mold them.
One Moment portrays the experience of one character embodied by three performers who channel her past, present and future through how they speak to her in a single moment. The present self is caught in a moment of stasis, straining towards something as she sits at a desk poised to pour a glass of water. Tormented by the past in one ear and the future in the other, the audience are given a seat in her subjectivity through the use of binaural microphones that transmit her experience directly into the audience’s ears. These intimate sounds and kinesthetic textures in turn vie for space amongst other forms of sound design, playing with the dimensions of our aural world and contesting where – and when – our consciousness sits.
One Moment premiered in the Roundhouse as part of We Are Now festival in June 2016, and was described as ‘witty,’ ‘poignant,’ ‘ear-opening’ and ‘one of the closest things to a truly immersive theatre.’