One in every of three immersive works by E. Garcia Romeu, Opus 2 of Le Petite Theatre du Bout du Monde (or The Little Theater on the Finish of the World) was staged within the gymnasium of the Franck-Mozart Major Faculty, in Charleville. A big area with excessive ceilings, it’s darkish. An unlimited white table-like floor, which is itself the scale of a small room, is lit on the heart. It’s harking back to a skate park, manufactured from undulating chipboard, bolted collectively to kind the suggestion of a barren panorama. Coming into alongside the aspect, one can look at tables and cabinets that perform like cupboards of curiosity, stuffed with little objects and statues for use all through the piece. There are only some chairs as a result of that is an ambulatory efficiency, and the viewers will transfer round, inspired to take photographs and even movie. The piece is a performative set up, the place 4 puppeteers arrange, take down, and organize objects to kind a stream of vignettes—some momentary. On this piece, sound helps construct every scene, disconnecting us from the place we’re and have been, rebuilding the world by our auditory notion. I feel again to what puppeteer Omayra Martinez-Garzon asserts:
50% of every of her items is what she calls the “sound world.” That’s actually the case on this piece and one thing that captured my creativeness on the pageant general. Soundscapes are basic in worldmaking.
One of many outstanding issues concerning the pageant is the sheer variety of venues which are activated everywhere in the metropolis. There are theaters and auditoriums of assorted sizes, kinds, and states of repairs. There are exhibits in libraries, tents within the park, and even the assembly rooms of a employee’s syndicate. I think about that arriving, most firms discover themselves assigned to one among these many venues across the metropolis. Relying upon what they uncover, they’re challenged with both accepting (and even embracing) the context or redefining the area, remodeling it from the quotidian to a world aside.
At one level in Opus 2, the biggest and thinnest plastic sheeting is introduced up and over the huge white floor, rustling and hushing because it billows: snowfall. I observe the synesthetic high quality of the tender brushing sound of the plastic pores and skin as if it has touched my pores and skin. At one level, the puppeteers pull containers from under the far corners of the white floor. They use clips to connect beautifully-crafted, miniature mild posts to the perimeters at these 4 quadrants. They appear to be artifacts of a jail or a bleak, deserted industrial park in one other time (even perhaps a future time). Then, within the small circles of sunshine, the puppeteers place a number of small guard canine collectible figurines in a row. Quickly we start to listen to canine bark and howl after which to reply one another from these 4 areas, remoted, with a sonorous expanse dividing them. (There should be 4 small audio system hidden at every nook.) The sound has sketched the gap and the temper. After which, simply as I develop into misplaced within the panorama, the puppeteers effectively disassemble this world, the place sound was the one animation. There’s animation within the piece, however a lot of the present consists of a continuing setting and dismantling. The hassle expended on every scene, the crafting of objects and mechanisms, and the way in which that every merchandise is touched as it’s positioned appears purposefully absurd. And maybe that’s the level.
Sound does many issues. It units an emotional tone and lends a rhythm (even activating the viewers’s heartbeat). It may well set up a location or setting by offering contextual cues (birds, site visitors, or waves crashing). As with the lonely howls of the canine (and different sounds that got here by hidden audio system dispersed all through the room), it may possibly additionally create structure. In “Intro to Sound Design for Theatre,” Gil Eva Craig describes how stay theater affords a chance to increase the dramatic area: “The expertise of watching theatre is a 3 dimensional expertise …. The position of sound in a set can improve the precise bodily area the motion is going on in, and … manipulate the bodily area the viewers is in.”