>>>> Back to MUSIC FOR THEATRE

Vishwamitri Villas Vadodara India, February 2024

This was a devised play about a day in the life of a group of domestic servants in an apartment block in Vadodara, Gujarat, India. The production was in Hindi, Gujarati, Indian sign language and local sign language.

Back in 2018 Kristine and I visited the rather amazing Akshar Trust School for hearing impaired children in Vadodara. We ran some drama and music workshop and were hugely inspired by both the school and the students, most of whom come from very poor backgrounds.

The school had no funds to pay for music equipment so I got hold of a couple of planks of wood and bolted some speakers to them. We experimented with the young people lying, sitting, standing on the planks with different parts of their bodies touching the wood. Even if their ears weren’t working, their bodies acted as “hearing” organs, picking up the vibrations of music from the speakers through the woodgrain. This was tremendously exciting for both me and the students and I resolved to work further with them on this whenever I got the chance.

Covid scuppered any chances of visiting there again but – as you can read elsewhere – in 2021 Kristine worked a small miracle by developing a short (40min) film, shot entirely on Zoom, with some Akshar students and young performers from a local (Vadodara) drama group called Page To Stage. I wrote the music for this and the film went on to play in several film festivals, picking up many laurels along the way (see music for film).

Finally, in January 2024, Kristine and I landed in Gujarat to commence devising, rehearsing and composing for the stage version of Vishwamitri Villas, again utilizing the performing skills of local non-hearing Akshar students and young hearing performers.

For me as composer, the idea was to work with musicians from the local Bhil tribe, based at the Bhasha Trust Tribal Academy in the nearby village of Tejgadh, combining their skills and styles with my compositions. This was to prove most challenging – musically, culturally, even physically – but, with generosity in abundance from everyone concerned, we got there…. 

As nearly half the performers had profound hearing impairments, I had to utilize my ideas from the 2018 workshops. For example, we fixed a sub-bass ‘woofer’ to a wooden platform upon which a performer, who had no hearing at all, played a scene in which she falls asleep and dreams she can hear music, dancing to the rhythms in her dreaming mind. In another scene involved one boy, who could hear, trying to share the joy of music on the radio with his non-hearing friend. I found a Bluetooth speaker that produced such a strong bass response that one could feel the ‘flap’ as the air moved from the speaker. The performer simply held the speaker in his hands and ‘felt’ the sound. Elsewhere, the strengthening of bass vibrations form the main speakers helped a lot of the performers to ‘feel’ the sound as they carried out movement sequences in time to the music.

For the audiences the sound might have been unusual but, in the world of the play, it made sense and they quickly adapted. Our first performance was to an almost entirely hearing-impaired audience and the response was incredibly positive, with many coming to me afterwards to express how much they liked the music.

The results – six sold-out shows in mid-February, in the atmospheric “Space” studio at the Alembic Arts District in Vadodara – were quite amazing, moving and rewarding.

For those of a musically technical mind and who might be interested in such things, all the music for this show, with one small exception, is written in 5-time, sometimes overtly, sometimes less so.