In audio-instructed productions, unrehearsed members of the public are given headphones that deliver prerecorded directions, making them at once audience and performer. Gathering multiple examples of this relatively new art form together under one banner allows its practitioners to prove that it isn’t just a one-trick gimmick; the technique can be applied to a variety of different styles and situations, and can have a variety of different outcomes for the participants.

For instance, while Rotozaza’s Wondermart tries hard to make participants feel safe, Rotating in a Room of Images does the opposite. Participants spend the majority of the 15-minute production in pitch darkness, guided only by invisible hands and the spooky voice in the headphones. The overwhelming feeling is of powerlessness. On your own, you’re incapable even of escaping the darkened space, much less of finding “the Room” to which the voice continually refers. You’re forced instead to rely on the goodwill of expressionless figures glimpsed moving in slow motion during brief periods of visibility – and on the disembodied voice in your head.

The actual content of Rotating in a Room of Images is everything critics of fringe theatre accuse fringe theatre of being – oblique, opaque, and so open to interpretation that it may as well mean nothing at all – but it’ll still leave you emotionally shaken. Whatever that says about this specific audio-instructed production, it’s evidence that the technique in general possesses the power not only to amuse, but also to shock. It’s difficult to decide whether to classify productions like this as theatre, but that breadth of potential should be an incentive to get them under theatre’s umbrella before some other medium claims them as its own.

Andrew: I’d like to start by asking about Rotozaza’s background. Where did you meet and what were the contexts you came from when you started out?

Silvia: Well we met in Aosta in Italy during a workshop organised by an ex-student of the Lecoq school in Paris. Anthony went to Lecoq from 95-97 and I was doing a similar course in a school called the Arsenale in Milan. In 1999, Ant came to Milan and we did our first show together Due; we did our second show, Next, the year after in Paris and then I moved to London and we started full-time.

Ant: Since that workshop in 98′, we’ve been doing pretty much all the work together; with a few exceptions: Silvia’s done some work with Shunt for example, Romcom is something I did alone with a writer called Glen Neath. In the first four years, we did about 14 or 15 shows. Some of them were one-offs and they were quite varied too, including public interventions, large scale happenings and installations. The largest project we did was in Abney Cemetery in Stoke Newington and that was a collaboration with over 60 artists. It was also our first commission, so for the first four or five years we weren’t really earning money through our work, we were trying not to spend too much on the projects and I guess we got quite good at doing things for very little.

Alexandre Archenoult and Silvia Meruriali in Next, Paris 2000. Photo by Gaelle Bona.

Some of those shows, like Grace and Next for example, were really important in terms of creating particular worlds that we’ve often gone back to. In Grace there were two girls on stage rehearsing a show, then after a while you realise that there’s actually only one person on stage, that they’re two halves of the same person; one of them is pretty much the director and the other’s the actor. So we got into this idea of portraying the two sides of the self; one person thinks hard about what to say and do and the other person does the best they can and gets on with it.

Silvia: And then what happens when someone’s watching all this? What does it change if there is someone there watching who can tell you what they think?

Ant: That was something that figured in the later work with guest performers, and unrehearsed guests. Being watched in Grace for example, meant that the audience was pretty much an invisible presence: you’re there watching but it’s like spying on the process, which is something that changed a lot later on but that we also came back to as well. The idea of being watched was explored by a sort of interruption in the show. We were in the Lion and Unicorn theatre, above this pub, with a lot of dodgy Irish drinkers in the bar downstairs. The door leads onto the stage and so during the show, there was quite a hermetic feel to the room, like a sort of bubble, but then the door opened and a man appeared holding a pint glass and clearly he had come up from downstairs. He said “sorry I thought the toilet was here” and one of the girls replied “no it’s downstairs”. He went away but then came back later and asked if he could watch and they say “yes, ok, sit down there”. So the audience thinks there’s some nutter in the room and eventually he starts chipping in with some advice.

Silvia: He had a red light that he used to ‘comment’ on the action. Turning on the red light meant it was good.

Andrew: So was this a planned interruption?

