Savage/Love
LSU Physical Theatre/Festival Fringe (Edinburgh)
Director: Nick Erickson
Lighting/Projections Designer: Adam Parboosingh
Costume Design: Kyla Kazuschyk
Composer/Sound Designer: Shannon Marie O’Neill
Photographer: Andy Phillipson
Performed at Louisiana State University and the 2016 Festival Fringe in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Savage/Love by Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin is a collection of monologues, poems, and songs without a narrative through line. LSU Physical Theatre performed this piece for the 2016 Festival Fringe in Edinburgh, Scotland as well as in Aurillac, France and Baton Rouge, LA. Each monologue was performed via movement, aerial silks, and/or acrobatics. Some performers spoke their monologues. For others, the physical nature of what they were doing made it difficult for them to speak and project so the audience could hear them, so in those cases, we recorded their voices and played them through the sound system as part of the overall sound design.
Most of the performers were not actors, but rather dancers or aerialists. One of the big challenges was to help those performers who recorded monologues to be comfortable with the microphone and deliver as natural a performance as possible. For many of these performers (who were also students at LSU), this was their first time in front of a microphone, which can be pretty intimidating! I was happy with where we got in the end, and I always enjoy projects where I can work directly with performers to help create the aural atmosphere of the show.
The sound design was comprised of original music composition, loops, original recordings, and found sounds. Thematically based around a heartbeat, many of the sounds and instruments are made from a recording of a heartbeat.