Thespians know David Rosenberg as a founding artist of Shunt and a theatre director who indulges in experimentation; Run Riot regulars will also be familiar with his untraditional approach to interviews, which are always blissfully blurb free and intrigue heavy.

This time around the focus is on Fiction, ‘an immersive sound journey in total darkness’, which sees Rosenberg team up with writer Glen Neath again - the duo previously worked on Ring. We tried to get behind the pitch-black hue of their latest collaboration; we found out how to verbally kick them in the stomach should you not like the piece, why buying a ticket means there will always be someone to bail you out of jail, and the importance of Gaffa Tape in the creative process.

Run Riot: Binaural sound has featured in your work for some time now. What have you discovered about the theatrical possibilities of the technology over the years? Where do you hope to take it next?

David Rosenberg: Binaural sound recording is a technology that is almost 100 years old, using various microphone configurations or dummy heads to record sounds that, when played back through headphones, give the listener a very accurate three dimensional sound environment from the perspective of the microphone. This allows each audience member to locate themselves in the centre of what they are hearing.

I have used this technology for several different objectives: Contains Violence and the work I have made with Frauke Requardt (Electric Hotel and Motor Show) all attempted to transport the audience into a distant image, where they can occupy the auditory environment of what they can also see. The audience are simultaneously the voyeurs and the ‘voyees’. There are limitations in how successful this transportation can be because the image is so dominant and is always pushing the sound to submissively agree and reinforce what is seen.

In an effort to humiliate vision we have squeezed all the light out, so all it can do is pathetically limp behind the sound, occasionally offering up incoherent blotches and shadows like a foot-licking gimp. That is the platform for Fiction (and Ring).

The architecture is constructed with sound alone and the audience find themselves in the middle of this environment.

The sound allows each audience member to be spoken to directly - to almost feel the heat of the breath in their ears. They become the hero or at least the hero’s sidekick or at worst an extra in a crowd scene (man 3 coffee shop) but definitely in it.

This is the greatest appeal of working with binaural sound; creating intimacy in live performance has always been a principle concern with all the shows I have made or been involved with. With a very small audience this intimacy is impossible to avoid but as numbers increase it becomes more difficult to maintain a direct line from the performance to the audience. This use of sound helps to straddle the gap.

As virtual reality and augmented reality headsets become more ubiquitous all of this will seem very old fashioned; remembered fondly like vinyl or being lost.

Run Riot: How do you go about devising a text meant for darkness?

David Rosenberg: With Ring and Fiction I have worked with the writer Glen Neath - each show has been a fairly long process to make a script that includes the audience and doesn’t slip into something that can be listened to in a detached way. It needs to feel like a personal journey that is happening because you are there. There is a very thin line between coherence and nonsense and we aim to balance on this line, our arms swinging about violently, no doubt swaying unfavourably over to each side.

We have a fear of making a radio play. If you didn’t like it then say it was like a radio play and we will be properly torn to pieces and you can at least enjoy having made the most effective and painful reproach.

We have always needed to present these shows to an audience before we can really work out what is strong about it and what is unnecessary and too confusing. An earlier version of Fiction toured last year and we have been changing and developing it since.

It is impossible to separate the script from the sound design as much of the meaning and experience is in the way that the audience hears it.

As with Ring (and many previous binaural sound shows that I have made) we work with Max and Ben Ringham who are the composers and sound designers and have accumulated a lot of experience in how to intensify the three-dimensional sound and mess with your brains.

Also messing with brains is the neuroscientist (and Fiction collaborator) Tristan Bekinschtein, whose current work has been concerned with describing different states of consciousness such as awake, sleep, sedation, vegetative state. His latest line of work is primarily looking at how we lose consciousness and how we get it back. This research has fed into the script and helped to structure a multi-layered dream that plays with the transition between being awake and asleep.

The transition from a relaxed to a drowsy state of mind is often accompanied by hypnagogic experiences: most commonly, perceptual imagery, but also linguistic intrusions, i.e. the sudden emergence of unpredictable anomalies in the stream of inner speech.From Intrusions of a drowsy mind: Neural markers of phenomenological unpredictability. Frontiers in Psychology, 2015.

That’s what we’re working with - ‘phenomenological unpredictability’ and also other stuff.

Run Riot: In complete darkness and occupied by the soundscape, the audience will still be surrounded by others in the space. What kind of community (or communal experience) are you intending to create?

