High-spirited dance concert a feast for the subconscious mind
Beatrice Jaccard an award-winning co-artistic director of Company Drift an ensemble that examines the absurdities of everyday life choreographed and performs in the upcoming production of Sound Machine part of One Yellow Rabbit’s High Performance Rodeo. The show is a quirky unconventional mix of dance multimedia music and clowning. Company Drift has performed the show around the world to great acclaim and Jaccard says that even after 70 performances the show is still “really fun to do and quite challenging and never boring.”
Sound Machine is based on the short story of the same title by author Roald Dahl. In Dahl’s story a man obsessed with sound constructs a device that allows him to listen to sounds many would assume to be non-existent. With the bizarre gizmo he can hear the screams of roses as their stems are snipped and the moan of a tree as an axe cleaves its flesh. Company Drift took this concept and collectively created a show about a trio of scientists attempting to answer various bizarre questions. When a fly bumps into a scorching-hot light bulb how does it scream? How does a tomato sound when it turns red? What does a fish say when it asks its own fin to join in wedlock?
If these questions strike readers as ridiculous that might just be the point. As the three scientists struggle to record the endless stream of data gained from listening to such sounds it’s not long before their work begins to look absurd. Their dance on the superficial exterior of reason is what blinds them to reality. To put it in the words of one critic reviewing a production in San Diego the play examines “our obsession with analyzing EVERYTHING while masking the uncharted territory of our own neuroses.”
Jaccard says that her everyday encounters with earthly concerns inspire her to work in the realm of the surreal. “The way I look at the world and reality gives also a value to the absurd because that is how much of reality feels to me. It gives me pleasure in finding intuitive connections between things and it is enriching to find pathways through reality that are not always led by common sense and reason. This does not mean at all that we do not reflect a lot about our work.”
She is also quick to point out that Sound Machine “is not an explicitly surrealist piece” but it certainly does contain elements that could be described that way. “The extraction of sound out of inanimate objects like a tomato and making music from that is quite a surrealistic concept.”
What the music dance and imagery all represent is never articulated and that’s not the point anyway. Despite the sophisticated ideas driving the work the ensemble at Company Drift want more than anything for the audience to enjoy what has been repeatedly described by critics as a playful enchanting and beautiful show.
“We have performed Sound Machine in many likely and unlikely places around the world” Jaccard says. “Audiences usually quite enjoy it. It helps that the piece is quite humorous.”
After the First World War many people no longer believed that traditional bourgeois values and beliefs made sense. Surrealism emerged from a desire to explore and understand the world through a new untried method.
The ensemble at Company Drift takes great interest in Surrealism and that leads the cast to play with subliminal associations and the supremacy of dreams. Surrealist theatre is alive with symbols atmospheric images stories told in non-linear sequences archetypes and sensory episodes all in the name of metaphorically encapsulating certain emotions and life experiences.
According to author Thomas Moore art that taps into our subconscious mind immerses the audience in rich illustrations of certain experiences. He believes far too many artists and storytellers make the mistake of looking for answers to life’s problems on superficial levels those being the personal social and physical realms of reality. Humanity he says takes great pleasure in finding itself (its deep immaterial unconscious self) mirrored in the material world. Moore believes art that focuses on such territory invites its audience to quietly contemplate certain areas of existence with a degree of awe.
