The Flood

BACKGROUND The Gothic genre has been consistently employed in Australian art and literature since European settlement (Turcote, 1998) with our history providing rich context of the principle of "the familiar transposed into unfamiliar space." Rich gothic imagery, ideas and their associated musical genre have been a cornerstone in the fantastical performance art of Finucane & Smith productions. The rescoring of The Flood, a domestic family drama for a touring remount, was an opportunity to test the how such established tropes might be subverted into a subtle force for emotional manipulation within a more domestic narrative context. CONTRIBUTION The researcher rescored and re-sound designed The Flood for Finucane (director) & Smith (author) The soundtrack's methodology strongly follows Turncote's definition of the Gothic as a "hybrid form, delineated by borrowings and conflations, by fragmentation and incompletion, by a rejection of set values and yet a dependence on establishment." A dialectic between naturalism of the sound design with the score's opportunistic musical frames (from hyper-minimal underscore through to encroaching cinematic dread) drove the research. The drama of the storm and floodwaters have a clearly portentious relationship to the narrative arc of the play, and provide a metonymic subtext for familial dysfunction. The score pushes the gothic where necessary whilst counterpointing with sonic restraint to open up the sense of the uncanny. SIGNIFICANCE This soundtrack subverts the Gothic genre by establishing a tension with a kitchen sink drama, relegating the musical elements to a more insidious force. This innovative disjunct challenges theatre's traditional application of gothic musicality. The 2016 production, rescored by Verhagen was the first Australian Drama to be presented by the Shanghai International Contemporary Theatre Festival and was featured in the Xixi International Arts Festival, December.