“When we think about the name – A RIght/Left Project – it’s a nod towards sound, classic stereo in two channels. It’s about using the right and left sides of the brain, and also it’s a nod towards us moving forward, but in a slightly wonky way…There is a path we could move forward that would make a lot more sense. But because we’re trying to find a new path, we know this is going to be a little bit wonky.”
For Punchdrunk stalwarts Colin Nightingale and Stephen Dobbie, A Right/Left Project – the umbrella under which they are creating a series of works exploring audio, space and installation art – is about breaking away from what they know, and trying something new. We welcome them into the voidspace to talk about their influences, their creative journey, and what is so exciting about this new departure.
Photo: Stephen Dobbie
voidspace:
Colin and Stephen, welcome to the voidspace. Thank you so much for joining me today. To start off, I’d like to ask very basic opening question: who you both are and what you do in this space.
Colin Nightingale:
I’m Colin Nightingale. What I do in this space is a question I’ve been trying to work out the answer to for a really long time. I’m comfortable to describe myself as an artist, now, especially in relation to the work I’m doing with Stephen but in general I just like making stuff happen. I really love collaboration, and within that, I’m quite happy to fall into whatever role is needed to allow something to happen.
I suppose my main skills are around creative producing, but I’m not really a producer in the traditional sense. I’ve got no interest in just producing for the sake of it: I want to be invested in whatever I’m working on. What I’m most driven by is stuff I feel passionately about.
My roots into everything creative are from growing up and being fortunate to have an older brother who was really interested in music. That took me on a journey, that meant that suddenly, as I finished school and went to university in the early 90s, I realised that I knew loads about music. And I got lost in DJ culture and the whole process of being a DJ. This is all pre-digital, when you had to actually learn your craft: how to discover records and how to get information. It was a treasure hunt, and I used to love that side of it.
A love of music exposed me to a lot of different art forms. I had friends who were dancers, who exposed me to contemporary dance. I was always curious about art, and installation art in particular, and it all slowly sent me on a journey into a world that showed me that there wasn’t any boundary to what art is. Sometimes that surprises me: I gave up art when I was 13 years old, mainly because I felt like no-one really explained that art could be more than drawing and painting. I have very naturally found my way, trying to understand that there are so many forms of creativity and expression.
Stephen Dobbie:
It came from this very specific moment in time, much like our journey in this space.
Colin Nightingale:
I’ve been very fortunate. I don’t really feel like I’ve ever applied for a job within a creative world. I just found a lot of like-minded people through searching. Everything comes back to the search for music. It goes into my approach to everything about life.
Stephen Dobbie:
Similar to Colin, I’m more comfortable referring to myself as an artist these days. I always drew stuff as a kid. Cars, mostly, and birds. We had the Sunday Times Encyclopaedia of Birds at home, and we used to copy bird pictures out of it. That creative streak just blossomed and bloomed as I grew older. As Colin says, I was of a generation where art at school was very much drawing and painting. I wouldn’t say I was particularly good at drawing or painting, but I enjoyed the process of making something. But while doing art GCSEs and art A-level, I was introduced to photography, and photography became the thing which I enjoyed most: sharing my view of the world through images. I like the immediacy of it, but I also like the process involved. This was pre-digital as well. I was very much a wet, dark-room sort of practitioner.
So, there was this appreciation of art and design photography. I remember going to the Saatchi gallery, when I was 18 or so, seeing Damien Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde and walking into Richard Wilson’s crude oil piece, and at the time, not really understanding what it was. In some ways, it was in an art gallery. So, this was art, but it was actually the experience of being in that space at that time that stayed with me, because it was a warehouse, quite a bare warehouse. I think looking back, those experiences probably opened me up to art. Art could be a dead shark, or it could be a room full of crude oil.
Similar to Colin, I also had a keen interest in music. I did DJ, but I was less into DJ culture, and more in the production side of things. And my digging for records was about finding records to sample, to make sample-based hip hop and funk music. Sampling has informed a lot of the journey of my practice over the years. Finding other like-minded people, who would appropriate and embrace these little nuggets from different cultural expressions – music or film, whatever – and then bring them together to present something new, really spoke to me in a profound way.
