Sappho

This project was the the theatrical culmination of an ARC grant for the writer/performer Jane Montgomery Griffiths. For me as the sound designer it was to explore methods of representing elements of ancient Greek poetry and drama without disrupting the poetic and subjective world experienced by the audiences with elements which would tie the production down to specific era and geography. It also involved lengthy discussions about the differences between the experience of poetry and the experience of sung text - again with my reservations associated with the destruction of the poetic, open and personal (which incorporates an ongoing dynamic between the residues of artifice and "natural" speech) with the potentially proscriptive artificiality of musical settings potentially not doing justice to the beauty and mystery of fragments of the ancient verse. Importantly, the work was revelatory, given that the sonic approach to narrative within narrative (which I had successfully explored in "Madagascar" earlier in the year) completely failed in my initial experiments here. It was quickly clear how certain characteristics of direct address fundamentally shifts the dynamic with a narrative line - and when not handled correctly, potentially catching the sound design in its glare as artifice. This was a problem that I continued to wrestle with later in the year (see "Syncopation... Details: Commissioned work Significance: Malthouse is one of the two premiere Victorian theatre companies. I was invited to compose for this project by the new artistic director of the company (ex Bell Shakespear AD) Marion Potts. The project was the culmination of an Australian Research Council grant - the Monash/Malthouse Linkage Project "Staging Sappho: investigating new methodologies in performance reception". It was criticaly very well received.