Ant: Yes, he was an actor.

Zhana Ivanova and Silvia Mercuriali in Grace 2001. Photo by Thomas Peter.

Andrew: What sort of training was involved for the actor to achieve a ‘credible’ interruption?

Ant: well this particular actor was a very good actor, generally I think it’s a matter of being convincing in quite a traditional way. There was never a moment where we decided that the audience was going to click. One night they’d get it early on and another night they’d get it very late.

We often have these moments in shows, like in Doublethink, when all the lights go out and we pretend that there’s been an explosion in the lighting box: the two operators are scurrying around and eventually they come on stage and just keep the thing going by whispering instructions into the guest performers’ ears. It then slowly becomes clear that they’re actually fictional characters.

Silvia: It’s the idea that they’re trying to put some sort of doubt in the audience as to whether it’s real or not, trying to keep them on the edge, not knowing how much of it is rehearsed. It’s fascinating when the real world comes in. But to what degree can you make it come in realistically?

Ant: In terms of getting that right, it’s a delicate thing; we talk about it a lot, just down to even how much you flick a switch to make it seem like they’re panicking, a bit too much and it it’s obviously staged, less then it’s as if they don’t care enough. It’s the sort of thing that audiences are very good at immediately tapping into. But in terms of mimicking reality, it’s an interesting thing because at the same time you’ve got people who are not acting at all on stage, who are literally being themselves and just responding to instructions.

Silvia: It’s quite a delicate balance.

Ant: When there’s a rehearsed side to the show, like in Doublethink, it’s a case of slipping ourselves in between the fiction of the scene and the structure of the show and the allegory that slowly starts to rise from a situation which is not at all fictional.

Lucy Foster, Silvia Mercuriali and Finlay Robertson in Doublethink. Photo by Chiara Contrino.

Andrew: From what you’ve already said about the diversity of work in Rotozaza’s early years, exploring different forms and concepts and then moving gradually towards work with guest performers and this sense of ‘performing the real’, has the pursuit of ‘reality’ now become a recurrent part of the process in your work or not necessarily?

Ant: I don’t know if it’s necessarily about ‘performing the real’, to be honest it’s more a question of representation and playing with the line between just being in the room, just being in the present and then yes structuring something whereby an atmosphere or an allegory starts to appear.

Silvia: What we try to do is definitely not naturalistic. It’s not about trying to recreate reality, it’s about always making sure that we are here in this moment and in this room and then we can explore all kinds of worlds and weird situations, because we know that the audience and the actors are there and the unrehearsed guests are real and that they really don’t know what will happen next.

Ant: It’s really about having a sense of an event, that it’s happening now, which for us we keep coming back to as the reason why we’re doing work in the live realm at all. You know, because there needs to be a reason, and I feel that a lot of theatre practitioners quite often lose track of why it is they’re not doing film or TV or media that is inherently dependant on some sort of recorded format. Our starting point is always to think of a new way of creating a sense in the room that this is unique to the live realm, that there is a point of need for me [the audience] having travelled to see this, and then working from there.

Andrew: Where does the name Rotozaza come from?

Ant: I’ve always loved the work of John Tinguely, the Swiss sculptor. He made three pieces called Rotozaza 1, 2 and 3. One of them was a big machine that threw balls, it was popular with children, you sort of threw balls at it and it regurgitated them and threw them back out. It was quite a scary sort of machine as well, you could see all the nuts and bolts. The second one was a huge installation that was made for a world peace conference in Sweden and it was a machine that took plates from one end of the room to the other, and at the other end was a big frying pan that smashed the plates, and then Tinguely turned that into a performance, using the sculpture as a site. There was an opera going on at the same time that dealt with the chaos of modern life, it was inherently a cross-genre, multi-disciplinary world that he created with a lot of structures and energies. I also just liked the word.

Jean Tinguely's Heureka in Zürich-Seefeld (Zürichhorn).

Andrew: You were talking earlier about Doublethink and Romcom, how did the ‘guest performer’ strand of your work come about?

