Art and culture, theater and stage
The team at the Tron Theater in Glasgow hopes their new series of radio plays, Earwigs, will offer intimate experiences to counter the loneliness of lockdown, writes Joyce McMillan
Tuesday, February 2, 2021, 4:26 p.m.
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Some of the creatives behind the Tron’s Earwig series, clockwise from top left: Stef Smith, Johnny McKnight, Hannah Lavery, Finn Den Hertog, Jo Clifford and Danny Krass
The visual image that accompanies the Tron Theater’s Earwig program is as eye-catching as it is beautiful: a close-up of a human ear printed in a glorious soft blue, with the shaded inner parts of the ear painted in an equally soft brown. It’s an incredibly intimate picture by photographer Niall Walker. and it captures an essential aspect of this new Tron season of six audio pieces commissioned and designed by renowned Glasgow theater sound designer Danny Krass.
These tiny recorded symphonies of sound and text last between seven and 15 minutes and are sometimes of a meditative quality, sometimes more narrative. But with every piece designed to be listened to through headphones, Danny Krass knows that he wants them to provide a truly immersive experience and demand a different quality of short-term attention from an everyday radio play.
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“I want the listeners to have the feeling that these pieces are happening in their heads,” says Krass from a studio in Tron, where he is putting the finishing touches on some recordings, “and almost have the feeling that they are the central figure are. It’s not so much about not having a fourth wall as of not having any walls at all. I want the sound to penetrate fully, as if it was coming from both the listeners’ minds and the outside world. “
The pieces will appear online every Wednesday through March 10th. and the first recording, Stef Smith’s The Deadlift, provides a powerful example of the season’s inner, meditative quality as Smith – with sound and music of Krass and percussion by musician Alon Ilsar – tries to capture the powerful absorption in the moment and the hopes to personal healing and change brought about by lockdown exercise routines, in this case weight lifting.
Next, on February 3, Hannah Lavery takes up the Russian legend of Baba Yaga, the old woman who lives in a strange forest house propped up on chicken legs. The season also includes works by Johnny McKnight, Morna Pearson, Jo Clifford and Luke Sutherland, all performed by a formidable group of actors including Ann Louise Ross, Robbie Jack and George Anton.
“It was a great experience for me,” says Krass, “being able to lead a project and actually commissioning and helping to create works by artists with whom I have worked and admired so much in the past. With Stef Smith and Morna Pearson, for example, I have known and loved their work since I was the sound designer on their Traverse pieces Swallow and The Artist Man And The Mother Woman in the early 2010s, other writers involved. I think that sound design is often best when the audience is barely aware of it. It should be about supporting what the actors do with the text created by the writer. And working in this way with so many great actors and writers has left me with very strong feelings about the kind of work that interests me and that I would like to help create. “
Krass was born in Sydney, Australia in 1979 and started playing with the Australian Theater for Young People while still at school. He completed his training as a musician and studied anthropology and performance studies. He says anthropology of either is more useful in understanding the dynamics of theater and its ritual and cathartic properties. He first came to Scotland in the mid-2000s and settled here in 2007. His partner is Scottish actress, writer and director Rosalind Sydney, with whom he now has two children. and for over a dozen years he has assembled an impressive portfolio of work with companies ranging from Visible Fictions and Catherine Wheels to Traverse, the National Theater of Scotland and David Leddy’s late and much-grieved Fire Exit venture.
In Scottish and British theater, however, it is unusual for an artist to shift sideways from one of the technical fields of theater to creating and directing his own projects. So far Danny Krass has only directed one project in Scotland, his 2015 production A Kind Of Silence for Solar Bear; and actor and director Finn den Hertog, who works with Krass on directing Earwig, is particularly excited that the Tron’s lockdown projects are opening up that kind of space this spring.
“I think it’s great if, despite all the downsides of this terrible pandemic, we can use this time to encourage artists to develop in new directions. and I think the Tron is starting to do that in a really interesting way, ”says den Hertog. “I’ve been involved in a lot of audio and radio plays during my career. But these catchy tunes are much more haunting and transporting – if that’s a word – than a normal radio play. They are like pieces of music that contain the sound of the human voice; and if they were ever performed live after the pandemic I would probably see them as dance pieces rather than spoken word theater. “
And Krass agrees. “Yeah, I think the obvious way to do this would be some kind of dance. Both Finn and I love theater that involves dance and movement and it tends to connect with people very directly, which I hope these pieces will do. We are living in a drought of human interaction right now, and people so lack the intimacy of human physical connection. I want these sound pieces to feel a bit like a hug to people. An intimate experience and an act of empathy to counter the loneliness of these very strange times. “
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