Sense of Place
From Weave Movement Theatre, an exploration of the spaces and places in our hearts, minds, memories and everyday reality through physical theatre, soundscape, and visual projections.
Janice Florence, Emma Norton, Trevor Dunn, David Baker, Anthony Riddell and Greg Muir – photo by Vikk Shayen
Weave Movement Theatre is a bold, diverse dance/theatre company made up of disabled and non-disabled performing artists. Since its formation in 1997 the company has helped pave the way for inclusive practices to become the norm - making the stage an area for dynamic and exploratory performance. A space to challenge power and celebrate movement.
“A comment offered through 3D sound, fragrance, images, and movement, Sense of Place is a surprising and witty new work, with a wonderful streak of absurd humour, which gently asks people to question their space and place in the world.”
Collaborating with WMT, Zya Kane and Impermanence Productions, I designed sound for this one-hour performance work. A long and dynamic development process began in May 2022, when the ensemble performed previews for feedback, and culminated in a one week season at Dancehouse, Melbourne, in August 2023.
Places can become unfamiliar as people stray, as our cities are carelessly knocked down and rebuilt before our eyes. Even our home can be made inhospitable as we lose a sense of our place in it. Sense of Place is an exploration of the spaces and places in our hearts, minds, memories and everyday reality through physical theatre, soundscape, and visual projections.
The sound design makes full use of the Dancehouse theatre’s sound capabilities, consisting of three pairs of speakers onstage and behind the audience, and a large sub underneath the audience risers. I pushed the spatial aspects as far as I could, utilising the front and back, and left and right, vectors, trying to evoke an immersive sound field for each scene, or focus the sound onto a performers’ movement around the stage.
The two development periods allowed me to get to know all six performers, their stories and their perspectives. I was able to listen to them and learn over a long period of time, and work with them to find the right sounds, the right senses, the right timings. WMT are seasoned performers and they all have a sharp wit, great humour. Sense of Place as an ensemble piece has moments of deep pathos and hilarious surrealism. Finding the ways to enhance or colour these moments with sound was often instinctive and serendipitous, and the openness of the performers is a huge part of that, the way they fluidly work with technologies.
We recorded a series of interviews with each about place, and their memories of Carlton - the Melbourne suburb in which we were working. These voices became intrinsic parts of the show, from a soundscape as the audience entered, to a ‘call and response’ scene where the performers respond to their own voices reminiscing about their experiences in this place.
For the final, climatic scene in which the performers dance with an enormous, flowing piece of fabric, I composed a piece of music that samples and deconstructs Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’ (a prompt from one of the performers), reversing it and spinning it along with other sounds that had been foreshadowed throughout the show, building to a rhythmic dance propelled by heartbeats, with the performer’s own voices woven in. Below is an excerpt, remixed in binaural for headphone listening:
“While our senses are never assailed, they are always engaged - our minds are never overwhelmed but are always challenged. Lisa Greenaway and Brad Vaughan (the sound and lighting designers respectively) should be awarded for creating an ever-evolving place for performance that compliments the cast rather than overshadows them. ”
Below is a video preview from the initial 2022 development:
Sense of Place
16 Aug - 19 Aug 2023
Dancehouse, Melbourne
Co-creators & Performers
Anthony Riddell
David Baker
Emma Norton
Greg Muir
Trevor Dunn
Creative Team
Co-Director & Choreographer Janice Florence
Co-Director & Sensory Theatre Zya Kane
Sound Design Lisa Greenaway
Lighting design Brad Vaughan
Set & costume design Sophia Burns
Media & Projection design TAN Kang Wei
Digital artist (for some images) Bixiao Zhang
Support Artist Joshua Lynzaat
Producer & Web, Graphic Design Taka Takiguchi (滝口貴)
