Considered one 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 house with excessive ceilings, it’s darkish. An unlimited white table-like floor, which is itself the dimensions of a small room, is lit on the middle. It’s paying homage to a skate park, manufactured from undulating chipboard, bolted collectively to type the suggestion of a barren panorama. Getting into alongside the facet, one can study tables and cabinets that perform like cupboards of curiosity, stuffed with little objects and statues for use all through the piece. There are just a few chairs as a result of that is an ambulatory efficiency, and the viewers will transfer round, inspired to take images and even movie. The piece is a performative set up, the place 4 puppeteers arrange, take down, and prepare objects to type 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 way of our auditory notion. I believe again to what puppeteer Omayra Martinez-Garzon asserts:
50% of every of her items is what she calls the “sound world.” That’s definitely the case on this piece and one thing that captured my creativeness on the competition total. Soundscapes are basic in worldmaking.
One of many exceptional issues concerning the competition is the sheer variety of venues which can be activated all around the metropolis. There are theaters and auditoriums of varied sizes, types, and states of maintenance. There are reveals 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 certainly one of 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 house, 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 mushy brushing sound of the plastic pores and skin as if it has touched my pores and skin. At one level, the puppeteers pull bins from beneath the far corners of the white floor. They use clips to connect beautifully-crafted, miniature gentle posts to the sides 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 have to be 4 small audio system hidden at every nook.) The sound has sketched the space and the temper. After which, simply as I grow to be 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 continuous setting and dismantling. The trouble expended on every scene, the crafting of objects and mechanisms, and the best way 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 possibly 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 way of hidden audio system dispersed all through the room), it might probably additionally create structure. In “Intro to Sound Design for Theatre,” Gil Eva Craig describes how stay theater gives a chance to increase the dramatic house: “The expertise of watching theatre is a 3 dimensional expertise …. The position of sound in a set can improve the precise bodily house the motion is occurring in, and … manipulate the bodily house the viewers is in.”
