I’m starting again at the Stratford Festival doing music and sound design for The Hobbit, in my 10th season here. A decade is a good time to think about things, to look back and ponder on the path. My first show here was a doubleheader – the Breath of Kings double header. It was a colossal undertaking, and I didn’t really know what I was in for when I said yes to coming to make the music and sound design for it (for some context, Stratford is North America’s largest repertory theatre company, welcoming 400k-500k visitors annually across multiple venues and programs).
For a young sound designer, who still felt a little unsure about what he was doing, being called to come to this place was quite an achievement (a call, a terror…). It’s a large machine here – there are so many people who work on all the different shows, up to 1500 per season at its height. Part of that is because of the scale of the festival, but part of that is because of the intense collaborative model that theatre calls for, even in a large machine like this. It can be a little impersonal at times, but every day there are moments of connection that are really very special, and common to the creative life no matter what your sector or scale of work that you do.
As someone who wanted a career in “music“ theatre was not really on my radar. It was something that I knew it was out there, and something that I knew could be a potential gig, but I was never really aware of the depth and the breadth of work that is required to tell a story in this way, on a stage, for an audience, all of us breathing the same air. Coming to a place like the Stratford Festival is in some ways no different than working on a show in a 100 seat backspace theatre, though. The same kinds of skills and knowledge and heart and openness are required, because what we are doing is, at heart, the same no matter the venue. It’s easy to get caught up in the glamour (such as it is in Canadian Theatre), it’s easy to get caught up in the scale, or the tech, or the logistics. And those things are interesting and often fun to deal with, don’t get me wrong, but every year that I come back I am reminded that it’s not an easy or automatic task. Every season and story requires attention, it requires authenticity, it requires skill and heart and knowledge to live on a plane of storytelling.
10 years. 10 years of early morning and late night drives, 10 years of snacks at the audio table, 10 years of nerves and uncertainty, 10 years of new discoveries and new choices and new friends. And those 10 years were built on another lifetime of banging around on drums in my basement, touring across the world, nerding out about a microphone, and practicing, practicing, practicing. I guess as I write I realize it’s not just 10 years: it’s every moment that led up to this one.
So this year my series will be not just about the logistics (you can see my posts about Romeo and Juliet for that). I think this year I’m more interested in nerding out on the human things that connect us when we try to tell a story. The world needs more of that I think.
And the geese too, of course.