There was never a moment where I realised that I’d found my people, or the way I want to express myself. I just found a place where I could do the things that I was excited and interested in doing, which allowed me to develop and evolve my practice, and incorporate the photography, incorporate graphic design, incorporate the sound design and the music element – which is very much at the core of what we’re doing now with A Right/Left Project, which is about bringing music to the core of something and then crafting an experience around it. It’s all part of the same thing.
voidspace:
It’s really interesting, thinking about how you met working together with Punchdrunk, hearing how the things that inspired and energised each of you are things that became so core to those particular theatrics. The idea of kind of a giant collage of found music, found references, found themes, putting them all together. And that idea of treasure hunting and that idea of having to root out the nugget of that thing that then gives you that sense of achievement. It’s interesting how those things have carried on.
Colin Nightingale:
I’d been travelling around the world, and got back to London. London had obviously always this place where I was told was hugely creative, but I always felt like I was just consuming creative things that had already been formed. I was doing a job – in events management – and I was working very hard, in something that wasn’t a very creative industry. And I liked that because it kept artistic stuff separate. I worked three years full time, and then I worked part time.
So, I basically carved out this lifestyle where I used to work about three days a week and had four days where I could explore. I would use my DJing as my calling card, and I was actively searching London for creative things to get involved with. I was running a series of parties, where I used to make hand-drawn maps, and the maps were actually slightly wrong, because I was trying to get people slightly lost on the way to the party. I was really curious about whether you could shift people’s energy: how people would feel, having a really complex journey to get to this thing, and the relief when they found it. I had lots of philosophical ideas around how to craft the party, and how to create something exciting.
That was a bit of a reaction to a feeling that the club scene had started to get quite commercialised and it’d gone from being something that was really exciting in the early to mid-nineties, to not. You knew what you were going to get, and I was a bit frustrated about that. So, I was doing these things, actually living it in terms of trying to explore stuff. And through that, I went to a little arts festival in Deptford on a Saturday afternoon. I was going to leave and then someone just said, “oh, have you been into this Punchdrunk thing?” I walked up some stairs and through a red curtain and fell into a rabbit hole. And that’s how I got involved. [Punchdrunk’s first London work, Chair, took place at the Old Seager Distillery in Deptford, in 2002.]
Stephen Dobbie:
That was also my first experience of a Punchdrunk show as well. I experienced it as a participant, but lots of friends of mine were involved in making it. That was also the first time that my photography and graphic design were used for promotional purposes. But we didn’t meet at that time.
Colin Nightingale:
When I got involved, it was through talking to Felix about the work. I’d say to Felix “That’s really cool, but let’s do this and that with it”. I think that was something that was exciting for Felix, because I was telling him what he was doing, but I was also telling him what more it could be. And that is how I slowly got involved. Eventually Felix and I created a one night only Punchdrunk project together called Lost Persons, which was an iteration on the parties I used to create, collided with a fabric maze inspired by Chair. That project, whilst only on for one night, led to Punchdrunk making work at The Big Chill music festival, which really started to develop and broaden the audience for this type of work
In those early times I used to hear Stephen Dobbie’s name, as this amazing sound designer and graphic designer. But it was a good couple of years before we really met.
Stephen Dobbie:
It wasn’t until The Firebird Ball [in 2005].
Colin Nightingale:
I think we were in the same building during [the London version of] Sleep No More [in 2003]. I remember a time I was doing some stuff and then you came in, but you used to do so much of the sound design outside of the building.
Stephen Dobbie:
Those buildings were inhospitable at the time.
You probably saw me that day, when I was in hand-cutting the tickets for audience members, as they were coming in.
voidspace:
We’ve all been there. It’s nice to know that everyone starts off there, isn’t it? There’s something very comforting about that.
Colin Nightingale:
In the work we do now with A RIght/Left Project, we’re back to very being hands-on, because actually it’s the best thing.
voidspace:
Tell me a bit about A Right/Left Project. I’d say that most creative projects tend to come from a feeling that the thing that you want to see done isn’t quite being done yet. There’s a drive, there’s a lack, there’s a gap. What was the gap that got this off the ground?
Stephen Dobbie:
You’ve hit the nail on the head there. It was a need for us to find a space where we could explore a relatively newly-discovered process of making work we wanted to make. We’re both huge fans of music and sound, and how that can impact on people. And we were presented with a couple of opportunities where sound could really be at the core of a transformative journey.
