Ugly mugs

BACKGROUND: This theatre commission was a score and sound design for a new piece of controversial Australian writing. After her high profile career on Neighbours, author Peta Brady has spent the last 20 years as a support worker for sex workers. This play, developed through a series of workshops with the creative team, explored an innovative literary way of engaging with serious issues faced by this cohort. SIGNIFICANCE: This was a high impact commission by the Malthouse (one of Melbourne's biggest theatre companies) and Sydney's Griffin Theatre. It was high impact both in terms of the audience experience in the performance, but also to the extent that it brought attention to the extent of violence against women, as well as complex issues unerpinning sex work. It was controversial - splitting the sex worker community and getting the issues at its heart mainstream coverage in a range of forums. CONTRIBUTION: The writing presented a number of challenges and opportunities, as the writing constantly plays with spatiotemporal rupture, splitting as well as folding the time ands space of simultanous narratives quite deftly. There are also questions about the reliability of certain memories, and repeats of moments which need to be recontextusalised. The research question was how the sound design was going to accommodate, articulate and clarify these devices. Of particular interest was the feeling of the experience when such devices were unsupported by sound (as much as when they were alligned). The larger soundtrack question was how the score could encourage empathy with the central themes as the confronting (and, at times, humorous) narrative unfolded. This relates to how music in score is read in relationship to characters, themes and action. Ugly mugs was an opportunity to explore the elasticity of how music (and its perceived meaning) can sometimes make its own decisions about what it binds to, irrespective of composerly intention.