What Is Given Is Not A Fully Formed Song

Speakers as performers

A sound experiment. A theatre work that uses electronic sound as a stage within a stage: speakers as actors, stereo field as world. The virtual sonic soundstage is in dialogue with action and text on the real stage.

As part of the Creative Development program in Winter Nights 2020. This project is undertaking a development and will not present anything publicly as part of Winter Nights.

View how the team developed their work via this link.

What is your development/work about and what happens?

What is given is not a fully formed song is a performance haunted by a radio play. Between two speakers poised like strange statues, an actor, a dancer, and a live band tell stories of troubling and extinction: ghosts smoking in alleyways and marsupial-shaped gaps in the roots of gastrolobium plants.

How are you developing your work?

We’re creating a library of scores, scripts and other fragments for our team to sift through, and recording their responses, reactions and contributions. We’re then taking this material and collaging it in our home studio, creating a piece that’s a hybrid of musique concrete and radio play.

What are you excited about in this project, and what are you hoping to get out of it?

We’re excited to explore the theatricality of sound and the musicality of theatre and text, confronting our own assumptions about our forms. To put six artists from different worlds in a room together to play and challenge one another. To make a microcosm of what this might look like in the long run.

What are you exploring?

We are exploring the stereo field as a ‘stage within a stage’. Sound in this piece is a parallel world, co-existing and interacting with the ‘real’ one. This lets us play with time travel and haunting – composer as unreliable narrator – and to bring the aesthetics of radio play on to the stage.

Who is in your team or involved, and what is their role?

The process is led by composer and recordist Josten Myburgh and writer and theatre-maker Noemie Huttner-Koros. It is devised with actor Mararo Wangai, performance artist Joshua Pether, and a live band including Josten alongside two improvisers: guitarist Jameson Feakes and double-bassist Djuna Lee.

A creative development as part of Winter Nights 2020
Supported by Minderoo Foundation