concept

‘(answer to an auditory hallucination)’

It’s the ‘(answer to an auditory hallucination)’ that is the title of a polyphonic performance.
The title includes parenthesis at both end as well for it’s a kind of instruction article for an actor/actress in a script.

Fig 1. Audience study: audience in a polyphonic theatre

The initial concept of this piece was to inspire every audience to have different emotions while seeing a single performance.

As a foreigner at Glasgow, I enjoyed listening to abundance of different style of accent. Though I live here since last June, I’m still struggling to fully understand jokes that my Glaswegian mates make after 11pm in a bar.
I could realize that I was answering even to a mere noise, trivial mumbling of mate or sound of coughing. It was like talking to an auditory hallucination.

That was the moment that I started to convey these senses of poor communication, auditory hallucination, misunderstanding into my art work. And then this interest in unnecessary sounds, words, language, chatting, coughing has driven me into a kind of polyphonic performance piece.

Fig 2. Floor plan of a polyphonic theatre, Digital print, 2011

That inspired me to designing a fictional theatre where there are three kind of chairs that enables people to see and hear different genre, style or story of drama.

As can be seen from figure 2, this stage contains its own dream of radiating different experience, emotion towards each audience.
(This image is a fictional, conceptual image art work which has inspired me to design feasible structure of polyphonic performance, including following images)

“Sam wouldn’t be able to stop laughing at a musical ‘Alice in Wonderland’, while his girl friend Tasha could stop being sad at the musical ‘Alice in Wonderland’, while their friend Lisa feels this musical ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is a play of the absurdity.”

The above episode is an imaginative situation that exaggerates daily experience that not everybody gets same impression or feel similar emotion since, as a total art genre, movie or performance contains lots of subjective moments and stories that will stimulate you to enjoy fluctuation of your emotion, stimulate you to make your sentiment moist.

Like Marshall McLuhan asserted that medium is the message, Nicholas Carr said ‘media aren’t just channel of information, They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.'(Carr, Shallow 6). If I may further these two scholars’ notion, I could reach an idea of a new media that contains different characteristics of different media, perspective simultaneously.

Fig 3. ‘(answer to an auditory hallucination)’, digital image, 2011

So I wrote three scripts for this polyphonic drama.

As in the figure #3, audience listens to a different scripts from each sound shell(dome) according to their preference.

I made all three script have same number of syllables and a single group of actors and actress mimes.
In this drama, each audience in each sound shell can be put in a situation that they think the actors are acting the script they are listening to, while other audience in the other sound shell think that their script is being played by the actors.

Below is the list of the three script that will be played at the same time. These scripts shares similarities or disparities in terms of literary genre, story, subject, tone of voice, gesture, noise, background music, etc.

Script 1: Legislation presentation of Political Gambling Law
Script 2: The investigation of report of EuroJackpot
Script 3: Hi, my name is British Pound. You can call me Quid

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Script 1: Legislation presentation of Political Gambling Law

Script 1 shows a speech of a fictional Prime Minister who suggest a new law which his party entitled as ‘Political Gambling Law’ that enables people to bet their money on their national politics. It is a sarcasm of a collusional relationship between politics and business/ industry.

Political Gambling Law (legislation presentation by Roger Hart) from Saejin Choi on Vimeo.

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Script 2: The investigation of report of EuroJackpot

Script 2 is a journal report that investigates an unprecedented scandal about the biggest European lottery, Euro Jackpot (fictional) that hasn’t meet any first prize winner for 17 years. By keeping being accumulated without meeting awardee, the international conflict/war of nerves around this the world’s richest lottery is the main plot of this script.

Investigation Report on Euro Jackpot (01) from Saejin Choi on Vimeo.

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Script 3: Hi, my name is British Pound. You can call me Quid

Script 3 will be acted by a personified British Pound. It’s a diary of  ‘￡’. Let’s listen to his story of how he became a money and grown up as a ‘capitalism’.

A statement by a £ from Saejin Choi on Vimeo.