There’s one show at SummerWorks that you can’t see – you can only hear it.
Tomorrow’s Child from Calgary’s Ghost River Theatre is an immersive audio experience where audience members are blindfolded before taking their seats. The play is Eric Rose’s adaptation of a classic Ray Bradbury sci-fi story about a family whose first child is accidentally born into another dimension and appears to them only as a blue pyramid with tentacles.
“We wanted to see what would happen if we chose one element of theatre and went very deeply into it,” says Rose from Calgary, where Tomorrow’s Child has been mounted a handful of times over the past two years. “It’s both performance and experience. We were interested in creating a one-of-a-kind show based around one of the senses – and the first one we chose was sound.”
Rose is tight-lipped about exactly how the sounds are rendered in the theatre, but hints that it’s more than just a radio play.
“It’s a secret how the show is animated. I actually can’t tell you. We literally keep people in the dark. I can tell you that before audiences enter the theatre there’s a quick lobby presentation to make sure people feel safe and understand that no one will touch them or disturb them while they’re blindfolded. We designed the experience to be an imaginative one, and we want the audience not to be primed by too many specifics going in.”
Attendees witness what Rose calls “an internal spectacle. The theatre is happening in the audience’s mind, and they get to create the set, the images and cast the show themselves.”
Rose says he chose the story in part because Bradbury imagined a noisy future.
“Bradbury wrote the story in 1947, just after the Second World War, but set it in a futuristic 1989, which of course is now our recent past, and we loved the retro-futuristic element. The main characters travel everywhere by helicopter, and Bradbury’s future society is predominantly mechanical, so everything has moving parts and makes sound. So the world is richly textured in all sorts of ways when it comes to environments and objects with sound.”
Themes of disability and dimension-slipping are also teased out by the blindfolding.
“Sight is so dominant among our senses that when you take it away you get an entirely different experience of a space. Things your mind normally filters out are suddenly central. So it’s dramatic when you take it away, especially because we’ve become even more visually dependent since we started interacting with screens all the time. Being blindfolded, you’re isolated, just like the mother in the story feels isolated after her child is born in the wrong dimension. The deprivation of sight allows you to put yourself in someone else’s position and to take in the world from a new standpoint.”
Rose says that this concept has brought new audiences to the theatre.
“A third of our audience is theatre people, a third are people interested in audio work, audiophiles – we’ll have an amazing sound system in Toronto that will blow their minds – and a third group I call adventurers, who are interested in having unique experiences.
“One of my great pleasures in doing this show is to watch people listen deeply.”
Tomorrow’s Child opens Thursday (August 4) at the Artscape Sandbox.
Get more SummerWorks 2016 here.
stage@nowtoronto.com | @jordanbimm
