Theatre
Kind Of Silence
Platform, The Bridge, Glasgow
Mary Brennan
THREE STARS
“The world is silent, and music is everywhere.” The words spool across the front of the programme for Kind Of Silence but, really, they are only a hint of what director Danny Krass and Solar Bear – a theatre company making work with deaf and hearing performers for a similarly integrated audience – have explored in the piece.
With ideas of communication and shared understanding in mind, Kind Of Silence brings together myth, movement and modern technology. The concept is rooted in the stories of Echo and Narcissus. Besotted with his own reflection, Narcissus can’t see beyond it while Echo has lost the power of spontaneous speech and can only repeat the phrases of others. One is stuck in a visual loop, the other is stuck in an aural loop.
In the myth, they share only their respective isolation. On stage, they share an environment where – thanks to the inventive techno-percussion of live drummer Alon Ilsar – sound takes on a physicality as immediate and dramatic as the (visible) choreography of Chisato Minamimura.
The effect on all three performers translates into a expressive mosaic of discoveries, emotional and personal as well as sound-related. As Charlene Boyd, Jacob Casselden and James Anthony Pearson channel rhythm, volume and cadence through their bodies, so wave frequencies dance across an up-stage screen: we see and hear music everywhere. And if the open-sided box on-stage is Echo’s Cave, it also becomes a visual metaphor for silence, for a place of refuge, for a state of mind and, yes, for exclusion... Radical, challenging, sometimes elusive, Kind Of Silence is a tremendous, imaginative leap towards making music vibrant for deaf and hearing audiences alike.
Why are you making commenting on HeraldScotland only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here