Creative Innovation / Studio & Music
Nach denKlippen.
Andrea Breth · Elisabeth Orth · Vienna & Frankfurt
Elisabeth Orth’s live voice in dialogue with her recorded voice. Music, transformed speech and spatial sound became a live-performed collage for Andrea Breth’s staging of Albert Ostermaier’s Nach den Klippen.
Explore project
- Project
- Burgtheater Wien · Akademietheater
- Year
- 2005–2006
- Role
- Musical sound design · Ableton Live performance / Operator
- Services
- Musical sound design · Music arrangement · Live operation
Commissioned by the Burgtheater and staged at Vienna’s Akademietheater in 2005, Nach den Klippen centred on Elisabeth Orth’s performance of Albert Ostermaier’s monologue. Andrea Breth conceived much of the evening as a theatrical audio play: Orth’s presence on stage intertwined with previously recorded and transformed passages of her own voice.
A score performed in the moment.
Bert Wrede composed the music and delivered its individual elements. Working closely with Andrea Breth, Michael shaped these materials into the production’s musical sound collage. The timing followed Orth’s delivery and dramatic accents, so a fixed playback could not do the work.
Using Ableton Live, Michael performed the musical layers throughout the production’s run, responding to the actress in real time. Arrangement and live operation became part of the performance itself.
Sound throughout the theatre.
Loudspeakers distributed around the auditorium made direction, distance and placement part of the staging. Voices and musical textures could emerge from different points around the audience, extending the scene beyond the visible stage.
Michael worked alongside Ingo Pußwald, responsible for sound effects, and Rupert Derschmidt on theatre sound engineering. Developing a system that could follow the performance while controlling this spatial sound field involved extensive experimentation with the technology available at the time. The production was also performed at Schauspiel Frankfurt in 2006.
Collaborators
Text: Albert Ostermaier Direction / soundtrack: Andrea Breth Performer: Elisabeth Orth Music: Bert Wrede Musical sound design, music arrangement & live operation: Michael Dörfler Sound design / SFX: Ingo Pußwald Sound: Rupert Derschmidt & Helmut Weiss Stage design: Martin Zehetgruber Production: Burgtheater Wien / Schauspiel Frankfurt
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