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Boarding Darkfield’s existentially challenged airline for New Scientist, 28 November 2018<\/a><\/p>\n There\u2019s a shipping container sitting outside 14th-century Dartington Hall in south Devon, offering cheap flights to an unspecified destination. Even by the standards of today\u2019s budget airlines,\u00a0Flight<\/em>, by theatrical production company\u00a0Darkfield<\/a>\u00a0is cheap. How do they do it? Part of their winning formula, I think, must be the way they kill their passengers.<\/p>\n Because one thing is for sure \u2013 the plane I seemed to be on (mocked up to a high degree of realism, with seatbelts and overhead luggage bins and a safety card in the seat pocket in front of me describing what action to take in the advent of some difficult-to-parse existential disaster; then, once the lights went out, magicked from the absolute darkness of the shipping container by an immersive binaural soundtrack) that plane, as I was saying, most certainly broke up in the air. I heard the screams. Some of them may have been my own.<\/p>\n Afterwards, armed with a steadying pint from the nearby White Hart pub, I had to admit, however, that life had not altogether left me. Was I alive or dead? Had I flown on an orange airline, or a blue one? To steady myself, I dug out my laptop and began editing my interview with\u00a0Flight<\/em>\u2018s co-producer David Rosenberg.<\/p>\n Rosenberg and the Darkfield company are no strangers to Dartington Hall. Their first blacked-out and binaural entertainment,\u00a0S\u00e9ance<\/em>, ran here in 2017. And while they\u2019re a company known for pushing the boundaries of performance, their presence is by no stretch a novelty for the estate which, since its purchase in 1925 by social experimenters Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, has been attracting artists, educators and political philosophers in an effort to develop new ways of living.<\/p>\n The work of the Dartington Hall Trust, which aims to maintain the estate as a\u00a0place of radical experimentation, a model of rural regeneration, and a centre for progressive ideas and innovation, sounds hippyish \u2013 it\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0hippyish, in important respects \u2013 but that\u2019s not to say it\u2019s unserious. On the contrary. Important British institutions, including the National Health Service and the Arts Council, were conceived here.<\/p>\n A\u00a0community devoted to self-renewal, the 1,200-acre estate is deep into ground-breaking experiments in land use, farming and housing, and artistic and social projects that involve the estate in the lives and aspirations of some of the most deprived communities in Britain.<\/p>\n \u201cWe want to be championing arts that are purposeful here, and have something to say about the world in which we live, whether through performance or the visual arts,\u201d says Amy Bere, executive director of the Dartington Hall Trust\u2019s arts programme. \u201cWe\u2019re also looking for socially engaged and civic art, and for ways to\u00a0reach those parts of our community who aren\u2019t engaging with us yet.\u201d<\/p>\n Darkfield\u2019s offering is certainly likely to draw interest from all manner of people. Maybe not the timid, though. Scanning the transcript of our recent phone interview, I see that Rosenberg, a medical anaesthetist turned theatrical impresario, called the recent output Darkfield \u201ca terrifying fairground of darkness\u201d. He was joking. I think.<\/p>\n And of\u00a0Flight<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 a 20-minute airline experience that leaves you\u00a0inhabiting two worlds at once \u2014 one where you\u2019re alive, and one where you very much aren\u2019t \u2014 he said, \u201cIt\u2019s not as scary as all that. Unless you dislike flying. Or you\u2019re afraid of the dark. Or you have some existential terror about the way the universe is assembled.\u201d<\/p>\n Simon Ings<\/strong>\u00a0That\u2019s a long list.<\/p>\n David Rosenberg<\/strong>\u00a0But a short show. Glen Neath and I have been making performances in complete darkness using binaural sound for the last six years or so. But the commitment to sitting in a theatre for an hour in total darkness is a big one, so we\u2019ve now begun making shorter, more intense pieces in shipping containers: pieces that would explore fear and anxiety in different ways.