https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8800-891X
Abstract
This dialogue explores the possibilities of binaural sound for contemporary theatre making and museum curation, situating sonic modes of practice in relation to particular formal experimentations demanded by the context of pandemic and exemplified by the international touring production of Blindness first staged at the Donmar Warehouse in London in 2020, and directed by Walter Meierjohann. The discussion between Meierjohann and Georgina Guy opens up the potential of sound installation as an apposite form through which to challenge visual-centric cultures of production and stage particular political and theatrical challenges, related to ideas of community and responsibility, and imagination, collaboration, and collective experience.
Introduction
In August 2020, the Donmar Warehouse re-opened in a reconfigured shape. Audience members occupied the stage seated in physically distanced pairings, attired in protective facemasks, and provided with headphones through which to experience the binaural audio of the sound and light installation Blindness. During the production, visitors listened to, what the theatre describes as, a timely and ‘gripping story of an unimaginable global pandemic of infectious blindness’ rendered aurally through the recorded performance of narrator Juliet Stevenson and immersive sound design of Ben and Max Ringham.Footnote1 The source text from which the piece is adapted by Simon Stephens – a novel published in 1995 by José Saramago – is particularly challenging in terms of its disability politics. Building from her experience of the production and research across performance, installation, and sonic and visual art curation, Georgina Guy talks with UK-based director of Blindness Walter Meierjohann about the contexts, collaborators, and conceptual and formal approaches that shaped this project, as well as subsequent binaural work with the same creative team under the guise of emerging theatre and sound collective AURICLE. Within the framework of this special issue on ‘Hear Tell’, the following conversation, which is transcribed from a spoken exchange, reports on the development of a significant sound-centred production staged in the context of syndemic. Here, as elsewhere in Guy’s research, the term ‘syndemic’ is preferred since it foregrounds our experiences of pandemic as inequitable and shaped by structural inequalities.Footnote2 The discussion unfolds insights about presence, community, and collective experience central to the theatrical encounter that are called into question by restrictions on bodily closeness and reinvigorated by experimental modes of performance that intersect installation and sound.
Georgina Guy: Blindness was one of the first indoor theatre events to tour across the UK and internationally post-syndemic closures. How did that specific context – and the regulations around physical distancing that radically altered the practices and proximities of our cultural encounters – shape the form of the piece and its staging as a sonic and light installation?
Walter Meierjohann: I’ve been trying to stage Blindness for almost twenty years. I tried it first in Dresden in 2005 when I was Artistic Director of NEUBAU, the international new writing company at the Staatsschauspiel Dresden, and I got the rights, but the Artistic Director of the Staatsschauspiel at time said it was too bleak, which was quite interesting. In 2005, I thought about Blindness as a response to the rise of the right wing in Dresden. Then, in 2008, I was living in London and I wanted to stage it with Hofesh Shechter’s choreography. So it was meant to be a big event and a fusion with dance but I didn’t get the rights. At that time, there was the context of the financial crash – so that was my new Blindness in a way. Then, in 2013, I was appointed Artistic Director of HOME in Manchester and, when the Brexit vote happened, I commissioned Simon Stephens to adapt the novel to emphasise the rise of nationalism. At that time, I was trying to work with Manchester International Festival to make it as a massive operatic piece with dancers, ten actors, and a 100 strong community choir of blind people. That version didn’t happen because I left the post, but we had the script from Simon. Then we workshopped the script in 2019 at the National Theatre Studio and the great outcome of that was that we had British actor Juliet Stevenson in the principal role of the storyteller/doctor’s wife. We had meetings with David Lan, who was a freelance producer at the time, and he made this one remark in terms of the finances of the project: ‘Could you make it slightly smaller?’ Simon picked this up and came back to me after the summer and said, ‘Listen I’m working now on a monologue’ and I went, ‘Are you kidding me?’ In my mind, this was a huge piece that was so visual, and I said, ‘but you are Simon Stephens, so of course, let’s give it a go’. By December 2019 we had the first draft of a complete rework, which was a monologue. This was the basis of what I then sent around to five theatres, one of them the Donmar Warehouse, but this was all pre-pandemic.
