LET IMAGINATION SEND YOU OUT TO NEW DIMENSIONS
Livestreamers urged to wear blindfolds for 3-D sound
Even for live theatre, Tomorrow’s Child was an unusually immersive experience that required audience members to shut out their surroundings.
Since 2014, when Ghost River Theatre first adapted Ray Bradbury’s trippy sci-fi tale into a theatrical experience, thousands of people across the country have taken in the play. To be clear, that doesn’t mean they have seen the play. They heard it. Audiences from Calgary to Winnipeg to B.C. have been blindfolded and marched to their seat for a sightless, audio-only performance.
“It was really interesting to watch people listening,” says Ghost River artistic director Eric Rose, who adapted Bradbury’s story with David van Belle and Matthew Waddell for Ghost River Theatre.
“We’ve had way over 5,000 people listen to the show blindfolded in the normal theatrical setup that we have. It’s been amazing to watch people’s imaginative response to the show because you’re creating all the imagery of the show in your mind. You can almost watch people’s thought bubbles appear above them. Over the years, it’s been really fascinating to look at, when you go very deeply into one of the senses, how rich the material can become and how textured the landscapes and spatial dynamics of sound can be.”
Teaming up with Vertigo Theatre, Ghost River will now enter a new phase of this theatrical experiment. Starting June 4, a newly remastered, binaural Tomorrow ’s Child will be livestreamed for ticketed performances.
“It’s really interesting to bring it to people’s home where people are feeling a bit isolated, or trapped even, in their own headspace as well as their physical space,” Rose says. “I think this experience really offers the ability for people to be immersed and allow their imagination to travel into new dimensions.”
Given Ghost River’s track record of cheerfully subverting theatrical norms, it’s hardly surprising that Tomorrow’s Child goes beyond a mere livestream. The company is known for a series of productions that made unusual sensory demands of its audience.
Scent Bar, which ran at a former steak house on Stephen Avenue in 2017, was developed for the audience members’ sense of smell. The year before that, Ghost River was again asking audience members to don blindfolds for Touch, a collaboration with the Aveda Institute of Calgary that had audience members “walk, swim, lounge and cavort” through another sensory experience, according to Postmedia theatre critic Louis B. Hobson.
Most recently, 2019’s Giant explored the strange life of professional wrestler Andre Giant by having massive puppets and puppet parts interact with actors.
The remastered, remixed production of Tomorrow’s Child is designed for headphones or earbuds and uses something called binaural recording, a sort of audio 3-D.
“It’s a kind of recording technique that mimics the way human ears listen,” says Rose.
“It really helps to create this 360-degree, three-dimensional sound experience. We’re remixing the original sound experience into something very specifically designed for headphones and earbuds for people. We’re really excited because it means somebody in India or Vietnam or Africa or in Marlborough can buy a ticket and listen to it and have that kind of transportive experience.”
Rose says audience members listening at home will be encouraged to blindfold themselves to get the
full experience.
The unique soundscape involves everything from a choir singing original music at an old church in Montreal, to a Romanian sound designer’s recording of a kindergarten class playing in the U.S., to music by synth artist Jesse Osborne-lanthier (Noir) and Sarah Albu.
It’s all in service to Bradbury’s 1948 short story that imagined a retro-futuristic 1980s where a couple’s baby is accidentally born into another dimension due to a malfunctioning “birthing mech.” As with much of Bradbury’s work, the themes have a certain timelessness to them. But Rose thinks they also overlap with the strange times we find ourselves in during COVID-19.
“The story is really about the experience of Polly, the mother, who goes through postpartum depression in trying to figure out how to deal with isolation because she can’t leave her house, she can’t expose the child to the outdoors.
“In many ways, she goes through this difficult period of time trying to figure out how to communicate with the child and deal with the isolation of being a new mother. I think it will have a lot of resonance with people right now.”