For All Ears Kate McIntosh sets up the stage as an improvised adhoc laboratory for a series of unusual recordings and acoustic experiments, using everyday objects and materials. Chairs are dragged, paper is torn, glasses are toppled. Sounds are gathered, recorded and played back – the action of one part of the performance providing soundtrack, background or atmosphere for another. Along the way McIntosh – as combination curious scientist, mischievous questioner and eclectic storyteller – leads us on a distinctive journey through a diverse landscape of ideas.
There are parables of human and animal behavior, fragments on crowd control and linguistics, jokes about politics and group dynamics, maps of birds and traffic jams, stories about systems, societies and social interactions. At the heart of the piece – in the silence between the sounds recorded, at the centre of the listening crowd – are questions about who we are alone and how we are together, about what it might take to change a culture and what we could be missing in the push for individual self-sufficiency.
[1hr 15]