Ant: The starting point for all the guest performer work was a piece that I did with a friend of mine called Sam Britton. He’s an electronic musician and a composer. We were invited to do a piece for a festival in Paris, I didn’t really know what I was going to do but I knew a friend of mine was going to be there called Henri and I just had this idea of him on stage pottering around and dealing with stuff. I didn’t think too much about it to begin with but then I thought he’s never going to agree to rehearse a show with me; he won’t want to assume the responsibility of being a performer, because he’s not like that at all, he’s never been on stage and he’s not at all extrovert. On the other hand he has the ability to just speak into a microphone, for example, and yet remain within his own world. So all these things led to the thought that if we create a list of instructions for him and that he agrees to do as well as he can and he trusts that we’re not going to ask him to do anything embarrassing, it could work. I think he understood very well what we had in mind and, bravely, he said yes.

The voice for this piece was pre-recorded and we worked with Gad Sabba, someone we’ve gone back to quite a lot subsequently. There’s a very particular quality to his voice, somewhat ambivalent: sometimes he can seem very harsh and sometimes very vulnerable. In the performance, the voice is quite cut up and you forget that it’s pre-recorded until you’re suddenly reminded by certain glitches.

The show was a revelation for us, and because we had three nights we thought we can’t just do it with Henri three times in a row so I asked two other people who I knew to do it and it was fascinating. Since then it’s been essential for us to choose the guest performers, because it’s not something everyone can do.

Andrew: Why is that?

Ant: It’s different for different shows. For Romcom and Doublethink it requires people who are at ease with their own personalities and who are not going to stress out about being on stage or try too hard, try to entertain or be funny.

Silvia: Happy to be watched without panicking or without wanting to cover up what they are, that’s the most important thing.

Andrew: Even though these people are receiving instructions and they don’t need to rehearse anything in this pre-made structure, do you still require them to retain a degree of ‘actor control’?

Silvia: They don’t need to be actors at all, just people that are comfortable with themselves, because that’s mainly what we want to show in the performance is themselves; how different people with different personalities and ways of doing things can change and enrich the show. The instructions, if you read them on paper, are nothing special, so what is interesting is watching people cope with the instructions and performing them live.

Ant: And there’s always the unknown things that happen. Take Henri for example, there’s a moment where he’s up the top of a ladder in the spotlight and there’s a deafening noise all around him, then suddenly there’s dramatic music and he walks down the ladder towards a cradle that’s descended with the sound of a baby crying and he’s told to unwrap it. He unwraps this bundle and it’s a watermelon and at that point a knife flies in behind him on stage and he’s told to cut it to bits, but in that show he didn’t see the knife and figured that he must have a knife on him somewhere because we were constantly asking him to take things out of his pockets. So he started searching through his pockets and he found all this stuff like a gun which he used later on, but he couldn’t find anything to cut with, so he picked up the watermelon and first took off the label, which was very Henri, and he raised it above his head and let it drop on the floor and it split into two perfect halves. Given the same situation, another person may well have panicked.

Andrew: In terms of writing these pieces, how important is it to leave space for things to happen?

Ant: Very important.

Andrew: What is an instruction in the Rotozaza context and particularly in your performance Five in the Morning? In that show the audience is able to hear instructions being given out loud to three performers on stage in a kind of deserted ‘water-world’ theme park.

Silvia: In Five in the Morning, which is very different from the other guest performance shows, the voices are the performers’ own voices which you find out as the show goes on. So the instructions are internal, giving yourself instructions in a situation where you’re having to decide what to do on the spot, but that’s a very different kind of instruction than Doublethink for example where it’s not about the voice being the other half of the self, but is clearly someone else. It’s like some sort of empty outsider who’s making decisions, a sort of brain out there that is doing an experiment on the guests.

Five in the Morning. Photo by Enrico Neves.

Ant: In Doublethink, there are two operators pushing the buttons, there’s a male operator and a female operator, there’s a male guest performer and a female guest and they pair up and slowly you start to understand that they never normally talk to each other, but here they’re forced to communicate because of a crisis. It’s like Five in the Morning in that it’s a very awkward relationship but one which can also produce some beautiful results in certain situations.

