Oscailt review: Improvisatory and sometimes chaotic sound world feels almost documentary

Oscailt

Samuel Beckett Theatre

★★★★☆

In just over an hour, the composer, vocalist and performer Jennifer Walshe navigates a brain-melting whistle-stop tour of coexistent mythic and digital versions of Ireland. The piece is multimedia and episodic, and Walshe’s high-octane music is a mixture of what’s written down, what’s improvised and live digital manipulation. The latter includes the recording and sampling of the audience performing vocal warm-up exercises (given welly by The Irish Times).

Walshe’s collaborators are her fellow composers and improvisers Panos Ghikas and Nick Roth and the soprano Elizabeth Hilliard, all in white lab coats and seated at stations arrayed with musical instruments, electronic equipment, tuning forks and random objects. Secondary-school students – designated “Ireland’s new digital natives” – are located both on stage and at the back, playing instruments, singing or roaming the theatre armed with Ether microphones to capture electromagnetic signals – from light fixtures or audience members’ phones – which are then converted into sound.

Tempering this live and improvisatory, sometimes chaotic sound world is an almost documentary format in which Walshe gives spoken introductions to each section, supported by images and video on the large screen above the stage.

The analogy connecting the unseen spirits of the mythic world with the electromagnetic field is followed by sections depicting ancient mountaintop fire signals as the Irish prehistoric internet; machine learning and AI-generated images, such as the Giant’s Causeway as a wedding-cake; absurd faux Irish proverbs (“Grow beards over the cats of hatred”); Morse code and the first transatlantic telegraph cables; or the aptly oppressive climactic tutti reflecting the unimaginable vastness of data storage centres located near the Hill of Tara.

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[ Dublin Fringe Festival reviews ]

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Oscailt had one show in the Samuel Beckett Theatre, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, on September 19th. It continues tonight in the Riverbank Arts Centre in Newbridge, tomorrow in the Belltable in Limerick, Saturday in the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork and next Tuesday in the Linenhall Arts Centre in Castlebar.