Reassembled in Auralia.space
Shannon and I got to talk about the process of making Reassembled Slightly Askew in the first in-depth interview focussing on making Reassembled Slightly Askew with a special focus on the finding the aural dramaturgy.
It was great to revisit the journey and its fabulous that the interview now exists as a resource.
From Auralia.space:
Our guests for this LMYE #5 Laboratory documentary are Shannon Yee and Hanna Slättne, who worked together as writer and dramaturg of the award-winning headphone theatre piece Reassembled, Slightly Askew (2015). The performance, made in collaboration also with co-creators Anna Newell, Stevie Prickett and sound designer Paul Stapleton, is amongst the most daring pieces of recent years to have brought together a performative language with a medical one, interweaving technological achievement, autobiographical trauma, and dramaturgical experimentation.
The making of Reassembled – a process which we learn took more than five years – has its point of departure in Yee’s diagnosis of a rare brain infection in 2008, which kept her at the acute neurosurgical ward at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast for about three months. Based on Yee’s writing and on conversations from her early stages of recovery, the idea emerged to ‘make a show in bed’, and that its spectatorial and sensorial experience be determined by the theatrical potentialities of emergent developments in binaural audio.
As the two generously share notes from their process, guiding questions in making the piece and the questions the piece asked of them, a picture emerges of a work of great ambition: the starting script is an experimental set of shapes and textures arranged into ‘fogs’ and ‘grids’, the dramaturgy situates the spectator in the position of the patient, and the experience plays a complex game of shifting interiorities and exteriorities. In itself a product of a deep process of collaboration – between the co-creators first and then between numerous other individuals and organisations – Reassembled, Slightly Askew is crucially a work about empathy. A whole set of processes of ‘translation’ of experience are at work in the performance, which begins from the communication between two artists and friends to expand out into a much wider journey of radical understanding. Indeed, Reassembled, Slightly Askew has toured continuously since its first inception, not only as a performance but also as a tool for medical training. Generous, thought-provoking and, as one review had it, ‘quietly devastating’ (Time Out London), the show is an example of Medical Humanities at its best.
Follow this link for the full interview Auralia.space.Reassembled
And do spend some time at this amazing resource and wonderfully curated website
covering everything you need to know about oral/aural dramaturgy
Auralia.Space - Aural/Oral Dramaturgies:
Post-Verbatim, Amplified Storytelling and Gig Theatre in the Digital Age