Chamber Made’s Hi-Viz Practice Exchange 2019 comprised two days of artist talks, practice interrogation, networking and art dates, and workshops.

In this recording documentary theatre maker Roslyn Oades discusses her 'headphone verbatim' practice and the evolution of her work from theatre-based performances to immersive site-specific audio experiences.

Transcript

Right. Firstly, I just want to say thank you for having me. It's such a privilege to be in a room with so many great artists, and also makes me feel a little bit nervous. But yeah, I'm really thrilled to have a chance to share some of my practice and I'm going to—there's a lot I could talk about, but I'm going to specifically try and talk about sound, my relationship between sound and theatre.

And my name is Roslyn and I am—there's three strands to my practice. One, I am a voice artist, so I voice cartoons, commercials, and audio books. So I'm of a vocal instrument and I also have a practice of signature, what I call signature performance works, which are the works that I conceive and make. And I'm also a collaborator, so I collaborate with other artists as a writer, director, dramaturg, someone who's a researcher or sound recordist. And I'd just like to acknowledge that there are those three strands to my practice and that that is how I'm sustainable as a freelance, a full-time freelance artist. And it's also been really good for my mental health that I have those three strands, it actually enables me to keep going.

But today I'm just going to talk about my signature practice as a theatre maker and documentary artist. So in the year 2000, I was living in London for a while as a performer, and I came across, at the London Actor Centre, a director called Mark Wing-Davey, who ran a workshop called Theatre Without Paper. And I met Mark and this workshop was inspired by a rehearsal technique he'd witnessed while working with an artist in New York called Anna Deavere Smith, who some of you may have heard of. She's an amazing actor, but she's also a theatre maker. And in her rehearsal process, she interviews people and makes a sort of documentary theatre as a one woman show. She interviews people and then she edits those interviews, audio interviews, and she puts on headphones and she rehearses their exact vocal print. She essentially memorises not just what they're saying, but their vocal print, the way they speak, and then she works and works with that. And then once she's memorised, then she takes off the headphones and she performs these incredibly virtuoso performance pieces.

And Mark was quite intrigued by the way she rehearsed and he ran a workshop called Theatre Without Paper, sharing this rehearsal technique, and I became as a voice artist, I became really fascinated with that particular rehearsal technique. 'Cause I guess I think a lot about the meaning in the way people speak and this idea that I believe that everyone's voice is as unique as a fingerprint. There's so much information in the way someone speaks, how fast they speak, how confident they are, what their background is. There's all this information. I became almost more interested in the way people speak than what...