Colin Nightingale:
Everyone’s got instant access to music now. In the past, you had to really work at being a lover of music, unless you were just going to be happy with consuming what was coming through mainstream radio. That ease of access is one of the reasons I stopped DJing. I used to DJ because I bought a lot of music, and I wanted to share it, because otherwise, as much as I was building an archive for myself, it didn’t seem to make a lot of sense just to be listening to it in my bedroom. I was excited about going and playing a piece of music and someone else liking it, and then having a conversation about it and maybe learning something about that artist that I don’t know about, or being exposed to something new. Everyone can build an archive digitally, very easily now, so that experience of physically finding and sharing music other people may not have known about, isn’t there anymore.
Also, I was always driven by this idea of how you can present music in different contexts, and how you can find new ways for people to engage with music. 22 years ago, when I stumbled into Punchdrunk, my motivation was all about music. And then I got caught up in this incredible moment in time, working with a great group of people, and it took a moment for me to realise I was in a theatre company. And it got to a point, it was probably about five, six years ago where it was really nagging at me. Remembering why I got into this in the first place.
Stephen and I started talking a little bit more, and one of the things we chatted about was the fact that in DJ culture now, because music has become more readily available, the real diggers, what they get excited about, is looking for the master tapes of recordings, because then they want to get access to the original recording stems and then the ultimate edit. They might then re-edit a track, but it’ll be out of the original component parts of it.
voidspace:
When you say the stems, you mean the nuts and bolts of each track?
Colin Nightingale:
Yeah. If you imagine a recording studio: you’ve got all your faders, you’ve got the different instruments, that all then get put together to make a track. Stephen and I started talking about what would we do if we got hold of that stuff. We’re not really going to create a piece of music and put it out as a record, because we think three-dimensionally and we think experientially. So that led us to talking about how great it would be to get these stems. Then we could deconstruct a piece of music, and rebuild it three-dimensionally across space, so you can walk through a piece of music. We started to have some opportunities to explore that, and it wasn’t going to make any sense for that work to sit in Punchdrunk, because it’s not been driven from the same motivation. So, that led us to forge a new path and looking at setting up A Right/Left Project.
Stephen Dobbie:
That was a real galvanising point.
voidspace:
Was one of the opportunities you had to start exploring that different way of conceptualising music Beyond The Road at Saatchi Gallery?
Colin Nightingale:
Yes. It was quite a crazy thing. It built our reputation, for everything we’ve done since outside of Punchdrunk. That project was a real passion project for us. It allowed us to explore this opportunity of spatializing sound in this way. We worked with James Lavelle/UNKLE as the central artist within that, as a collaboration, because James was a big inspiration to us when we were younger. What James was doing with his record label, Mo’ Wax, and what he was doing within the 90s music scene, was hugely inspirational. And I really love things in my life going full circle. It was exciting and very fitting that at this moment when we’re stepping out and we’re about to start doing something new, going down some other avenues within the kind of creative palette of work that we do, that it was connected with James.
Stephen Dobbie:
That we carved out a situation where we could actually connect with someone that inspired and enriched our appreciation of what music was, and what the culture that surrounds it could be, because James’ practise is quite holistic: there’s street culture, there’s graffiti, there’s clothing, there’s stickers, there’s ephemera.
Colin Nightingale:
He sometimes talks about himself as a bit of collagist. And I think there’s a lot of that in us: we draw from a lot of different influences.
Stephen Dobbie:
This idea of challenging ourselves to find a new way to experience music and sound. It’s informed by this nostalgia of how we experienced music in the past, but I think it’s not driven solely by that. The question for us is: how can we present music and sound in a way that brings it back to the body. You travel to it, and you have to cross a threshold to experience it. And then how does that then affect you, physically and psychologically, in how you absorb this music?
The work we did on Beyond the Road and a lot of the work that we’ve done subsequently, has been self-generated. We’ve taken that principle of deconstructing music and then rebuilding it three-dimensionally.