Silvia: It’s true that the voice as psychological entity is quite a recurrent theme in our work. Even in Ooff which is probably our least conceptual show, the voices that give instructions to the two guest performers are the voices coming from the minds of the other rehearsed characters that are on stage with them.

Ant: Ooff is a piece with two guest performers and Silvia as a character called ‘Mini Lavette’ who’s a sort of sport-obsessed girl in crazy, sporty clothes. There’s a grid on the floor, A, B, C, D – 1, 2, 3, 4 and two speakers. The two guest performers are inside the grid, moving from square to square, one listening to one speaker and the other listening to the other. The speakers are speaking together, so the whole thing is pretty chaotic and occasionally they’ll say copy Mini, and Mini Lavette is running around doing various exercises and then demonstrating a movement that they have to immediately learn and remember to recreate whenever they hear a certain sound cue, so they’re learning things at the same time as running around boxing and stretching. The whole piece is very brightly lit and exercise-video-like. Then it changes state and becomes a night time scene where the guest performers suddenly gain a lot of power and generally the situation turns around and Mini finds herself slightly bullied by these two people and the idea is that they are products of her imagination or dreams. We were interested in the idea that when you dream, you can become a victim of your own creation.

Matt Rudkin with Silvia Meruriali in OOFF. Photo by Chiara Contrino.

Silvia: You can also be a victim of the instructions you give yourself in various situations in real life. So that’s like in Grace, which is probably why we often go back to that show because there’s two people being the same person in a conflicting relationship. The same thing goes for the voices and the guests performers; it’s what you tell yourself and how you perform it. In real life you always have to negotiate between what you tell yourself and what you actually manage to do in the end.

Ant: And the whole negotiation is between extremes of violence and intimacy a lot of the time, and that again is something we discovered in Grace.

Andrew: It’s interesting, sitting on the outside listening to these descriptions of your performances and going back to the name Rotozaza, the Tinguely installations you mentioned, the machines, the switchboards in Doublethink, people dislocated from one another, instructions from voices, whether internal or external, this reminds me of certain German expressionist work that portrays the insides of society as mechanical, powered by lost individuals with a sense of alienation from one’s work, oneself and others.

Ant: I don’t think the performances are expressionistic in form, but there may be a parallel in that we’re very interested in media and in the way that our predicaments in life are dominated by the media. This expresses itself in the shows through focus on process; seeing the nuts and bolts of what is going on is really important and generally things get taken apart until you can see through them.

Also in terms of the actual performance mechanism of interpreting impulse, the agency comes from the instruction. So in a sense this may answer your question about what an instruction is. Perhaps an instruction is agency for action, which may be obvious… We talk about agency but we also talk about agents on stage and super agents, who tell them what to do.

Andrew: What would be an example of a super agent?

Silvia: Maybe the closest thing to a super agent we’ve had was in Doublethink with a voice that is neither me or Neil, it’s something pre-recorded that we’ve been given, and we’re just operating it. A super agent is the one who controls the whole thing.

Ant: In Doublethink you have this screen with two people either side of it, with the voice giving instructions to both of them, so it’s like a homogeneous agency, like a common denominator. In a similar sense, Five in the Morning was a shared space but turned out to be a psychological construct; obviously at a certain point there’s going to be a crisis in that, it’s not sustainable, it’s something that we naturally gravitate towards in ourselves. We tell ourselves things that we feel other people are being told and yet at a certain point we have to come back to the things that we can only really tell ourselves, and so that’s where the two operators split and come on stage and deal with things separately. That was a super agent, and beneath them when the electricity runs then the agents have to take over and do it themselves.

There is a wealth of experimental sound on this site, submitted by working artists and available for public download under the Creative Commons copyright law which enables the legal “sharing and reuse of cultural, educational and scientific works”. Visitors to the site can browse the artists’ work and download tracks of interest. Of particular note is the work featured below by the UK duo Frankland and Fyans.

(from Intramural in Somniscope by Liam Frankland and Dave Fyans)