DIE VERTEIDIGUNG DES PARADIESES (2024)
theatre / 135 min / based on the novel by Thomas von Steinaecker
Münchner Kammerspiele / premiere 06.06.2024
director: Gernot Grünewald
stage: Michael Köpke
costumes: Katharina Arkit
music: Daniel Sapir
video: Thomas Taube
VR: Carla Streckwal
For this immersive theatre parcours, involving stage and acting, VR, video, theatre walks and binaural audio drama, I was responsible for all audio recordings, including the sound recording on set for the video parts and the studio recordings for the VR part. But mainly, I was recording and designing the two binaural audio dramas that the audience listens to in two different moments throughout the play, where they sit down and put on headphones – two parts of the play solely told by sound.
One of the two binaural (that means that the audio is produced specifically for highly immersive and realistic listening via headphones) audio dramas is letting the audience experience a moment in the story where the main protagonist, Heinz (played by Maren Solty), is inside of a big ship and alternates between reflecting on his situation and listening to the boat’s surrounding sounds and hallucinating people, creatures and memories. For this audio piece, I was building a virtual binaural audio environment of the ship’s cabin and the rest of the ship’s interior and exterior, doing sound design on hallucinative encounters with turtles, speaking lamps and hostile robots, and was recording the voices of actors, placing them inside the ship. One main part was working with Maren Solty for recording the point-of-view sounds with binaural recording from her perspective, like walking, running, breathing, writing, touching objects and communicating/hallucinating. This piece was produced mainly with virtual binaural techniques, adding some binaural recordings.
The other binaural audio drama for headphones was recorded live and only by using binaural recording on set. Again, the audience takes the point of view of Heinz, listening from the protagonist’s position/point of view. This part of the play finds Heinz as part of a group of people taken captive by traffickers, sitting around a fireplace with other climate fugitives in a warehouse close to the seaside. This was a very different way of creating an audio drama piece because it involved casting a location, preparing and staging the location only for sound, building a sound scenography into the location using different props, materials and speakers, rehearsing scenes and movements both for the actors and for the effect on the potential headphone-listener and finally, recording it with a binaural microphone placed in the ears of the protagonist, played by Maren Solty, with the actors playing the scene while the scenography and sound effects were added by loudspeakers. Everything the listener hears in the end has been recorded live. The sound scenography, changing dynamically throughout the audio drama, involved first of all the surrounding (the seaside outside of the warehouse that you can hear through the open and broken windows, with wind shaking the shutters, the water of the ocean, seagulls), staged by playing designed sounds through a couple of direct and indirect speakers placed in the recording location while the actors were playing the scenes. Another important element, a fireplace the fugitives are sitting around, and the aural centrepiece of the scenes, had to be simulated because we couldn’t light a real fire, and was built by using an array of small loudspeakers positioned in different angles and playing various fire crackling sound samples. A mobile loudspeaker was used for spatially moving sound sources like laser guns or a crying baby in the arms of a mother. The sound scenography changed throughout the scenes, with day becoming night or vice versa, or with a change of auditory focus. In the end, some sources that we couldn’t faithfully reproduce while recording (such as a horsewhip) were added by using multi-channel binaural impulse responses that were recorded on-location.
„Und es ist tatsächlich verblüffend, wie hier ein eigenständiger, sehr präziser Abend entsteht, der trotzdem nah an der Vorlage bleibt. (…) Gleichwohl ist es faszinierend, wie präzise der Ablauf funktioniert. Wie perfekt die Sequenzen aufeinander abgestimmt sind, wie sich aus den einzelnen Elementen die Erlebnisse von Heinz formen.“
“And it is indeed astonishing how an independent, very precise evening is created here, which nevertheless remains close to the original. (…) Nevertheless, it is fascinating how precisely the sequence works. How perfectly the sequences are coordinated, how Heinz’s experiences are formed from the individual elements.”
(Süddeutsche Zeitung 07.06.2024)
https://www.muenchner-kammerspiele.de/de/programm/22445-die-verteidigung-des-paradieses