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HEROINE A show by Asa Mader & Anna Mouglalis |
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HEROINE
A show by Asa Mader & Anna Mouglalis
TRIVIA
September 17th to 19th, 2004, Sala Gotica del Castello Maniace, Siracusa, Sicily
Production : polimniA & Change Performing Arts
Director, video, Asa Mader, assisted by Clémentine Duzer
Stage & lights, AJ Weissbard
Starring Anna Mouglalis
I made the music, and took care of the spatialization & PA.
One hour.
Official festival's website
A few pictures taken during the rehearsals...
... and a few other pictures taken during the performance.
1. THE PLAY & THE MUSIC
Here is a summary of the play, and the relationships between the play and the music.
Instead of working using melodic themes, as it's often the case, here I used "ambience themes" or "design themes".
For instance, there are two "sound themes" based on the piano : the "out of tune acoustic piano" (beginning and end), and the "compressed piano" (waltz, tree).
Also, some elements, like the "lo pitched synths" which appear in the nightmare and in "walking to the bed", are easily identified sounds which make a link between situations that have something in common. For instance, hi pitched synth sounds were often linked with dreams and hope, and lo pitched synth sounds to reality, anxiety and fear.Naturally, linked situations in the story & scenography lead to common elements in the music - eg the "water drops + chimes" element, which appears three times in a typical sitation.
Aditionally, the relationships between different music parts were made to underline relationships between different video elements which were projected on transparent screens across the stage.
2. THE PLACE
As usual, the place was a very weird one : a large, gothic hall, all made of stone.
And as usual, it meant trouble : long RT60, impossibility to do a normal PA job - impossibility to actually hear the voice coming from the character etc.A few pictures of the naked room, taken a few months before the show :
Another picture, a few days before the show :
On the pictures, one can see not only the main room, but also the entrance of several smaller rooms next to the main hall. Those rooms were eventually used as "secondary acoustic spaces".
Since the castle was practically surrounded with the sea - the high windows that may be seen on the pictures are directly on the sea, it was not an uncommon thing to suddenly have to deal with a huge boat noise interfering with the rehearsals or with the show !
Not speaking about the yard next to the hall : each person coming to the room had to go through it - usually making a lot of ruckus walking on the gravels on the ground, amplified by surrounding stone walls.Basically, it meant that the music & sound design had to "melt" into the space so they would not differentiate too much from the ambient noises - and make those noises sound completely intrusive.
This doesn't mean that the music should imitate the ambient noise - it's rather an acoustic problem : the music had to be heard in the same acoustics as the ambient noises, and that means that there must be speakers positioned at the same place as the source of the noises.Another problem : most of the acting had to be made on a confidential, soft tone, impossible to understand even partially if not miked.
That meant wireless mike and support speakers mandatory.The situation was a bit difficult at first, but full of interesting possibilities.
3. SPEAKER SETUP
To sum up, there were three aspects to consider.
1. difficult acoustics, that made the understanding of the actress voice quite difficult
2. music spatialization, using multi speaker diffusion - otherwise it's not very funny...
3. integration into the space - so the music can meddle with the ambient noises, which were plentyThe solution was to separate the voice and the music as much as possible : close speakers next to the audience, dealing with the voice only - and several faraway speakers delaing with the music.
This way :
1. the voice can be heard and understood whatever happens.
2. the music can be spatialized in a very interesting way
3. often, the music meddles with the numerous ambient noises, since it comes from the same place as themThis last point was extremely useful during the last night - there was a huge storm outside with rain, wind and thunder, and the effect was excellent : the rain and thinder meddled nicely with the music, and often it was impossible to tell whether you heard was in the score or not.
Additionally, the complete separation voice/music gave the nice impression of a character at the foreground, speaking on top of a music background, which was litteraly true, since the music speakers were further away from the audience than the speech speakers.
Here is a Flash animation with the room plan, and the speaker setup :
Basically, there were the four speech speakers (1 to 4), the main "stereo compatible" music speakers (5 and 6), and a great ring surrounding everything and providing a frame for the background (7 to 12).
Speakers 9 to 12 were especially useful to mix the music with the ambient noises.
The subwoofers were very useful, since all the "normal" speakers were of the small, portable and waterproof kind, which means very much narrowband...
4. TECHNICAL SETUP
A pretty much simple setup : a PowerBook with an 002R, a Yamaha O2R, and many many cables.
Half of the outputs came from the O2R, the other half from the 002R.
Every speaker could be addressed directly in ProTools I/O setup, and all the "punctual" events were trigged in Ableton Live used as an RTAS Rewire slave.Here is the complete technical setup.
The spatialization, unlike the levels, was not made live, but scored : each ProTools and Live track was mapped to a set of outputs, and each sample, ambience etc. had a predefined position in space - though the precise postion could be changed live playing with the levels for each speaker.