An interesting discovery is that when you break it down into those component parts, and give the audience agency to move between them, there is a different engagement with it. They interact with it differently in that, because it’s not a fully complete song, you have to search for the next bit, so that you’re piecing things together as you physically walk through a space. I think all the stuff we do comes very much from an instinctive, intuitive place. And I’m sure that there’s lots of scientific analysis or forensic investigation into what’s going on when people experience this stuff. But we’ve seen it with our own eyes, that people linger in a space listening to essentially the same thing for half an hour or so, looking at a single painting or looking at a single object.
I think you’d be hard pressed to find another environment in everyone’s everyday life, in contemporary culture, where you would do that. A lot of the projects that we’re incubating at the moment are really honing in on that as an idea, that you have some sort of focal point in a space, but then the music and the sound that we’ve composed or created, that exists and orbits that central thing, just allows a deeper level of interactivity, immersion or engagement with something unfamiliar as well.
We’re not working with a replica of the Mona Lisa and creating a piece of music around that. We’re creating original sculptures, installation pieces that are born out of an idea, and then we respond to that idea, and then other people, we collaborate with other people – lighting designers and composers and technicians – and then they respond to it, and then we respond to their response and thus it creates a wonderful circular pivot of collaboration, where everyone’s response is valid, and everyone’s response is useful and exciting.
Photo: Stephen Dobbie
voidspace:
I think there’s something very exciting about being able to make work again, where there aren’t preset expectations. The mask format has done so well, but it means that a lot of people do have an idea of what it’s going to be.
Colin Nightingale:
Totally. It’s a format in its own right,
The early years of Punchdrunk were incredible, where we were constantly doing those shows and iterating, and learning so much. I used to production manage and produce them, and I developed a lot of the operational systems around how they ran. I developed the stewarding stuff. We didn’t have stage management, but then slowly worked out how these shows needed to run.
I used to spend hours and hours, hundreds of hours, standing in the dark, observing people. I feel sometimes like I got a psychology degree, because I just learned so much around people’s relationships with the work, people’s relationships with the people they were with.
Every show, we would all learn our own things from it, but there’s definitely a point, probably around when we opened Sleep No More in New York in 2011, where we stopped learning. There was nothing more to learn from that: it’s a fully formed format. We know the processes you need to go through to make that show, and equally, the audiences know the format.
And what’s interesting, sometimes it’s talked about a lot how that work came from a place of trying to break up the rules, and now there’s a set of rules established about how you engage with that work. And in some ways, personally, for me, in the journey I’ve always been on, I was kind of done with that work even before we went to New York.
It was around that time that Sleep No More went to China, in 2016, when we started heading off in the direction we’re going in now. Because I needed to start doing something else, to start learning something else.
Stephen Dobbie:
Sleep No More, New York was presented at a time when we were operating at peak level, and we knew what we were doing. Everything that went into that show was coming from ten years of refining and finessing.
Colin Nightingale:
To come back to what A Right/Left Project is about: There’s the motivation for us to try and make sound, music and audio central to the experiences we are making. But some of it is also about how we start to birth something new, and how we can give ourselves the space to explore new forms and formats. We don’t have the pressure, we’re exploring.
And I think we’re starting to become closer to what the core values are of this new work that we’re looking to try to make. There are certain themes that have come out of the different projects that we’ve been doing, where we’re very motivated about making work that is maybe on a scale that is more nimble, and more manageable.
voidspace:
I always think that it’s more surprising that you’ve managed to do as many of your past Punchdrunk projects with such a level of success than not, because sort of operationally, the odds do seem stacked against you, because there are so many moving parts that need to be in place at the same time.
Colin Nightingale:
I used to joke that trying to get some of those projects on, it was like trying to get the stars to align. In Right/Left we want to birth stuff that might have more opportunity to find paths for more work to get out there into the world. There are some practical considerations that are going on, in the types of projects that we’re looking to try and do. Practical and creative need to work together.
You’ve got to think of the steps to move it forward within creating the idea, especially around experiential stuff. If you don’t think about the operational side of it, you might have a brilliant idea, but it’ll end up getting executed in the wrong way. And then it’s actually working against what you’re trying to create.
