For over a year and a half, playwright Jari Hietanen and director Antti Mankonen have been setting Orson Scott Card's cult Sci-fi classic Ender's Game for the stage. The book presents a deep investigation of interpersonal relations in society by looking at the uninhibited interaction of children - the setting being not entirely unrelated to the more widely known classic, Lord of the Flies.
The production for the stage piece is now in full steam at Legioonateatteri in Tampere, Finland. This production, in what the director calls a 'mystery theatre' approach, is the first ever stage-setting of the novel. I am taking the huge responsibility of the audio side of things, starting with the actual design of the PA system: the theatre has recently relocated and received a state grant to get the lights and sound upgraded.
What I have made out of this freedom is a three-speaker plus subwoofer system with Ableton Live for playing out the audio. The sound for the play is built for a left-centre-right speaker configuration from the ground up, this really adds a great degree to the means of spatialisation. For every sound scene, the audio has been split into stems that can be independently sent into the stereo set of speakers, the middle speaker or reverb using a set of rotary encoders, and the live sound mixer has the opportunity to really react to the action on stage.
In keeping with the mystery theatre ideals, the sets will be abstract and minimal, and lots of mime techniques are used to 'sketch' the surroundings into thin air. On the sound front, my guiding thought has been to work every sound scene into a single drone, where abstract renditions of what one might expect to hear in the scene are coupled with synthetic sounds bordering on noise, but still exhibiting a fundamental frequency. What the audience hears is a complex weave of sound, and for those more sensitive to aural experience, delicate harmonies are found everywhere.
This production has also seen what must be my finest creative moment in sound design: time-stretching the slow release of water from a toilet water container to create the resonances of a spacecraft's walls in takeoff!
Ender - Defender of the dead will premiere on 6th September 2009. For more info (in Finnish) take a look at the Facebook event page or Legioonateatteri's web site.