GG: It’s interesting how that shift in scale opens up new possibilities for staging that take the piece beyond the visual. There are some challenges that you inherit from José Saramago’s novel. In that text, as production consultant, audio descripton user, and critical disabilities scholar Hannah Thompson also points out, blindness is used as a ‘metaphor for disaster’ and the regaining of sight at the end reinforces vision as the preferred sense. Your production at the Donmar Warehouse approached this not by trying to stage or to re-create an experience of blindness but by celebrating sensory modes of engagement beyond visual representation.Footnote3
WM: I was a bit afraid of that conversation initially, because the book itself is not very much liked in the blind community. Hannah was critical but she said afterwards that Blindness was one of the best theatrical experiences she’s had. I know that the subject of the book was not popular but actually this kind of work was so much about sound. When the pandemic hit I got a phone call from Artistic Director at the Donmar Warehouse Mike Longhurst who said, ‘Listen I’ve read the script and I think this is the piece for the moment’. So, moving from blindness as a metaphor, suddenly blindness and the pandemic in the script became a reality. Mike was clear from that first phone call that Juliet could not appear live on stage. I was trying to wrestle him down to say, ‘Could we have her in a glass box?’ He just said ‘It’s too risky. We’ve got to find a bridge between something which is basically this horrendous stop of all activity and live theatre in the future’. So Blindness was conceived as a pandemic piece but even then as a stepping-stone to live performances again. It was this that got me thinking that we’ve got to go into a sound world, and I need the best sound people we can have. It was very clear that Ben and Max Ringham were the people to go to. And it was the dream moment to put in the artistic time together because everyone was available – that’s never happened to me before. So I could work with theatre designer Lizzie Clachan, and she arranged the chairs, wrote on the wall, and came up with this idea of the light installation, and with Jessica Hung Han Yun as Lighting Designer, whose input was instrumental.
GG: I’m fascinated that for theatres to reopen in the context of physical distancing, the contemporary stage has to be reimagined as an installational space.Footnote4 How did installation – as a form concerned with bringing critical attention to the situation of encounter and the institutional spaces that frame our engagements with art and performance – help to make legible, aesthetically and theatrically, regulations around venue capacities and distancing?
WM: As Artistic Director at HOME, I had co-produced The Encounter and that was the big inspiration. Seeing Simon McBurney do that performance live on stage with a binaural microphone gave me a lot of food for thought that this is really an extraordinary way of storytelling because it’s 360 degrees. What we did differently, of course, was that Juliet wasn’t live on stage and we found out that binaural works best in the dark. So, that is why the second part of the piece became entire darkness. It’s 35 minutes in darkness, but always interspersed because there are 33 scenes and lights flash in between, and it’s really quite something. It made you feel that Juliet is whispering in your ear, she’s walking around you. We did rehearse this as if we were working with a camera; we had to block all the scenes and know exactly where she’s going. For me as a theatre maker it became about how you work when you are reliant on these sound guys. Sound became the primary driving force of everything. Ben and Max had experience that I didn’t and so so-called hierarchies about how you work together became a collaborative process because everyone had time as well, this was the difference. We had Lizzie in every rehearsal, we had Jessica in every rehearsal, we were really a company with almost no hierarchies – everyone had a right to share their thoughts. Simon Stephens was in every rehearsal as well. So it was a very happy time. And Juliet said afterwards that this was actually one of her favourite times ever, because she said we all didn’t know how to do this, which was true. We had these amazing people but how do you turn a novel into an experience? We were always thinking about the audience with their headphones and, of course at the time, also a mask. Lizzie’s design with, what I would call, ‘dynamic seating’ meant that you were never just sitting behind people; you were confronted with a stranger who was sitting opposite you, the face mask covering the mouth, and so eyes become very important. In a way the COVID restrictions all heightened what we were doing anyway. As I said at the beginning of conversation, I had three or four attempts to stage it – but COVID came up with the concept of how to do it. So the move, from a 100-person company to suddenly a monologue where the performer is not even there, was not something I conceived right from the beginning. It’s important to say that as an artist you live and respond in the world. I believe that for good art you need boundaries, and here we had massive boundaries, and we had to deal with it.