When we think about the name – A RIght/Left Project – it’s a nod towards sound, classic stereo in two channels. It’s about using the right and left sides of the brain, and also it’s a nod towards us moving forward, but in a slightly wonky way because it’s purposely “right left” and not “left right”. People would normally say “left right”. We want to slightly confuse that – to create that slight moment of: “is it left right, right left”? But it’s also us. There is a path we could move forward that would make a lot more sense. But because we’re trying to find a new path, we know this is going to be a little bit wonky.
voidspace:
You need to come at it slant-wise.
Colin Nightingale:
We’re also trying to be able to create an environment for ourselves where there’s the playfulness of the early years of some of the work that we’ve been involved in.
Stephen Dobbie:
There’s the very conscious decision to work at a certain scale as well, I think aids that. It means that we can self-fund to a point, and that the ask for potential collaborators and funders isn’t that great.
voidspace:
The grassroots side of things for me is what’s really exciting at the moment. When people are faced with constraints in terms of resources and in terms of what they can do. Because for me, the most exciting work has always come out of a place of constraint.
Colin Nightingale:
Totally. There are so many examples we’ve got from our careers where I know how powerful some of the ideas that ended up being presented to people, and I know where they came from, and they came because there was no money or there was a super quick deadline and you just had to do something.
And it’s not that having resource and time can’t create something amazing, but I think personally, what I’ve witnessed is that, you are more likely going to do well initially by having limited resource and needing to move a little bit faster and smarter. Though the two aren’t mutually exclusive.
voidspace:
Something really interesting with Punchdrunk, is that you have something that can have a very powerful psychological effect on people, in relation to things like trauma, in relation to neurodiversity. You find the work gives people things which you maybe didn’t intend. It’s really interesting how all of that has ended up, in something that maybe started off as an iterative process.
Colin Nightingale:
The goal of work was always for it to be high impact. And I think quite early on, people realised that audiences at times were having quite deep responses, and meaningful responses.
That’s a big driver in the work that we’re now making in A Right/Left. We’re trying to develop work that maybe has a slightly smaller ask in terms of the scale of what we’re trying to install somewhere. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be high impact. Take something like The Retiring Room, which is a deep listening experience that we embedded in a hotel room. We were given a room at The Standard hotel in London and that piece was a 20 – 25 minutes experience.
We observed that people’s nervous systems seemed to be changed by the experience that they go through. We’d noticeably see some people move differently afterwards. They slowed down, you would see their physicality change. It’s almost a kind of sound spa we’ve created and it is a bit like a wellness tool. But we’re not coming at it with any scientific data behind it. We don’t really want to position that work as a wellness piece. But if that’s actually an impact of the art for some audience, then that’s brilliant.
We’re very motivated at the moment by making work that can maybe make people feel calmer. The world is crazy now, and I feel that on a personal level. Whilst in the past, I might have been involved in some projects which created a high level of engagement through really challenging people and making them feel quite uncomfortable, I’m not so motivated by that now. There was nothing sinister behind the motivation for doing it, other than that it was a route to actually breaking people down, so they then go deeper into an experience.
And we are, I think in some of the work we’re doing with A Right/Left Project, finding a way where we can ease people into a place and then they have this really deep experience with it. That feels quite a responsible thing to be doing at the moment, because people’s nervous systems are being ramped up. If you look at the news, or look at your bank account. Things are tough now, and the body of work that should slowly start appearing to people, there will be a common thread running through it, which is something that we naturally learned through doing Beyond the Road, which people found really calming.
It’s been a very conscious thing for us, as well, to move forward in a way that’s different to what’s come before. Take our colour palette: we want to use bright, vivid colours. It gives the immediate message that this isn’t a Punchdrunk show.
We’ve had audiences having really deep experiences, that they’ve connected to their own lives. We didn’t necessarily make the work expecting that would be a response that people were going to have to it. But in many ways, that’s the dream. You want people to have a deep connection with your work.
voidspace:
I think when you tap in that deep, people do bring their own experience to it. I think there’s a real responsibility that comes with that. When you’re invoking that depth of response in people. With so many people I’m talking to in this space, work that was happening maybe 20 or 25 years ago was about breaking the status quo, shaking people up out of their comfort zone. It was countercultural, in that way, because the prevailing cultural wind was seen as being complacency. But now I think the prevailing cultural wind is, panic, overactivation, overstimulation. So, the countercultural move becomes something different.
