Sight is one of the most dominant human senses, and the audiodrama SUBTERRA, oddly by robbing this sense, gives rise to new, uncanny hyperawareness. “Being blindfolded heightened… your awareness of your body in space,” reveals senior Tinka Avramova, “but at the same time, you’re completely lost in space and you don’t know where you are. Even though you think you do, you don’t.”
This juxtaposition of feeling lost while very present is exactly what junior Alec Sarche explores with his 4th audiodrama experience. Sarche admits he actually discovered his love for the form out of “laziness,” scrambling to finish his Performance Design final last year. “I can’t express myself on paper, so I thought, ‘well what if I made my audience build my set for me?’” Sarche continues. By giving the audience power to create the space they imagine, he “sort of stumbled on something that people aren’t really doing.”
A couple artists do similar work, but not exactly. Sarche mentions “Audio Walks,” pioneered by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, in which an mp3 track guides you through public spaces, such as Central Park. The track may use observation, poetry, or other devices to bring attention to overlooked aspects of well-known places. Sarche says his form stems more directly from “an escape room, a pretty recent fad where you pay 20 bucks and you and 5 of your friends are in a room that has clues as to how you can get out.” The experience serves as a game, challenging you to collaborate and find a way to escape the room within the 60-minute time limit. “Sometimes there’s a zombie on a chain in the room, or a murder for you to solve,” reveals Sarche, “[and] that interaction is what I’m going for, that transference of the responsibility for the performance onto the audience.”
In “Subterra,” the audience is a sleeper, engaging in an underground, cave environment to wake up other sleepers. Sarche begins writing by deciding on an “axis prop.” “Alec and I had sat down together and talked about a new audiodrama,” recalls senior Laura Berry, “and so I gave him some Greek thoughts, and then he went off.” “I started thinking about Greek mythology…[then] we remembered that the river Styx flowed through a cave called the cave of Hypnos,” continues Sarche. In Greek mythology, Hypnos is the god of sleep. “It is so simplistic,” admits Sarche, “I thought, ‘oh, there are a lot of people asleep in there probably’… a sleeping person would be interesting for someone blindfolded to touch, and not expect to touch.”
Blindfolded with headphones, the audience is asked to engage with his/her senses. Compared to “Termination,” Sarche’s last audiodrama, “Subterra” asks more from the audience. Senior Max Hittesdorf reflects, “[There were] more actions, it was asking you to do more stuff like actually speak.” The traditional theater experience doesn’t include audience participation; rather, the audience is “given” the performance. Here, the audience becomes part of the performance.
“I came in thinking I was going to hear a story, because it was an audiodrama,” remarks freshman Jun Park. Professor Shawn Womack describes it as participatory theater, “where the audience is implicated in the performance as well as one who experiences it.” After adjusting, most reacted positively to the responsibility. “I was the one moving, I was the one touching people, feeling people, and they were just responding,” says Freshmen Maylin Cardoso Fuentes; for others, the responsibility of interacting became a shock. “I was freaked out when I first went in because I could kind of sense people walking around me,” senior Isabella Egizi describes.
In addition to recognition of other bodies sharing the space, not seeing brings recognition to the individual body. Sophomore Beckley Stearns describes the sensation as “hyperaware,” particularly feeling the water on his hands. Yet, while one may feel the need to panic, there is simultaneously an underlying sense of trust in the operators. “I felt like anything could have happened in that moment and I wouldn’t have said no to it,” admits senior Tess Gruenberg, “that sounds weird, but I mean you’re just guided… it’s a lot of trust to be blinded.” Asking to touch others also required a certain challenging surrender. Gruenberg continues, “Touching was difficult because you didn’t know who you were touching, and why you were touching them… in the beginning, I was like, ‘wow, how much do I commit to that?’” Freshman Kate Barnes even notes, “I felt like I wasn’t allowed to…I knew that it wasn’t not okay to do, it was what I was supposed to do…[but still] weird and out of place.”
For others, this mandatory interaction felt more comfortable, and even positive. “It was kind of comforting in a sense for me just because you had to really focus on the touching of it,” recalls Avramova, “it’s a little bit disconcerting at first, but then with the whole environment around, you kind of get lost in it.” Despite differences in independent testimonials, the mystery of “Subterra” appeared universal, creating this intentionally mythic quality. “I loved the uncertainty,” says Womack, “the removal of vision… to explore a world differently than we normally do.”
This modifying average experience of space is exactly what Sarche intends. “It’s easier for you to get in touch with your imagination when you’re not looking at something,” he articulates, “what I’m trying to get it is that sort of dream vividness where the set that you build in your head is far more detailed and lucid and luminous than anything I could ever build with my hands.” Sarche uses a fog machine, lights, and sound design to offer a framework, but the audience is free to imagine their own experience. “The cool thing was I actually had the imagery of this river at night while I was going through,” remarks sophomore Jason Edelstein. Many describe the sensation as dream-like, or out-of-this-world experience. Some see it as fantastic; “[I imagine] a moonlit cave…just this really tranquil place.” such as Cardoso Fuentes.
Yet for Cardoso Fuentes, and others, tranquility came with deep ambiguity. “Confusion for sure…wondering what was going on,” Berry confesses, “[but] oddly, you touch people’s hands and it makes you feel like you’re not alone, so there’s some positive feeling.” Sarche marks his previous audiodramas as “anxiety-producing…urgent and kind of fearful.” He hopes “Subterra” to be more “meditative and relaxing, having the audience wake other sleepers in order to “[feel] like you’re a part of something bigger than yourself…supported and loved in a way they wouldn’t if it were less abstract.” He plans to work with audiodrama for his thesis as well, hoping to experiment with “at least two people in the theater at a time… sometimes interacting with each other instead of just objects.”
“Subterra” is of course very abstract, with a loose, open narrative, but many audience members left the performance with an odd sense of clarity.
Despite any discomfort with interacting or touching, there remained a sense of appreciation for its unique form. Sophomore Isaac Rubenstein summarizes its allure very well: “I left feeling like I had done something good… its very metaphorical however you want to apply it. I don’t know, it was very interesting; I just want to do it again.”