GG: In an interview with American philosopher George Yancy, Judith Butler writes about the inevitability of the substantial innovations in artistic practice during syndemic because the significant ‘questions – how to live, how to face mortality and how best to make sense of the world – are ones that drive the humanities still and again’. So Butler observes that, of course, we turn to ‘writing and visual art, history and theory to make sense of [our] pandemic world, to reflect upon the question: When the world as we know it falls apart, what then?’Footnote5 Is it the job of theatre and performance to account for the challenges of contemporary reality?
WM: When we present Blindness in all these amazing venues internationally, I think that people don’t quite know that actually the process itself was very rushed. This is the irony; we had four days of script rehearsals, and then I would say eight days of recordings. And then they had to mix everything, and then we had a tech of four days. In hindsight you go, and this was the time when everyone had time! Do you know what I mean? And we all thought this was the future of theatre thinking – wellbeing – and it’s all going to be so nice because we suddenly have a balance between work and life and we have more time with the family, and then you go back into a tech. So, there is a promise of a different way of working and then, on the other hand, the reality. That’s why we, as an artistic team, move towards AURICLE [the theatre and sound collective that the creative term have formed following the success of Blindness]. Everyone you talk to in the team would say this was such an amazing time in history, because when we were rehearsing nothing was open; London was dead. So, there is an analogy with Saramago’s writing, of course it’s not as bleak, but still, if you think of London as a buzzing town, or as it is now, that was not the case, it was still a ghost town.
GG: Blindness is, of course, concerned with the lived experience of and governmental responses to the situation of syndemic in its subject. Co-editor of Contemporary Theatre Review, Bryce Lease, and I have been collaborating with you on AURICLE’s latest sound and video installation, which is based on Ulrich Boschwitz’s 1938 novel The Passenger. As researchers, we’re interested in the potential of binaural sound as a means of commemorative performance and to expand the technologies of curation in museums. The Passenger offers an affective experience of exile that is really focused on borders, movement, displacement, and disenfranchisement. Is sound particularly useful as a strategy for staging the political and social complexities of the contemporary world, in terms of the syndemic and more widely?
WM: Wow that’s a huge question. I think the material I always look for is political. I would even say in the Oresteia, which I produced during my artistic directorship of HOME, Manchester in 2015, there’s the behaviour of leaders and the shift to democracy. I have Jewish roots myself and I think The Passenger comes out of a life-long story of where do you belong, and then the sense of the horror overnight, losing your identity. I still think you could make a beautiful film out of that as well, it doesn’t have to be sound, but then there’s the concept of being on a train, the character is just constantly on a train. This is written pre-Holocaust, but I think if you play train sounds, you have this sense of travelling and you will still feel Auschwitz is not far from that moment in history. I learnt one big thing from Blindness, which was that the audience see, and imagine; this is what sound does, especially if you are in entire blackout. And this interests me a lot. You can build massive sets but it becomes the vision of the artistic team. If you reverse it and say you’re going to play the sounds and people can imagine their own world, this is so much more inspiring. And that’s something. I said to myself, ‘maybe this was actually the best way of doing it’. That sense of, how can you portray 120 blind people on stage? When it comes to the visual, you will very quickly go to simplification but the moment you go back to Saramago, and then Simon’s text, of course, and you start imaging that – it is in a way much more enriching. I’ve always been drawn to adapting books more than plays, and it’s this massive possibility, I think, where an experience becomes close to reading. Reading is very solitary but when you read a book you start imagining. And it’s very different to a theatrical experience where you say this is the director’s vision. It’s interesting to reverse it and say ‘You, as the audience, please work, you’ve got to work, you can’t just consume, you’ve got to start putting on your engine’. That’s a big takeaway from this whole experience that I’m still grappling with.
