The encounter

When I joined the Encounter, it was a work in progress, and the working title for the project was ‘Amazon Beaming’ (from the book of the same name that inspired the project).

We worked on the show for two weeks, with Fergus Mount, Pete Malkin and Gareth Fry working together on sound. On the final day, we presented a showing of our work so far to an invited audience in the rehearsal room at the Jerwood Studios. We has to set up wired headphones for more than sixty people in quite a short space of time, which felt like quite a challenge at the time. At this stage, I operated prerecorded audio on Qlab and Ableton Live, and Pete operated mics and loopers through Ableton Live and mixing on the desk. The show went down very well, and as a result more rehearsal time was set to develop it. At the end of this rehearsal period, the first public performance was to an audience at the Schaubühne in Berlin, as a work in progress. At this stage, we had most of the story, but performed an improvised ending.

EDINburgh international festival 2015

The Encounter’s formal opening was at the Edinburgh International Festival 2015. Here, we got the full epic design of the anechoic wall for the first time (designer Michael Levine), with video projection by Will Duke, along with lx design from Paul Anderson. I remember looking at the wall and the video art, simply as the projection was being lined up with the wall (see picture below) and thinking how stunning it was already.

When we returned to rehearsals, Gareth announced that I would be swapping with Pete and taking over the mics and looping role. We were joined by Ella Wahlström who took over my previous role. We had the full sound set up for rehearsals, and as well as the show developing, the physical equipment and programming developed constantly too. Networked together, we would work as a team finding and creating sounds, operating and mixing live as Simon and other performers tried out new sections, and editing and adding to the programming all at the same time. I might be using an effect on Simon’s voice while Gareth would edit the parameters of that effect, manipulating manually before automation was programmed; and we would frequently perform long experimental sections with all four of us playing with sound and creating more as we went along. Gareth and Pete constantly recorded what we made, and made and developed programming in Ableton and Qlab to enable us to repeat what we had done, and to explore new sections with increasingly exciting potential.

uk and european tour 2015-2016

After Edinburgh, venues all over the world wanted to host the show. We started a tour to various UK and European festivals. In French speaking countries, Simon delivered his introduction in French, so that was an added challenge as in operating the show, I had to follow various live instructions at the start of the show.

In 2016 we performed a run at The Barbican in London. During this time, we were interviewed by Kirsty Gillmore for SoundGirls; you can read the review and interviews here:

https://soundgirls.org/the-encounter-a-sound-design-review/

https://soundgirls.org/the-encounter-a-sound-design-review-part-2/

If you are interested in the finer details of the operation of the show, these are well worth a read.

broadway 2016

In summer 2016, we went back into rehearsals, to prepare for shows in the John Golden Theatre on Broadway.