The idea of creating music in the moment, or composing only for a specific person to enjoy, is part of the inspiration for Ensemble Offspring’s The Secret Noise. The award-winning show – described as a series of surreal, intimate scenes that hover somewhere between music, dance and live installation – is making its Victorian debut as part of the Melbourne Festival.
The work, explains Ensemble Offspring’s Artistic Director Claire Edwardes, was created by Damien Ricketson, when he was also co-Artistic Director of the Sydney-based contemporary classical music company.
“He speaks of drawing on private love songs for his inspiration,” she says. “Love songs that were only meant for the lover, the person who they were written for and not to be heard by the general public. It’s this idea of music that can be more reflective and personal and we obviously draw the audience into that world.”
The world they are creating will be staged throughout Arts House at the North Melbourne Town Hall. Softly-lit small tents become intimate theatres, big enough to only seat three and have another three standing behind, where audiences can enjoy individual, and sometimes interactive, performances for the first half hour.
“Basically not everyone gets to see everything that’s on in every tent because we just don’t have the capacity for that,” she says. “There’s this voyeuristic element as well, because as you hang out in the space itself, in which the tents are, they’re kind of glowing tents and pulsating almost with light. What you experience from outside these kind of opaque tents is also almost just as interesting and important as the person sitting inside having that one-on-one performance because, of course, you can hear what’s happening, you just can’t see it clearly.”
Traditional instruments are combined with megaphones and whirling devices invented by Ricketson to create an otherworldly soundscape, that references everything from ceremonial music to Stairway to Heaven’s backmasking (which is where an LP played backwards will reveal a subliminal, satanic message). Musicians Edwardes, Jason Noble and Bree van Reyk are joined in the performances by dancers Narelle Benjamin and Katherin Cogill, while actor Katia Molino recites text backwards.
“It sounds amazing, because it does sound like a whole other language that you’ve never heard before, but you can’t discern what she’s saying,” says Edwardes. Fausto Brusamolino’s lighting design creates the ambient atmosphere for this exploration of music as both a private and public exchange. “It’s very immersive, trying to bring the audience into our experience.”
Edwardes says The Secret Noise connects with audiences in multiple ways. “We had audiences from the age of five to 80 and everything in between so it’s probably the most eclectic audience we’ve ever had,” she says. “Everyone seemed to take something different away from it because it’s one of those shows that, because you don’t sit down in a concert hall type of thing, it’s more you can choose how you journey through the show and you can choose how you wish to experience it. It means that people can get very different things out of it. For a lot of people it will just be, in the first place, a new experience, possibly music that they’ve never heard anything like that before or a presentation, in terms of tents and having that one on one performance experience.”
BY JOANNA BROOKFIELD
