VISUAL
The Head: Performing Listening
We experimented with different ways in which we wanted to ‘perform’ listening. Whilst researching Binaural heads we discovered to our horror that all the major brands modelled the ears and head shapes of their binaural recording devices on male bodies only. In order to rectify this, we built our own binaural head, using ear casts from Anna's ears and a female cosmetic head. We would like to thank Lauren Tata for her help in building this!
Once we had the ear casts, we tried to adventure further, using many different objects to represent the head of listener in our rehearsal. I
In the end decided that we would use Anna’s head and she became a performing listener in the show, a representative body experiencing the same sounds as the audienve members, with her aural experience being transmitted directly into the headphones of the audience.
We played around with having her face toward or away from the audience but in the end agreed that to perform the act it was best to have her face outward.
The Objects and the Table
The table of objects went from being a practicality of devising to the sound to becoming an actuality of the performance. When experimenting with objects we had them organised on a table beside us and throughout the process we realised that this was an important element of presenting and performing the sound. We used the aesthetic of ASMR videos which are often quite lo-fi and take place in quotidien, domestic environments.
In particular, the bottle of water and glass became an important image for us, expressing the idea of a single moment in time.
Costumes: Similar but different
We wanted to create characters that represented abstracts concepts of past, present and future. We began by creating very specific, individual characterisations and then explored all becoming visually the same character but representing different states. Whereas at first we were three creatures, in the end instead of characters, Vera and I became operators on Anna, representing different parts of her consciousness. We dressed in near-identical outfits to visually express this.