Stephen Dobbie:
We are definitely trying to create an environment or a space where calm is the predominant state that we’re pursuing, but it doesn’t mean that we’re not aware of the power of disruption. In Beyond the Road there are calm moments and moments of disruption, which act as punctuation.
We’re trying to express ourselves through the work we’re making in a way which does reflect your everyday experience of life as well. Life is crazy and chaotic, generally, and we’re trying to create a space which is less chaotic, less crazy. But we don’t want to completely ignore the fact that you need those moments of disruption, almost as a reference point. You need that moment of shock to the system to then realise where you were before, and where you are now.
Colin Nightingale:
There are a lot of conscious decisions to have slightly darker sounds or some slightly more challenging imagery, at times, even though the overarching thing we’re trying to do is something quite calm. I would say I generally have quite a sunny disposition in my life, it’s not because on a day-to-day basis, I’m not dealing with some quite complex, hard situations. It’s actually those really challenging things which I feel I reflect on, that actually then make me feel able to be able to move forward and be positive.
Last year we got an opportunity to do a private commission for somebody. And we could have taken an easy route where we made something a whimsical and shallow. But Stephen and I just couldn’t go there with it. For us, there was an integrity that had to be there and so went deep and put in the layers. We’re not going to ram it down anyone’s throat: but as long as the meaning and intention is there for us, that’s okay.
voidspace:
It’s there for anybody who wants to find it. People can experience it on their own level, can’t they? And interact with it as deeply as they want.
Stephen Dobbie:
We’re still learning. We started off this interview saying that we’re reluctant to refer to ourselves as artists. But I think, in talking like this and in continuing to explore the ways that we want to express ourselves, we are learning constantly. About how we speak about our practise and how we express ourselves outside of the work.
We’re also learning by exposing ourselves to feedback. We did some R&D last week, and our initial question was: as you walked into it, how did it make you feel? Some people said it was confusing and unsettling. But, in a way, confusion is just curiosity.
Colin Nightingale:
With that project, it could be unsettling for some people because there isn’t lots of stimulus. Suddenly, you have to actually be present.
Stephen Dobbie:
Getting people into that space requires a very gentle onboarding. You’re not just thrown into a room where there’s no stimulus and it’s just you. That would be a bit too challenging, I think. But we’re very interested in holding and providing support for anyone experiencing the work we make from beginning to end. Hopefully the intention is that slowly, incrementally, over the course of those four or five minutes, as you walk into something, that being on your own feels okay, and it isn’t challenging and it isn’t uncomfortable. It’s going to be different for everyone.
Photo: Stephen Dobbie
voidspace:
Can you tell us a little more about Origin, the project that you first shared in May this year, and are bringing back in September.
I’d love to understand more about the motivations that you had for creating it, and what you learned as you brought it to life.
Colin Nightingale:
At the heart of the project is a desire for us to create original music and explore what the composing process is like, when we know that the music is ultimately going to experienced spatially. In Beyond The Road, we took existing music and then found a context to present it that involved audiences free-roaming, and physically walking through the music. It was basically a walk-through album experience in every sense as, along with the audio, audiences were also discovering the artwork that circled the creation process of the music, or was created as direct reaction to the music.
After the London run in 2019, we were planning to tour the project internationally, and then the pandemic hit. That really took out the momentum, but we did manage to take Beyond the Road to Seoul in 2021. It was a crazy experience trying to mount a project at that moment in time, and it involved us having to quarantine for 2 weeks in a hotel on arrival, but all the effort was worth it. The project was really well received by the Korean audience and attended by around 80,000 people over an extended 6-month run.
Whilst Beyond The Road is a much more manageable scale of project than a large scale Punchdrunk ‘mask’ show, it is still a big, expensive project, and in 2022 – once we had both helped create The Burnt City for Punchdrunk – we were really motivated to explore creating a small, nimble project. We had developed a relationship with musician and composer Toby Young over a few years, and he was keen to explore creating some music with us.
That process ultimately led us to present our first deep listening project, The Retiring Room, which we mentioned earlier. It was in a hotel bedroom and for one person at a time, so not really an easy project to generate income from. That naturally lead us to want to explore what a multi-user version could look like. In exploring that idea, we quickly hit on the concept of Origin, which would have a central sculptural element that would reveal a deeper meaning through lighting. Working with Toby again on the composition, and Ben Donoghue, who designed the lighting for Beyond The Road and The Retiring Room, the whole project came together very organically.