GG: In many ways Blindness is about the limitations of our visual perceptions and about other ways of knowing and experiencing, in the theatre and beyond. How important is it for you and your collaborators to challenge the contemporary predominance of visual forms and to explore and integrate other modes of sensorial engagement within your theatrical practice?
WM: With Blindness, we had requests from some producers who just didn’t have the money to put the whole installation in and they asked us, ‘Could we do this just in the studio space without the lights?’ ‘Could we do this just an hour in darkness?’ And we all said, even the sound guys said, ‘No, that’s not the thing. What we’ve created is a sound and light installation’. I think when we talk about visuals, of course, lights are part of that, but normally lights light something. Here, suddenly, glimmers of light toy with your perception. One of the things we couldn’t do at the Donmar but we did then on tour, for example in Toronto, was suddenly, in part three, we just lit the whole auditorium, which until then was not revealed. There was a safety curtain in between and suddenly the emptiness of an auditorium of 2700 seats appeared over a cue time of nine minutes, so super slowly, and it was, in a way, a massive site of loss, 80 people on stage looking at a huge empty auditorium. One of the key things about why I wanted to include that image of the empty auditorium was the effect of the pandemic on the cultural sector. Madeleine van der Zwaan, the managing director of the Royal Theatre Carré, was the first to programme Blindness after the Donmar and she phoned me afterwards and said ‘I just burst into complete tears’ because it was that moment in history when the artistic director had to furlough so many people and also that memory of the auditorium three months earlier, full of laughing, fun people and then suddenly there was this eerie quietness and nothingness. So, we decided, also with AURICLE, that the visual side should never be literal, even if you work with video. It could be a light source suddenly encircling you or it could be strips of light as a video but never to go literal, because otherwise you’re just doing a film and that’s not the language we are looking for.
GG: In Blindness, we don’t see the action of the narrative performed on stage but rather hear it reported by the storyteller. That removes the logistical challenges of figurative visual stagings. It also, as you say, emphasises audience imagination, since we engage with the images aurally and are responsible for elaborating the specifics of what we hear.Footnote6 In headphone theatre, how does sonic work engage with ideas of audience and community?
WM: I think that’s the defining question. I hadn’t done twenty headphone shows like Ben and Max Ringham. They felt like they would like to do a different step, so they actually proposed the binaural technology but the main question was whether the headphones make it a very singular, isolated perspective. You don’t download and sit on your own, so it’s still collective as an experience but you are with your headphones. They said, and I agreed, ‘How can we create a collective experience?’ And so the surround sound technology came in. For The Passenger we started from this vision that everyone would be in a train carriage. You have headrests and then there are mini speakers as well, meaning you get close to a binaural effect but it can still be very close and surround you. The main idea behind the train carriage was to explore how you tell the story that a guy’s among you, whose feeling and observing everyone else, and that we become passengers, complicit or not complicit, in this journey. I am actually quite a visual director. I also really enjoy working with actors, and the one limitation I have felt in the making of The Passenger in our first workshop, when we recorded for two days with actors, and then it’s a huge sound programming task, is ‘What’s my role here?’ Of course, I had conversations with lights and video but I did think that in this process the technology should support and not be the primal concern of everyday. It’s a hybrid form between live performance and an installation.
GG: It again brings us back to the kind of questions that the syndemic has demanded we ask about theatre and performance, and about where liveness is in this work. It seems so much of what’s theatrical, in Blindness and The Passenger, has to do with encounter and immersion, rather than the physical presence of in-person performers. So that’s something I wanted to ask you about. In an early trailer for The Passenger, Max Ringham talks about the piece as a ‘new form distinct from theatre’. How do you characterise these formal experiments across sound, light, and video? Is it installation or what language would you use to describe it?
