If Music be the Food of Love, then Stuff Your Face
If you have seen any of our plays or heard us talk about our work, then you will probably be thinking that the title of this blog is somewhat inappropriate, given that we, er…well, the truth is…well, if you must know, the thing is that we… we don’t use music in our performances, alright?! There, I’ve said it. ARE YOU HAPPY NOW? ARE YOU??
For those of you who haven’t (correctly) judged me to be a bit weird, and naturally proceeded to swiftly close the page on which you were reading this blog post, I will continue in a calmer fashion: Mario and I don’t tend to use music in our plays. There are two reasons for this:
1) We focus on psycho-realistic naturalism, and unfortunately, real life is not a musical. The nuances and minutiae of facial expressions, body language and speech give us a lot to work with, and we want our audiences to watch and listen to the characters without being distracted. Besides, we want you to make up your own mind about what you’re watching: it would be out of character for us to try to guide your perception of the play’s mood with music.
2) Neither of us knows anything about sound design.
That’s not to say that Mario and I think that sound and music design are a bad idea for all performances: in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The best piece of theatre that I have ever seen was about 20% dialogue and 80% music, and I know that Mario is a veritable connoisseur of opera. It’s just that, for us, music would be an extra layer of sensory experience that we wouldn’t know what to do with. If one of our plays is a Sunday roast, then music is ketchup: a brilliant idea under most other circumstances, but somehow, not quite right for us this time. We’ll just stick with gravy.
In a way it’s unfortunate that music has no place in our performances, because it massively informs our rehearsal process. Mario and I have been known to spend hours compiling music playlists for rehearsals, particularly when we are planning extensive physical workshops. And music is such an enormous part of our lives in general: night clubs, bars, shopping centres, underground stations and even theatre foyers play music, setting the mood and having an immediate impact upon your sensory experience. And this is good, and it’s important: music IS food, and not just of love: of hope, of ideas and memories. Music is something that you have an emotional response to, not an intellectual one. Liking a One Direction song doesn’t make you any less intelligent than someone who enjoys Beethoven, because music doesn’t need you to have a 2:1 degree or above: it just needs you to listen, and respond to it in your own way.
So if music is so important, but we don’t use it in our plays, then why am I telling you to stuff your face with it?
Because music is a way to access thoughts and feelings that you wouldn’t usually interact with. Music and theatre have that in common: you can’t exactly have them with you during a job interview or in the middle of a break-up, but they are there for you when you need to be reminded of who you are and what it means to be a person; an ordinary person, ambling through life with no more idea of how to be happy than any of the rest of us. Listening to music is something that informs a lot of what Mario and I are trying to achieve with our plays, and even though you won’t hear any specific examples of it during our performances, you will hopefully be able to identify what we’ve learned from music in our lives and in rehearsals: technical elements like pitch, tone and rhythm, but also (and more importantly) how to make you feel and think; how to get you to listen.
Empty Photo Theatre 