ILIAD - creating a unique sense of time, place & environment
An epic theatrical staging of Christopher Logue’s extraordinary version of Homer’s work of the same name, ILIAD was produced by National Theatre Wales in association with Ffwrnes and directed by Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes. This post-modern adaptation was monumental in scale from the get-go. This description can also be applied to the ambition of the project, the length of the performances and everything in-between, including the amount of technical equipment needed to facilitate.
Sourcing Sounds
From early discussions with directors Mike Pearson & Mike Brookes, it became quite clear to the JHM team that ILIAD wasn’t to become a period drama set in ancient Greece; Christopher Logue’s richly cinematic work subtly references modern day culture and geography. From inception, sound in ILIAD was intentionally utilised to create a unique sense of time, place and environment, purposefully avoiding overt reference to any particular era. In order for us to achieve this compositionally, it was integral to source our own sounds, and to use these to sculpt the entire soundworld of the production. We understood that, due to the vastness of the text, the collection of sounds would have to be similarly vast, whilst we sought those that were free of any existing associations.
In the wilderness of the rugged North Wales landscape, sounds were collected from barbed wire, fence posts, rocks and logs, as well as longer textural sounds such as scrapes and natural ambient audio. When these sounds were used in a sampler back in the studio (re-pitching & stretching recorded audio), their unique properties became more apparent, and aided in further detaching the music from any particular time or place. During the compositional process, we found that we could use these sounds in combination with more conventional acoustic instruments, such as hide-headed drums and old brass horns, to arrive at our bespoke soundworld.
Mike Pearson with Pete Smith and Sam Barnes at John Hardy Music
Pete Smith and Sam Barnes at John Hardy Music
Pete Smith and Sam Barnes during dress rehearsals at THEATR Y FFWRNES, LLANELLI in SEPTember 2015
Pete Smith in rehearsals
Final dress rehearsals for ILIAD