WM: I’m still wrestling with this. I think we’re all questioning now, what’s the next step? What have we learnt from the workshops of The Passenger and what have we learnt from Blindness? I think all of us were so pleased that it resonated with audiences so much. I think we’d all experienced collective trauma, some people with loss of life, and, at the end of that show, there is this sense of hope. It was very, very simple but it was the sense of, life goes on, in a way. Formally, we all said it would be most interesting to continue without performers, but, maybe because we’ve all been locked up for so much time, that encounter between one actor, two actors on a stage, is something also to really cherish. And I got a strong longing for that, I noticed, and I don’t want to say that the future lies only in actor-free performances. We had 4 Sound Designers in the workshop programming on their desktops and I suddenly had a real feeling of loss. I know technology is part of everyone’s thing now, if you were a film editor or whatever, but I suddenly had this moment of thinking ‘hold on, this is not quite how I imagine we should go forward’. I think a fusion between live and recorded would be really interesting as a next step.
GG: You describe your work with AURICLE as ‘mixing the analogue and the digital’ in order to create immersive environments. Can you elaborate? Where does the analogue come in?
WM: One of the lessons for me emerging from the pandemic was that I wanted to invest more into the digital. I’ve done fifty theatre productions in my life and I felt that I don’t want to just keep doing the fifty-first, fifty-second. You need a new step and I feel this is the right step. The analogue for me would be the messiness of a rehearsal room or the real-life breathing of an actor, and that coupled with digital technology is interesting. Suddenly technology will enhance the actors’ performances and take you somewhere completely different. So, that’s where I am at at the moment. We have lots of conversations but we’re not a company in the form that we have everyday meetings. We’re just freelancers who are hopping around. But the questions are big. At the moment, for example, I hardly go to the theatre because everyone, I think, feels like something needs to change, fundamentally. From an audience point of view, I think that’s clearly about the social responsibility of theatre and also looking after artists. I think, as a freelancer, I had moments of screaming at this whole system because you felt completely dropped like an egg. There was no safety net. I basically received no money from the government here in the UK or in Germany where I also work. I was lucky enough that actually the royalties from Blindness got me through these one-and-a-half tough years. So I was one of the lucky ones, let’s put it that way. But you do feel betrayed. You feel like you’ve invested so much of your time and skills, but it just affected everyone. And then when you hear stories of office workers who got seventy percent of furlough it makes you wonder what society wants and whether the arts are valued at all in the UK beyond the shallowness of celebrity culture. When you talk about the political, I still feel a real anger towards – I can’t even be specific, I can’t name a name – I think it’s the system that is broken. And maybe it was broken all along. Of course, I’m not from this country but I’ve invested quite a lot of time in this country and I do know that the theatre funding and everything in Germany, for example, is much better but still people tell the same stories – that as a freelancer – ‘Oh my God’.
GG: The syndemic really did underscore persisting inequalities and raise big questions about how we do this work of making theatre and who can participate. Using sound and speech, to structure our encounters, Blindness takes up the dramatic potential of sound installation but also of techniques long established in practices of audio description (designed to give visual information in verbal forms, mainly but not always for blind visitors). I would like to hear more about what you think sound-based work has to offer in terms of theatre’s accessibility. There is also an emphasis in your work on the three-dimensionality of sound and sound as an architecture for performance. Can you talk more too about sonic space and immersion?
WM: We did do audio description – I always wondered if that was really necessary but the feedback was that it was good to describe the lighting happening. So, I think this kind of work makes steps towards some communities. The binaural was an eye-opener for me. I think every director in the world dreams about the possibility of 360 degrees immersion because you normally are working within the proscenium frame of the stage. Cinema can do this as well but this whole shift from working with distance to that sense that you get someone so close to you is a real dream. How Ben and Max Ringham perceive a piece of work from a sonic point of view is so interesting. I think I am visual, in a way, and musical, but I don’t take the first route of saying how could this world be translated into an audio sculpture. Again, I’m not that kind of person who’s done thirty years of audio drama, but it’s so enriching to have these kinds of conversations which just open up possibilities.
