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By Alistair McDowall

Sound Design

Directed by Lucy Houlihan

November 2016

Sound Design for Space, and the Absence of Time…

Billions of miles from home, the lone research base on Pluto has lost contact with Earth. Unable to leave or send for help, the skeleton crew sit waiting. Waiting. Waiting long enough for time to start eating away at them. To lose all sense of it. To start seeing things in the dark outside.

Director Lucy Houlihan conceived of this production, set as a staged reading, that slowly turned into reality. Following the mental and temporal decline of the characters, the actors began losing their scripts, until it was as if the black box theatre had become the space station itself.

My design incorporated binaural SFX for birds and forest animals they begin hearing in the space. These sounds were interwoven with a tuned soundscape that musically created themes and a sense of movement, as well as the rumbling machinery of the space station. The building is a character, manifesting anything from strange noises overhead to a child with a bloody X over her mouth. The challenge of this project was creating a horror film on stage, within the unique context of a staged reading gone wrong.

Photos by Daniel Sarche

Theatre Workshop at Colorado College - Taylor theater