Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again.
Sound Designer
Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. was performed as a part of the Hangar Theatre’s Wedge season. As a design team, we talked about the show exploring the question, how can there be a feminist revolution when the language and patriarchy is already set up against it? Director, Sophia Watt, drew inspiration from a butcher shop to express the idea of women being degraded and torn down as if being prepared to be sold on a shelf at a store; which also plays off of the idea of comparing women to meat in today's society. As a result, the design team worked to create a stark, sterile environment for the world of the play.
Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. by Alice Birch
Director - Sophia Watt
Scenic Design - Matthew B. Kornegay
Lighting Design - Caitlin E. Brown
Sound Design - Tommy Truelsen
Costume Design - Vicky Butler
Photography - Rachel Philipson
Design
Our director desired “searing clarity” in the storytelling from our designs. The script itself does not follow a specific story and is rather a collection of various scenes with related subject matter. For sound, I added clarity through using a combination of electronic and human voices as well as known melodies or songs in combination with unconventional musical sounds. The voices were used to introduce each of the scenes of the play with the title provided from the script. The music accompanied mimed, onstage action which was performed through silhouettes.
The soundscape for this play was not fully realized in the idea that the auditory scape was not created for each location that a scene would have taken place in. Rather, that ambient soundscape was layered into the transitional underscore to give some context to the placement of the scene. However, the third act of the show included some underscoring which utilized a low frequency sine wave, in order to add a feeling of anxiety to the space, along with a variety of unconventional sounds layered on top of each other to create a chaotic auditory scape for the scene. During this part of the show, one of the female characters is bombarded by other actors with sporadic moments of dialogue which inhibit her from thinking or even being able to get a thought out. The sounds are intended to give us a glimpse of the chaos within her mind during this scene.
The soundscape followed the play as well as the other design elements on a journey of decomposition of a world that we all know. The process culminated in a scene between four women who came to the realization that in order to see change in the world, they would have to fully dismantle society. This scene was accompanied by a piece of Gregorian chant by one of the first female composers, Hildegard of Bingen (this can be heard in the "Act 3 to the End of Show" sound clip). This chant is intended to be performed for the feast of St. Ursula, the patron saint for educating young women.