David Rosenberg: Fiction is a communal dream that the audience are involved with together. All the audience asleep together in one room - it will be like a giant hostel; the kind you only go to for an hour; a filthy love hotel for groups. Or like one of those power naps that are supposed to be so refreshing and invigorating.

Maybe you will never have to sleep again.

We hope that as the lights come up at the end there will be a sense of having shared a guilty secret and that no one had any of their stuff nicked. My girlfriend’s bike was stolen from outside our flat a few days ago - angle grinders in the dead of night - it must have been a lot of work, I hope they sold it for more than £20. I’m sure no one will be so unlucky in Battersea, but maybe you can bring your bikes up into the theatre. I can’t see any problem with that.

Being in the company of darkness with a collection of strangers is a unifying experience and those strangers will be inexplicably compelled to come up with bail money should you ever be unfortunate enough to require bailing out.

Run Riot: Would you ever direct a performance where the audience comes in, sits down in front of the stage and remains still for the entire show? Would end-on be a challenge to combat or an uninspiring nuisance?

David Rosenberg: I have no principled objections to the traditional configuration of an audience looking at a stage and there are lots of things to explore with this set up that are too difficult or impossible to explore with a mobile audience. It’s just not what I’ve been doing. I’m not sure if I would know how to make a show for an auditorium. My interest has always been in messing around with the audience and putting them in positions to view things from different physical perspectives.

Some of these experiments have failed.

I once performed in a play, which I enjoyed very much, and had I done it better then I’m sure the audience would have too. I hope that one day I will find a way to make more use of the state of the art equipment, heating and practical seating arrangements of our nation’s theatre buildings.

Working outside of theatres or using theatres in a configuration they weren’t designed for is also a massive pain in the arse. (see chemical toilet anecdote)

How do you ensure absolute darkness in the space? What happens to the brain when it realises it can’t make out shapes and contours?

David Rosenberg: To achieve the level of darkness that we need for Fiction takes a shitty amount of work and an unholy amount of Gaffa Tape. Every tiny crack in the floor, walls and ceiling needs to be covered, every tiny LED warning light covered. Then after sitting for 20 minutes in the dark new chinks of light reveal themselves and the whole process needs to be repeated. (see previous Run Riot interview on Ring.)

The darkness needs to be so absolute that it is almost palpable, it becomes a thing, not just an absence, it feels thick and velvety. It is unlike any darkness that one experiences in the natural world outside of deep caves. Unnatural darkness...the devil’s work.

Often people shut their eyes during the show because the darkness presses in on them and they are weak and scared by their own mortality. If your eyes stay open then your brain will try to convince you that you can see; shadows emerge and you imagine the outline of your own hands. But they aren’t really your hands, these ones are much bigger.

The sound can be focussed on intensely, you will hear much, much more. The sounds in the headphones get muddled with the sounds of the audience around you: coughs, breathing, shifting about. I was once sat next to someone with a prosthetic heart valve, (a Bjork-Shiley tilting disc) I could hear it gently clicking in the deep background.

If it all gets too much then you can take off your headphones and have a little sleep and when it is over you will be woken up gently and then asked to take your bike and leave.

What happens once you take the recording into the space? How much time and precision work does the ‘set up’ take? Does it limit how mobile (or tour-able) Fiction is?

David Rosenberg: Aside from the aforementioned blackout issues and hidden microphones (although I don’t think I did mention those) there are loads of armchairs to arrange - it is a comfy show, one that you can really sink into. Comfort is everything - if you are not comfortable then you can ask for your money back. It is also a lecture so we advise that you bring a pen, memory is so unreliable. If Elizabeth Loftus, the cognitive psychologist, is to be believed you can quite easily plant false memories into the heads of most people...eyewitness accounts are treacherous. Don’t believe anyone anymore. My earliest memory was of a beach hut in Frinton-on-Sea but it turned out that I have never been there.

There is a concept in magic in which the trick is constructed in order to create a false memory of the effect - so when someone describes what happened they are describing something that misses out a few vital points and now the effect is truly impossible. I keep hoping we will happily stumble across a theatrical equivalent of this sneaky concept.

Fictioncan tour anywhere there is someone prepared to stand for an hour with their foot on a dead man’s switch; a switch that automatically turns on if the human operator becomes incapacitated. Constant pressure on this switch is what is keeping the emergency exit lights off so not to spoil the gorgeous inky blackness.

Fiction

3-21 March

Battersea Arts Centre