Inside LAND – The Sound of Memory and Movement (Part 3 of 3)

by Matthew Williams

LAND – A dance work reclaiming space, memory, and the right to stay.

In Parts 1 and 2 of this blog series, choreographer Haymich Olivier and cast members Gift Uzera and Shashitwako Muteka shared their experiences with LAND, a performance that focuses on reclaiming space, memory, and the right to stay. We followed their journey from the studio to the streets of Windhoek, where dance served as a form of resistance and a way to remember.

Now, in the final part of this series, we explore the sound of the production created by sound designer Matthew Williams. His work not only goes with the dance but also enhances the movement, remembers the past, and imagines the future.

THE SOUND OF MEMORY & MOVEMENT:

By Matthew Williams

My sound design experience includes lecturing and working with performance artists and poets. I am also a discerning music collector, compiler, DJ, and producer. It was requested that the music used be either local or original. Namibian music history is rich yet not easily accessible, so my main task was to create and compile my own music, soundscapes, and audio imagery, designed to resonate in sympathy with the emotions and movements elicited by the topic.

Sound evokes emotion, as does movement, and these interplay. I take care to select sound that fits, rather than sound that contrasts with or alters the feelings present in the storytellers. The soundscapes include my own field recordings, which depict various local landscapes. Layering these ambiences with music, speech, and recorded daily activity sounds, an image of various local places and times can be painted in the mind. For example, the sound of borders being mapped out on paper, layered, could bring a historic era to mind. When pairing music and voice recordings, I ensure they share emotion, and the spoken words confirm and detail the topic.

The texture of sound can suggest its medium, e.g., crackles depict the medium of vinyl, and they depict age/era, in the case of archival records. Some of my new pieces are meant to sound old and are processed accordingly. Some are meant to sound dream-like, and again, there are creative techniques to achieve this, a workshop topic. Memories, formed through the limits of human senses, attentional deficits, and emotional bias, are certainly hazy and partial at best.

Beyond sound design, I spent most days researching by speaking with helpful experts from museums and archives, near and far. This deepened my perspective and fed back into my work. I learned to limit tasks beyond my audio responsibility.

I was fortunate to work closely with Haymich as I made original music for which he had designed the movement. In my audio post final mix work, I sync up sound effects and existing music to the video. Here, the music was designed to give cues for movement. Another way to work is for music to be created first, to a brief or reference, so that at the start, the choreographer has the exact music they envisioned, to avoid using placeholders. Of course, the music and movement can both evolve as they interact. I appreciate his guidance on how to shift my Zoom from micro creative processes in one piece to the arrangement of pieces into a full show.

My research included locating old texts and rare audio and video tapes. Some text will be read live. Not only are the texts shocking in content, but so are the mindsets in some texts, such as the official old location massacre report, in which the governor projected his prejudicial fear in describing the people who had gathered peacefully as “having a threatening attitude”. This subjective perception is placed as a premise in his pitiful attempt at justification for the massacre. For interest, some forced removal protest songs existed, but the recordings were censored, record grooves scratched at the order of the old illegitimate regime.

Land in Namibia is endless yet elusive and expensive. This work references some history, and we hope to provoke some forward thinking and what follows thought…

Thank you for walking this journey with us.

May we all keep dancing and listening to the land beneath our feet…

– Matthew –

Father, husband, sound designer, music producer, compiler, audio branding specialist, aesthetics advisor, audio engineer, expert DJ, copy editor, etc.

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LAND is presented under the National Theatre of Namibia’s main program