Conclusion
Conversation is pertinent to the context of Hear Tell as a mode concerned with the exchange of ideas and how theatrical practice emerges and is accounted for through acts of narrative, reporting, and description. In his recounting of the processes, discussions, and contexts that inform his recent productions, Meierjohann reminds us of the imaginative space afforded by verbal and sonic theatrical forms and the possibilities of experiments at the intersection of sound installation and performative presence. As the syndemic moves our attention from theatrical co-presence to sonic immersion, it simultaneously emphasises the cultural workers and connections that create performance and the precarious conditions of artistic labour. Meierjohann expounds the potential that sound offers for expanding our perceptions, in the theatre and beyond, and the ways in which binaural technologies render three-dimensional aural architectures that develop new kinds of affective installation and proximate encounter.
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Gwyn Donlon, who transcribed the unedited sound recording of this interview.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Georgina Guy
Georgina Guy is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is co-editor of this Special Issue of Contemporary Theatre Review 33.4 on ‘Hear Tell: Describing, Reporting, Narrating’. Her book Theatre, Exhibition, and Curation (2016) was shortlisted for the TaPRA Early Career Research Prize and formed the basis for a research-led evening course at Tate Modern, London exploring theatrical approaches to curation and how performance is collected by art museums. This interview speaks to a larger project about sonic curation and installation across theatre and museum settings.
Walter Meierjohann
Walter Meierjohann is a Director, Lecturer, former Artistic Director (HOME: Manchester, NEUBAU, State Theatre Dresden) and International Associate Director at the Young Vic Theatre, London. Walter has directed over 50 productions in Germany and the UK at theatres including The Young Vic, The Barbican, The Donmar Warehouse, Residenztheater Munich, Staatsschauspiel Dresden, Schauspielhaus Graz, The Sophiensaele and Arena, Berlin, for Peter Stein’s Faust Ensemble. In Opera, he worked with the late Klaus-Michael Grüber on his productions of Aida (Nederlands Opera, Amsterdam) and Don Giovanni (Ruhrfestspiele). Walter has written and directed a short film Dear Anna, starring Kathryn Hunter. He is a founding member and Director of AURICLE.
Notes
1. Donmar Warehouse, ‘Blindness UK Tour and International Transfers’, https://www.donmarwarehouse.com/blindness-transfers/ (accessed April 25, 2023).
2. See Richard Horton, ‘Offline: COVID-19 Is Not a Pandemic’, Lancet 396, no. 10255 (September 26, 2020); Emily Mendenhall, ‘The COVID-19 Syndemic Is Not Global: Context Matters’, Lancet 396, no. 10264 (November 28, 2020); as well as Georgina Guy, ‘Staged Installation, Reported Speech, and Syndemic Images in Blindness and Caretaker (2020)’, in ‘Aural/Oral Dramaturgies’, eds. Duška Radosavljević and Flora Pitrolo, special issue, Critical Stages/Scènes critiques 24 (2021).; and Georgina Guy, ‘Theatre as Installation in the Syndemic Architectures of Rimini Protokoll and Battersea Arts Center’, in ‘Installation’, special issue, Theatre Journal 74, no. 3 (2022): 277–301.
3. Hannah Thompson, and Simon Stephens. ‘Reclaiming Blindness’. Donmar Warehouse, 2020.
4. Guy’s recent research develops a theory of post-syndemic performance that re-stages theatre as installation. See, for example, ‘Staged Installation, Reported Speech, and Syndemic Images’; and ‘Theatre as Installation’, 277–301.
5. Judith Butler, and George Yancy. ‘Interview: Mourning Is a Political Act Amid the Pandemic and Its Disparities (Republication)’. Bioethical Inquiry (2020): 483–87.
6. See Georgina Guy, ‘From Visible Object to Reported Action: The Performance of Verbal Images in Visual Art Museums’, in ‘Theatre and the Museum / Cultures of Display’, special issue, Theatre Journal 69, no. 3 (2017): 339–359 (340).