David Rosenberg on cars, dancing and a bit of eavesdropping

Brighton Festival is renowned for staging a number of outdoor performances and one of this year’s highlights is the return of Requardt and Rosenberg. They scored a major success with their first project, Electric Hotel, back in 2010 where they gave their audience an opportunity to witness the scenes of the piece through hotel windows. This year they have something different, but equally voyeuristic, to offer. David Rosenberg was kind enough to tell me a little more about this intriguing production.

 

What can we expect from you this year?

We are bringing the World Premiere of our new piece Motor Show. This work, commissioned by Brighton Festival, the London International Festival of Theatre (L.I.F.T.) and Norfolk and Norwich Festival, is the second piece that I have co-directed with Frauke Requardt. 

 

We create dance performances to be seen outdoors, or in temporary structures, that place audiences in unusual positions in relation to the work. When we brought Electric Hotel there in 2010, we wanted to explore the idea of listening to intimate details that you can see at a distance and, with Motor Show, we are very interested in trying to expand that distance, the distance that the audience is from the action.

 

In this piece do we get to eavesdrop into the cars?

That’s one element of the show, yes, the voyeuristic experience where the audience look through car windows while they listen to the interiors of those cars. We’ve found that by increasing the distance while maintaining the intimacy of the sounds that you’re hearing, we have created quite a peculiar experience. It seems to us that, as the distance increases, the intrigue also increases.

 

Are their just one or two cars in the piece?

No, there’s about ten altogether including a beautiful Jaguar XJ6 which we have completely destroyed. The piece is set in a wasteland, which is what makes the Black Rock area so perfect, and one of the initial ideas was to focus on what might bring people to drive to a wasteland on the edge of the city. There are various narratives that we have put in the piece that suit that particular environment.

 

The site in Black Rock has been walled off for years and it’s been used, quite frequently, by graffiti artists. Inside those walls we hope to create a wild, but fragile, spectacle with the city skyline as the backdrop. Our sound designers, Ben and Max Ringham have created amazing binaural recordings that work with the bleakness of this site.

 

Is the production intrinsically a dance piece? 

Yes, the language of the piece is dance and, although there are narratives that can be followed, the piece is guided more from the visual images created by movement. The choreography extends beyond the dancers to the cars themselves and how they are driven through the landscape.

 

The use of the headphones allows the audience to naturally transport themselves into the environment that they are watching and, although this is a huge outdoor performance, each member of the audience will get a very intimate, individual and curiously lonely experience of what we hope will be a thrilling piece. 

 

Motor Show runs from 9 – 13 May at 9.45pm and can be seen at a specially created arena at Black Rock, Brighton Marina before visiting St James Place Development Site Norwich from 19 – 23 May, as part of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival and Area 12 Greenwich Peninsula, London from the 23 – 27 June, (as part of LIFT and GDIF) and also at the Stockton International River Festival which runs from 1 – 5 August.