The theme of the performance is sound in its broad meaning. ‘We all listen to music, whereas hearing is a sense which is very hard to turn off. Despite that, we do not talk much about what and how we hear’, explains Wojciech Blecharz, an acclaimed composer, arranger, oboist, and early music performer who means to talk about sound by showing selected aspects of 20th- and 21st-century music. The director stated:
I wanted to create a performance that will help in understanding and naming certain sounds. It is a play that has no good or bad sounds, nor beautiful or ugly. All of them are treated the same; the story states that all sounds may be arranged in a musical structure. John Cage once said that even the sound of a busy street or murmuring leaves may be perceived as music (…) Sound is a vibration that spreads around the air and finally gets to our body. We do not listen exclusively with our ears but with the whole body.
Soundwork contains sixteen music scenes: ranging from precisely composed scores to elements of improvisation. Blecharz underlines that in his work with actors, he primarily tried to show his experience with sound.
Improvisation, composition, musical instruments construction, and extracting musicality out of objects that seemingly lack it serve the aforementioned purpose. Music is not narrowed to melody and harmony, while contemporary music, like no other, offers a wealthy collection of musical colours, intensity, scratchiness, half-lights, whispers, and murmurs to create the sonic richness that became the libretto of my performance.
Apart from sound, the director reached for the works of Luigi Russolo, an Italian futurist who described a list of noises that he believed were meant to become the sounds of the future. Blacharz explained:
He said that we have to continuously open and shape our sensibilities. This is what the performance is really about. We live in times when the listener has to be constantly surprised by something spectacular, but we forget that beauty may be found in truly simple materials. A fragment of Russolo’s text was orchestrated by us. Eight actors stood behind tables filled with various musical instruments – plastic cups, sticks, stones, metal scraps, and other incidental objects found in the theatre’s warehouse – and play such sounds as crashes, explosions, pings and laughs. We tried to find connections between those instruments that might define the nature of the sounds. I worked with actors, not professional musicians and that’s an asset. It shows that sound is available and we only have to play with it.
Cast: Jan Dravnel, Natalia Kalita, Hanna Klepacka, Magdalena Kuta, Rozalia Mierzicka, Paweł Smagała, Maja Wachowska, Magdalena Żak; music, libretto, direction: Wojciech Blecharz; costumes: Konrad Parol.
Source: PAP, TR Warszawa, ed.: AL
Author: Anna Legierska, translated by AW