Cues from 'Scarecrow'

Here's three cues written for a production of Don Nigro's 'Scarecrow' in the Victorian College of the Arts Directors' Series.

They're all pretty similar.  'Scarecrow' depicts an isolated family going through a series of events which might be repeating endlessly, as though under the influence of a curse.  I wanted to use the same sequence of notes over and over, like in the classic horror films of the 1980s, where the endless repetition of the theme reinforces the sense of hopelessness and inevitability.

Each cue is built around cello, played by William Heuzenroder.  I played all the other instruments.  The ambiguous sounds are all guitars or wineglasses.

The other sounds are clocks and cicadas - 'Scarecrow' is set in a farmhouse full of clocks, sitting in a cornfield.  The text contains no stage directions and all changes of location are merely implied.  At first the director and I experimented with reinforcing this absence of direction, but it made the play seem structurally weak; we changed direction and I started using quiet birds, cicadas and clocks to separate out the various moments and implied spaces of the play.

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Cues from 'iexist'

Here's three cues from I Must Not Theatre's 2010 production 'iexist', a dance/theatre piece created for the 2010 Adelaide Fringe Festival.  All were written in the rehearsal room while the director and actors developed the relevant sections of the performance.

King Of The Internet is part of a longer sequence of cues which evolves over about 12 minutes.  It contains two pieces of spoken text: 'King Of The Internet', which is spoken by the actor in the final show (so this version was just a guide for me to shape the cue to and isn't delivered perfectly) and 'I Dreamt I Was Made Of Words', which was delivered as part of the score and so is as you hear it.  This sequence of cues is built around sampled instruments and field recordings.  The organ-like sound is actually a processed recording of wineglasses; there's bees and traffic and a classroom in there as well.
 

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Kiing_2

Puppet Dance includes another piece of pre-recorded text which introduces a slow dance sequence.  It's built from a field recording of traffic, filtered to make it sound something like a piano.

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Traffic

 
Typing Trees is the closing cue for the performance and accompanies a wordless dance sequence.

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Typing_1