300 Tapes

300 TAPES is created by Joe Cobden, Frank Cox-O'Connell, Anna Friz, Brendan Gall, Ame Henderson, Gillian Lewis, Bobby Theodore, Trevor Schwellnus, and Vicki Stroich. The project has been developed by Public Recording with the support of the Theatre Centre and Alberta Theatre Projects. It premiered in Toronto in December 2010 and will open in Calgary in February 2011. 300 TAPES is a hybrid theatre project bringing together the aesthetics, strategies, and formal questions of distinct disciplines to create a shared performance language and structure merging theatre, sound art, design, and choreography.

Tapes

The performance's structure and content arises from an archive of personal stories as told by the performers and recorded onto microcassette tapes. These tapes, in both their content and form, are the material of the performance. The tape itself, as a substance, is examined: the ability to replay, rewind, and record magnetic tape, as well as its eventual degradation, are used as a physical metaphor for memory. In performance, the recordings are combined and manipulated as the performers select from the archive and "play it back" using different methods and effects. Similarly, all movement is based on set sequences of pedestrian gesture. On a larger, structural level, these actions are recorded, scripted, and re-performed in a series of repetitions.

Auto-Reciting

The central performance method is a technique we call "auto-reciting." Auto-reciting involves the performers interacting with tapes, using their bodies as playback units. Each performer listens to a microcassette playing back on headphones and says what they hear, as they hear it. This practical technique leads to different sound explorations (including degeneration, phasing, and reverb), mapping sound processes onto the body. For example, reverb is created when all three performers work with the same recording, staying in almost

perfect synch. Phasing occurs when the voices experiment with falling in and out of synch with each other as they auto-recite. Degeneration involves the degradation of magnetic tape over time and through copying. This is created practically through a series of repeated re-recordings of both sound and movement material, allowing the material to change form. During the performance, the recordings also become audible to the audience through their live manipulation by Anna Friz, sometimes revealing and sometimes complicating notions of ownership, identity, and interpretation.

Movement

To create choreographic material, the performers learned sequences of pedestrian gesture sourced from videotaped auto-reciting. All these movements are assimilated by each performer to allow for moments of unison, as if their individual playbacks lined up. Movement can be slowed, sped up, or spliced, much like tape. The performers "play back" choreographed pedestrian movements or play back the movements of the other performers.

Multi-Track Script

A base performance language of sound metaphors and music recording has been a through-line in the work and is also crucial to the dramaturgical structure. We created the script for the performance using the notion of multi-track recording. Each performer's actions were written onto a separate track on a large scroll of paper, divided horizontally much like a music score. This logging of the emerging score is completed collaboratively by the performers and they discuss the overlapping actions, durations, and intensities to chart each player's actions in relation to each other. As well, design and

PHOTO CAPTION: Joe Cobden, Brendan Gall, and Frank Cox-O'Connell in a workshop of 300 TAPES at the Theatre Centre, 2010.
Photos by Bobby Theodore and Trevor Schwellnus

sound have their own dedicated tracks. With all the tracks laid out together on one document, we now have a "tape" to be played and replayed for the performance. This method allows us to visualize how each individual's "track" interacts with the others in relationship to time. Using this tape/script, we now have a loop to be used as a structuring device. The performance will feature three loops using the same repeating structure. With each repetition of the loop, small...