TAC International Street Theatre and Arts Festival · Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid · 25 and 26 May 2023
The performance
Verso Libre, by María Moreno, at the TAC festival in Valladolid. Four performances: 25 and 26 May, at 6pm and 8:30pm.
The piece works as a laboratory of flamenco dance in which the artists work in real time and the musical line-up changes with each show. The audience does not watch from a seat: it follows the artists through the space.
It was one of eight shows, out of forty-five programmed, that required controlled access because of the nature of the work and of the place where it was performed.
The space
The Museo Patio Herreriano, in the historic centre of Valladolid. The route was not confined to the Patio de los Reyes: it moved through several rooms of the museum.
These are stone spaces and large high-ceilinged rooms, with hard surfaces and no acoustic treatment. The galleries are long and narrow, and the audience moved through them on foot.
The challenges
The route. The audience moved through different rooms following the artists, so coverage had to reach the whole path and not just one fixed point. A loudspeaker system would have meant wiring every room separately.
The reverberation. Stone and high ceilings send a lot of sound back. With loudspeakers, the reverb tail would have swallowed the definition of the footwork and the guitar, which is exactly where the detail lies in this piece.
Headphones solve both at once: the sound travels with each person wherever they go, and arrives direct, without the room in between.
The listening
The performance was heard through one hundred wireless headphones, fed by a single transmitter. There were no loudspeakers.
Volume control is individual, and the mix is the same for everyone: what each person decides is the level they hear it at.
Installation
One transmitter for one hundred receivers.
The control position was not fixed: it moved with the audience. Rather than covering the whole museum from a single spot, the technical position followed the route and was repositioned in each room.
Credits
María Moreno — dance
Eduardo Trassierra — guitar
Javier Álvarez — sound
Bleu Prod — production
Photographs from the silencioSonoro archive