The Long Christmas Ride Home

By Paula Vogel

Live Musician & Sound Design

Directed by Kevin Landis

December 2018

Set Design by Marie Davis, Lighting by Heidi Eckwall, Costumes by Gypsy Ames

The Long Christmas Ride Home follows the journey of three children on christmas eve told through bunraku style puppetry, poetic dialogue and movement.

Live Sound Design Using ABLETON Live 10

Kevin Landis at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs and the Colorado College Theatre department collaborated on this production of The Long Christmas Ride Home by Paula Vogel. In the notes of the script, Vogel writes that there should be a live musician incorporated into the production, and that the way you interpret that can vary from a single ukulele player to a full band. After Kevin selected me to be his sound designer in the capacity of the musician character, I knew I wanted to use Ableton Live to ensure I could have musicality, live components, and enough control to reproduce the same outline every night.

Convincing Landis that a digital world, using reinforced sound and microphones, would fit with his Thornton Wilder minimalist aesthetic took a few rehearsals. In the end, positioning me on the stage (you can see me to the left in the video below), as well as using live samples from instruments, voice and actors, created a live enough feeling that we were able to blend the digital world with the seemingly analoge.

One of my favorite repeated moments from the play was live sampling the voices of certain actors, processing them with reverb for the feedback, and then immediately looping the lines backwards and slowing them down to create an otherworldly rumbling effect. This was done during the key moment when each child was severed from his or her puppet and sent into their future. I could have pre-recorded a similar sound, and played it traditionally and uniformly every night, but sticking with the theme of liveness made the decision clear to process it live. In this way, you would hear changes in the timbre of the cue depending on how the actor recited the sampled line each night.

View the clip below

Shown is a transition incorporating one of these moments as Rebecca’s future fades and Claire’s comes into focus:

Video by Lila Schmitz

Colorado College Department of Theatre and Dance - Norberg Studio Theater