Sound maker Roslyn Oades was commissioned by Chamber Made to create a podcast series. Roslyn conducted a series of art dates with artists about their practice, with conversations particularly referencing how they have been listening at this moment in time.
Credits
To discover more about Adena Jacob’s body of work, and view documentation from these projects, visit her company website, Fraught Outfit, here.
The Howling Girls excerpts heard in this episode were recorded by ABC Classic FM. Learn more about this Sydney Chamber Opera project, including a full list of credits, here.
The sound-based art crush Adena mentioned was Jenny Hval. You can find her albums on Soundcloud here.
Audiosketch title music is by Fia Fiell. This piece, All in the Same Room, is from Fia Fiell’s 2018 album of the same name, which you can find on bandcamp here.
Additional sound design by Roslyn Oades, uses the following samples from Freesound: Plane take-off from Skavsta airport by arnaud coutancier andAttendant announces decent bybigfriendlyjiantlicensed under CCBYNC 3.0,in conjunction with recordings from Roslyn’s own archive.
Transcript
{Signature title music by Fia Fiell}
INTRO: Welcome to Audiosketch, a new podcast dedicated to innovative artists working across performance art and music. I’m Roslyn Oades, and in this episode of Audiosketch, I’m thrilled to be on an ‘in real life’ art date with critically acclaimed theatre director Adena Jacobs. Adena’s distinct body of theatre work encompasses feminist renderings of ancient text, hallucinatory images and operatic sound scores. If you like your theatre, wild, haunting and intelligently crafted, Adena’s work is a must see.
{Signature title music by Fia Fiell}
ROS: Right, that’s, you know…
ADENA: (Laughs)That’s, that’s great.
ROS: Is that in the ballpark? It’s hard to describe your work, actually. It kind of hovers between being really visceral and so sophisticated. It’s sort of hard to define.
ADENA: I’ve really struggled to define it over the years for marketing purposes and grant purposes because it’s, it’s intentionally in between all of those things. Sometimes descriptions feel too heavy-handed at times, somehow.
ROS: Which must be satisfying as an artist because it’s clearly not meant to be a piece of written work, it’s… it exists as this visual, aural, visceral thing?
ADENA: I think so. I mean, it’s kind of… I’m so conscious of the transaction between audience and, and performance. Or audience and scenography and sensory environment, that in a way that is where the content is largely made. And so, you know, after the fact you have photos and a video or whatever, and that does capture the tone of the show, or the visual language of the show, but it actually is a whole other product. It’s not, the thing itself. Which I guess is live performance, which we’ve all been missing, very much.
ROS: Yes. I think there’s something like a conjuring when I come and see one of your works. And it is about being in this space with people. And I don’t know, you draw back to something quite ancient. Yeah, it’s a bit of magic that happens.
ADENA: There is a witchiness that that I always feel like is somehow embedded in the, in the collaboration’s I have. In those theatre works where we’re working from ancient texts, we’re working really long from improvisations and in a kind of a hallucinatory mode or definitely an asocial kind of mode. And, I feel like through those improvisations, this conjuring that you’re talking about, arises in some way. It’s kind of about the thing that’s created between those performers and between the composer, between the designer, that’s sort of made on the spot and then somehow transferred to the audience. I really enjoy that aspect of the actual making process where things erupt and arise. And then you just think, how can I capture that and create that experience for the audience that we’re all experiencing in that rehearsal room.
ROS: The first question I like to ask all my guests on Audiosketch is, Adena, if you were a sound right now, what...