The Control Room
Arturo Fuentes
Sarah-Maria Sun, Susanne Fröhlich, Eva Reiter
music theatre for three musicians 2017-2018
Original idea: Arturo Fuentes
Stage direction, music and script: Arturo Fuentes
Scenery and lighting design: Jim Clayburgh
Sarah Maria Sun, soprano and sound objects
Susanne Fröhlich, recorders and Pätzold flutes
Eva Reiter, viola da gamba and Pätzold flutes
Duration: 1 hr.
The Control Room
Work inspired in the Francis Ford Coppola film "The conversation" (1974)
Original idea: Arturo Fuentes
Stage direction, music and script: Arturo Fuentes
Scenery and lighting design: Jim Clayburgh
Sarah Maria Sun, soprano and sound objects
Susanne Fröhlich, recorders and Pätzold flutes
Eva Reiter, viola da gamba and Pätzold flutes
Duration: 1 hr.
The Control Room
Work inspired in the Francis Ford Coppola film "The conversation" (1974)
ENGLISH
Introduction "Your're just supposed to listen" is the order given to the actor Gene Hackman while playing the role of a paranoid, secretive audio surveillance expert in the film "The Conversation", a thriller directed by Francis Ford Coppola in 1973-74. This music theatre is inspired on this film which won, among others, the Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The Control Room portray the world of the audio surveillance. Our communications are not anymore private, the State institutions (intelligence departments) supposed to give us protection, argue that they have to intercept our calls in order to protect us. As the principal actor of the Coppola's film, we fail to understand the meaning of all those tons of secret recordings and consequently we end up trapped in a net of surveillance and deception. The intelligence departments of all countries have failed giving us security. Popular culture, specially in films, has drown up representations of "how surveillance works". Even if we know that intelligence departments have hidden spaces where all our audio information is collected and, on the street, we can see all those video surveillance cameras watching us, only few of us have been inside a control room. What happens in there? Who is in charge of the audio codification? Do they laugh or do they cry when they hear something? How many stories do they know about crimes, love, family, loneliness, conspiracy, betrayal? The Control Room try to figure out that secret space that everybody knows it exists but nobody has seen. The script - synopsis The Control Room reflects the life of a woman (Sarah-Maria Sun) in which the real world transforms into a world of fantasy and paranoia when she knows that other people (Susanne Fröhlich and Eva Reiter) are hearing and recording all her telephone conversations, her nights alone or her singing moments on the shower. She starts to follow some cues and arrive to discover The Control Room, that secret space where she finds all the recordings made for decades. She starts to hear all the recordings and she goes back in time, she feels confused, she has been followed, her life does not belong anymore to her. Back home, she destroys her appartment trying to find the bugs that where planted in there. |
This music theatre explores the central personage (Sara-Maria Sun) within its multiple psychological angles, like if her voices where summed up in order to construct one only woman. Some echoes can be heard with the voices and instruments of Susanne Fröhlich and Eva Reiter. Here's where the music encounters the dramaturgy, when the soprano explores multiple vocal techniques in order to achieve moments that unify the voice whitin the instruments and the sound effects (like communications analogue signals and amplified sound objects). We find the voice doubled by the electronics, a sort of echo that gives lightness and confusion to the real voice. We hear the instruments mixed up with the mashed phonetics of the voice: sometimes we hear a sigh, sometimes a hole phrase. We don't understand completely what it has been said, but we have an approximation to the psychological source of the personage. We remain with a sensation, a sound, a metaphor. The script attaches to the idea of "deconstruction" of the source : we remain the audio recording of our lives. Scenery and lighting Developed by Jim Clayburgh, the scenery and light design attaches to the idea of contrasts between the "hidden space" (The Control Room) and "private space". A first proposal of a scaffolding structure has been figured out in order to divide those spaces. The main idea of this metallic structure is to refer to the scenography as a cage in which all of us are captured by videos and audio recordings. It is also a metaphor of a house with several layers (our world, our cities) in which all we live. Go-pros cameras, video projections in small monitor screens and small speakers are planned to be installed in this structure. The scaffolding structure is planned to be modulable depending on the dimensions of the theatre. Front: meters 4.40, 6.80 or 8.80. High: 4.00 or 6.00. Deep 5.00 only. "This is a world of hidden mics and two way mirrors, a world where nothing is private", can be heard on the movie trailer of Coppola's work, The Control Room aims to explore this world. Arturo Fuentes |
Scenery proposal
Some aesthetic ideas searched on the film/video
