Creating Collaborative Nonfiction: Site-Specificity, Sound-Led Experiences, and Liveness
Interdisciplinary live artists Saunders and Schneider will discuss their collaborative devising practice on CURRENT, including creation and research processes in format and form, as well as specific project practices for experimentation, working on location, sound design, scripting, experiential and interactive elements. Winner of the 2021 Tribeca Festival Immersive Creative Nonfiction Award and the Tribeca X Award, CURRENT is a time-based site-specific soundwalk though Lower Manhattan accessed via a custom platform, on your own mobile device and headphones. CURRENT immerses participants using binaural sound, composition and environmental recordings to draw together a narrative that includes themes of water, time, construction, destruction, synchronicity, and resilience.
CURRENT was created collaboratively by Annie Saunders (concept, direction, devising, narration); Andrew Schneider (concept development, devising, narration, spatialization, on-location recording and sound design); Jackie! Zhou and One Thousand Birds (sound design, engineering and spatialization); OpenEndedGroup (platform technology creation); Octopus Theatricals (creative producing); and commissioned by Arts Brookfield for One Liberty Plaza and One New York Plaza.
Annie Saunders is a multidisciplinary creator and director of site-specific experiences, and has made award-winning installations and performance works for major arts institutions as well as immersive projects in disused buildings and experiential works in public space. She is a member of the inaugural ONX Studio and an alumnus of the Devised Theater Working Group at the Public Theater. Saunders is the founder and artistic director of site-specific performance company Wilderness, and her experimental project The Wreck for Opera Omaha was called ‘ingenious…a persuasive expression of complex female feeling,’ by the Wall Street Journal.
Andrew Schneider is mostly interested in how humans telling stories about ourselves to each other can make us better at being humans. And how much the second law of thermodynamics and grief have in common. He is an OBIE award-winning, Drama Desk nominated performer, writer, and interactive-electronics artist creating original works for theater, dance, sound, video, and installation since 2003. During the pandemic Andrew focused on demonstrating in the streets, organizing for social justice, and a time-based narrative immersive light and sound installation dealing with grief, loss, and presentness, set to premiere in NYC in 2023. The in-development title is N O W I S W H E N W E A R E .
