Nearly a year after graduating, I had the pleasure of returning to my alma mater, Seattle University, to design the sound for an honors presentation of Caridad Svich's 12 Ophelias. In order for a student to graduate with departmental honors, they must submit a proposal and, if chosen, produce a large-scale project that is meant to use the skills and theory they have learned through their 4 years in school. The form can change from project to project, but in the case of this project, it was a fleshed-out and teched-out cut of the play. Students were cast and a director, choreographer, and designers were hired.

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I was thrilled to be among those asked to design this show. The year prior, I had completed an honors project of my own & found the program to be very enriching and rewarding. I also found the source material absolutely hypnotic--12 Ophelias is a poem of a play, centered around Hamlet's Ophelia who has landed in a cipher of a new world where she must use her voice to cut a new path for herself.

As the title suggests, the show is typically done as a musical (of sorts). Songs are built into the language and licensing comes with premade tracks, with the option of using them or your own music. For this particular presentation of the material, we chose to embrace the "brokenness," of the piece and eschew the use of "karaoke tracks," with the performer and director instead developing melodies together for her to sing acapella. In the final product, instead of backing tracks or true instrumentation, I built underscore with tonal support & acoustic textures where it helped strengthen the piece and left the performer alone to tell her story otherwise. 

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In other sections, we used prerecorded & heavily affected speech & synchronized effects to help develop the aural palette into another character of sorts, as action and emotion became intrinsically tied to the soundscape.  For example, the first clip below is the audio half of one particular "call and response" section, a heavily choreographed flashback of the grieving Ophelia. The movement sequence was devised during rehearsals to the actors simply reading the lines with the movement, but as the concept developed we chose to pre-record it and I built a tinnitus-inspired sound collage around the text: Ophelia may have been a young woman going mad, but the audience was pulled into that experience right along with her.