Production diary — April 2025
“Hell isn’t a place. It’s a pattern.” Hell Script PB version …
Timothy Morton’s opening salvo has become our north star – and our engineering brief. If HELL is a pattern, the stage needs to behave like a living algorithm, folding audience, text and atmosphere into the same feedback‑loop. Here’s how the project looks now that the core team have staked out their corners of the furnace.
Twin horizons of light
Christopher Paul Davenport has gone full Copernicus on the visuals: two 12‑metre ROE Black Pearl canvases wrap the audience in a 180° embrace on either side of Morton’s speaking zone. Each screen behaves like a volatile ecosystem – oil‑flare lattices, glitching chorales of satellite data, and particle swarms that pulse to the sub‑bass. Because the panoramas hinge at 15°, they form an almost continuous horizon; the audience sits inside a molten ring, never sure where the edge of the image ends or where their own peripheral vision begins.
Writing music for a 12.4.4 cosmos
My score lives in three strata:
- Infrasonic bedrock – a four‑tower Genelec W371 sub array throbs at tectonic frequencies, slow enough to be felt as pressure rather than “notes”.
- Spatial chorus – twelve Genelec 8361As orbit on two concentric circles, letting vowels from Morton’s live mic spin like unhappy comets.
- Height ghosts – four 8341s in the grid leak high‑altitude artefacts: reversed hymn fragments, pitch‑shifted refinery whistles, distant bird‑calls that never quite resolve.
Composed in 128 channel mode, the stems are mapped so any syllable or cello scrape can corkscrew vertically, then splinter across the screens in millimetres.
Editing the script (with a scalpel and a delay line)
Working side‑by‑side with Peder Bjurman, we’ve boiled Morton’s 230‑page manuscript to a 60-minute arc that moves by “emotional gravity” rather than chronology. For every cut on paper there’s a compensating gesture in sound: if we excise a paragraph, its consonant‑shapes are granulated into a shimmer that haunts the next scene. Textual subtraction becomes acoustic residue—a sonic palimpsest underscoring Morton’s insistence that nothing ever truly disappears, it only changes channels.
Hardware as theology
The tech isn’t window dressing at all – it’s dramaturgy. A Genelec woofer drop at 26 Hz makes the seats tremble exactly when Morton hisses, “We are the asteroid.” Hell Script PB version … A halo of LED oranges and toxic magentas erupts the moment Blake’s “Tyger” is name‑checked. The hardware sermonises.
Rehearsal snapshot
- May 2025 – System alignment & FIR tuning: every speaker phase‑locked, every pixel colour‑calibrated.
- June 2025 – “Hot‑room” run with twenty SPL‑meter crash dummies to model audience absorption.
- Q3 2025 – Premiere: expect communion bread embedded with NFC chips (yes, really) that trigger hidden footnotes on your phone when you break it.
Why build an inferno at all?
Because climate grief is more than data; it’s a corporeal tremor that deserves a matching architecture of light and pressure. Because—as Blake whispers—“everything that lives is holy,” Hell Script PB version … which means even the feedback squeal of a microphone can carry liturgical weight. And because, to borrow Deleuze, a theatre should be a factory of sensations, not a mausoleum for safe ideas.
We’re not guiding the audience out of Hell; we’re inviting them to recognise its patterns, dance in the furnace, and maybe re‑write the exit code together. Bring curiosity, earplugs, and the willingness to hum “Jerusalem” off‑key with the rest of us. The fire exits are clearly marked, but you may prefer to stay and smoulder.