Tron ventures into audio theatre with Earwigs

Some of the creative team behind the Tron's Earwig series, clockwise from top left: Stef Smith, Johnny McKnight, Hannah Lavery, Finn Den Hertog, Jo Clifford and Danny Krass

The visual image that accompanies the Tron Theatre’s Earwig programme is as striking as it is beautiful: a close up image of a human ear printed in a glorious soft blue, with the shadowed inward parts of the ear in an equally soft brown. It’s a tremendously intimate image, by photographer Niall Walker; and it captures an essential aspect of this new Tron season of six audio pieces, commissioned and shaped by the acclaimed Glasgow-based theatre sound designer Danny Krass.

Lasting anywhere between seven and 15 minutes, these tiny recorded symphonies of sound and text are sometimes meditative in quality, sometimes more driven by narrative; but with each piece designed for listening on headphones, Danny Krass is clear that he wants them to provide a truly immersive experience, demanding a different quality of short-term attention from an everyday radio play.

“I want listeners to feel that these pieces are happening inside their heads,” says Krass, from a studio at the Tron where he is putting finishing touches to some of the recordings, “and almost to feel as though they are the central character. It’s not so much not having a fourth wall, as not having any walls at all; I want the sound to be completely pervasive, as if it’s coming from inside the listeners’ minds, as well as from the outside world.”

The pieces are set to appear online every Wednesday until 10 March; and the first recording, Stef Smith’s The Deadlift, offers a powerful illustration of the inward, meditative quality of the season, as Smith – with sound and music by Krass, and percussion by musician Alon Ilsar – tries to capture the powerful absorption in the moment, and the hopes for personal healing and change, created by lockdown exercise routines, in this case weight-lifting.

Next up, on 3 February, is Hannah Lavery’s take on the Russian legend of Baba Yaga, the crone who lives in a strange forest house supported on chicken legs; and the season also includes work by Johnny McKnight, Morna Pearson, Jo Clifford and Luke Sutherland, all performed by an impressive company of actors including Ann Louise Ross, Robbie Jack, and George Anton.

“It’s been a great experience for me,” says Krass, “to be able to lead a project, and actually commission and help shape work by artists that I’ve worked with and admired so much in the past. With Stef Smith and Morna Pearson, for instance, I’ve known and loved their work ever since I was sound designer on their Traverse plays Swallow and The Artist Man And The Mother Woman, back in the early 2010s, and it’s the same with the other writers involved. I feel that sound design work is often at its best when audiences are barely aware of it; it should be all about supporting whatever the actors are doing with the text the writer has created. And working in that way, with so many great actors and writers, has left me with very strong feelings about the kind of work that interests me, and that I’d like to help shape.”

Krass was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1979, and started to act with the Australian Theatre for Young People while he was still at school. He trained as a musician, and his degree was in Anthropology and Performance Studies; he says that of the two, the anthropology is more useful in understanding the dynamics of theatre, and its ritual and cathartic qualities. He first came to Scotland in the mid-2000s, and settled here in 2007. His partner is the Scottish actress, writer and director Rosalind Sydney, with whom he now has two children; and over a dozen years, he has produced a formidable portfolio of work with companies ranging from Visible Fictions and Catherine Wheels to the Traverse, the National Theatre of Scotland, and David Leddy’s late and much-mourned Fire Exit company.

It’s unusual, though, in Scottish and UK theatre, to see an artist from one of theatre’s technical specialisms make the sideways shift into creating and directing their own projects. Until now, Danny Krass has only led one project in Scotland, his 2015 production A Kind Of Silence, for Solar Bear; and the actor and director Finn den Hertog – who is working with Krass on the direction of Earwig – says he is particularly pleased that this spring’s lockdown projects from the Tron are opening up that kind of space.

“I think it’s great if, despite all the downsides of this terrible pandemic, we can use this time to encourage artists to develop in new directions; and I think the Tron is beginning to do that, in really interesting ways,” says den Hertog. “I’ve been involved in a lot of audio and radio drama, during my career; but these Earwig pieces are much more immersive and transporting – if that’s a word – than a standard radio play. They are like pieces of music, involving the sound of the human voice; and if they were ever to be performed live, post-pandemic, I think I would see them more as dance pieces, than as spoken-word theatre.”

And Krass agrees. “Yes, I think the obvious way to perform these would be as some kind dance. Both Finn and I love theatre that involves dance and movement, and it does tend to connect very directly with people, as I hope these pieces will. We’re living in a drought of human interaction at the moment, and people are missing the intimacy of human physical connection so much. So I want these sound pieces to feel a bit like an embrace for people; an intimate experience, and an act of empathy, to counter the loneliness of these very strange times.”

Earwig episodes will appear weekly until 10 March, at https://www.tron.co.uk/earwig/

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