Stephen Dobbie:
The project explores themes around the cycle of life and human relation to nature, so it was important for us to birth it in the spring. We put the whole project together in about 3 months, and UCL Goldsmiths Theatre and Performance Department kindly helped support its development and testing before it then shifted to World Heart Beat. We’d been encouraged to look at using this venue by Wayne Powell at d&b audiotech, who is a big supporter of all the work we are doing with spatial audio. The venue contains a boutique concert hall with probably one of the best sound systems in the country, utilising d&b soundscape technology.
It was great to have audiences in the space, and over its initial run we learnt a lot about how different people engage with what is essentially quite a simple set up. The only real ask of the audience is to lie down, if they choose, and listen to the sound. We had overwhelming positive responses to the piece, and in the 30-40 minutes that most people were in the space, we found the majority were really able to disconnect from the everyday and sink in to a much calmer state of mind. One audience member fed back that if they could, they’d like to do the experience every day for the rest of their life. Another told us that she was rushing home to write, as her time in the space had unlocked a new chapter of her book.
Colin Nightingale:
These types of responses are so encouraging, but as with everything, there are always areas to be improved and develop. There are some limitations with the venue around the on and off-boarding of the audience, but we are looking at what we can do with this when Origin returns in September, and excited to have more people experience the piece and help us find the right language to talk about it. It’s part of a series of deep listening projects we have in development, and we still feel we are scratching the surface of where this work can eventually go, both artistically and physically. We want audiences to be able to inhabit a variety of environments, and keen to explore how different contexts could potentially shift the overall experience. We really do just feel we are at the start of the journey with this type of work.
voidspace:
Thank you for that. I’m looking forward to experiencing Origin in a few weeks’ time. Finally, what advice do you have to aspiring creators in this field?
Colin Nightingale:
For me, it’s important to find the right group of people to help you birth this work, and not to give up if it takes some time for you to discover those individuals. Collaboration is key in everything I’m interested in. It’s how I motivate myself. And it took me a long time until I stumbled into the right group of people, and then that opened up a whole world.
Ultimately, this is a long game. If this is the world you want to go into, it’s not about instant gratification. So, if you can create a life situation where you can balance things, – everyone needs to know that they can pay their bills – try to find a way whereby certain bits of your life are stable, then that can help allow you to then have the freedom to explore the artistic expression you want.
Because if you’re trying to do both things at the same time, it might lead you to make some choices that you don’t want to make. And none of this balancing act is easy. So, try to set up those circumstances, and stay aware of what you are striving to do.
Stephen Dobbie:
When I was asked to teach a masterclass earlier this year, I suddenly thought back to being at school, and people of a certain generation remember having blackboards. And my favourite thing was when the blackboard was repainted. It covered up the entire year’s worth of learning that had gone onto it, over the previous year. I compared it to the creative process, in that all of that stuff that you learn, each project, you start afresh, but all of that learning is still there.
And you take all that individual and collective experience and knowledge and understanding, and put it into the next thing. And if your intention is to make things and to make a career out of making things, or for your life to be about making things, then the thing you’re working on is not the last thing you will ever do.
If your intention is to do this, then there will be something else, and it might be bigger, it might be smaller, but I think as long as your approach to it and your intention towards it is consistent, then you will get as much out of it as an audience will get out of it.
I think an iterative stepping stone approach to making and expressing ourselves means that each thing you’re working on is a learning experience, and a stepping-stone to the next thing.
Colin Nightingale:
Even situations that could be going on in your life that could be perceived as not being creative endeavours: all of that stuff is coming with you on this journey, and everything’s relevant. Ultimately, we’re trying to make work that connects with people on a human level. And the longer you’ve lived, the more you’ve accumulated to put into your work.
voidspace:
Hope for us all there, however late we came to our journey. Thank you for joining us, and sharing your perspectives.
Find out more about A Right/Left Project here
Deep listening experience Origin is being exhibited as part of the London Design Project at World Heart Beat, Embassy Gardens 16 – 18 September 2024
Find tickets here