<\/p>\n Using the container means we can tour our material to places where audiences will engage with it in a different way \u2013 treating it a bit more like a fairground ride.<\/p>\n SI<\/strong>\u00a0With this form of presentation, are you fated always to be exploring the uncanny?<\/p>\n DR<\/strong>\u00a0I think we\u2019ll be able to broaden our output as we develop. But for now, by putting people in an environment where they feel quite vulnerable, the uncanny plays a large part in what we do. Our first piece,\u00a0S\u00e9ance<\/em>, dealt with our beliefs about death and the beyond.\u00a0Flight<\/em>\u00a0began, obviously enough, with the fear of flying, but then we got interested in the work of physicist David Deutsch and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. There\u2019s a peculiar interpretation of the many-worlds model, not very well regarded but irresistible, called the quantum suicide fallacy. Suppose all probabilities are played out in the quantum realm: then we will only have a conscious experience of iterations in which our consciousness survives. So, in this respect, it\u2019s impossible to die in a plane crash. Of course it\u2019s also possible to be the only survivor of a plane crash, or the horribly mutilated sole survivor of a plane crash, or the only person in the crash to be hurt, and so on: it\u2019s maybe not that much of a comfort. But this is the game we are playing in\u00a0Flight<\/em>. You perish and you survive, at the same moment.<\/p>\n SI<\/strong>\u00a0Why plunge your audience into darkness?<\/p>\n DR<\/strong>\u00a0In most instances vision is our leading perception. We attach sounds to images, rather than the other way around. You can show this with auditory illusions in which people moving their lips in a certain way but the sound that you hear is related to the lip movements.<\/p>\n SI<\/strong>\u00a0So we\u2019re all lip-readers!<\/p>\n DR<\/strong>\u00a0To some degree, yes. We wanted to make work that wasn\u2019t led visually in any way, and to achieve that we need darkness. In the dark, we can start with the sound and create environments and characters and to allow the audience to create visuals for themselves, in their imaginations.<\/p>\n SI<\/strong>\u00a0You first worked with Darkfield co-founder Glen Neath on Shunt in 1988 \u2013 the theatre company that pioneered immersive theatre in the UK. Why, with that background, did you decide to turn the lights out?<\/p>\n DR<\/strong>\u00a0As we explore virtual reality and augmented reality we\u2019ve begun to to notice that a lot of immersive techniques provide experiences that are are paradoxically less immersive than old media. \u201cImmersive\u201d has become an entertainment buzzword. I joked the other day about going to an immersive funeral: it was very sad, and it smelt a bit like bread.<\/p>\n Sure, we could reach a point where virtual reality is indistinguishable from real life; but then it would be real life. Quite a lot of popular virtual reality experiences involve doing incredibly mundane things. The human imagination, on the other hand is \u2014 or at any rate feels \u2014 limitless. I have been more immersed in a book than I\u2019ve ever been in a 3D film. Immersion isn\u2019t about drowning the senses. It\u2019s about providing enough gaps for our imagination to fill.<\/p>\n SI<\/strong>\u00a0Have you gone any further in exploring sensory deprivation?<\/p>\n DR<\/strong>\u00a0We\u2019ve used anechoic chambers to strip sound of all its reflections, so it literally becomes sound from nowhere. But we haven\u2019t really thought of a way to bring that into a performance context. The problem is the body itself is incredibly noisy. As soon as you remove all the other sounds, then your body really makes a racket and you end up focusing on that.<\/p>\n For myself, I remember in the late 1980s I went to a sensory deprivation tank in Manchester that was set up in this guy\u2019s flat. There was a bit of a vogue for the idea at that time. It was a very basic experience: a body temperature bath with enough salt in it that you floated, in complete darkness and quiet. Just before he closed the door on me, the last thing he said was,\u00a0Don\u2019t touch your face.<\/em><\/p>\n SI<\/strong>\u00a0Good grief.<\/p>\n DR<\/strong>\u00a0So of course I spent the whole time\u00a0not touching my face<\/em>, wanting desperately\u00a0to touch my face<\/em>.<\/p>\n SI<\/strong>\u00a0That sounds horrific.<\/p>\n DR<\/strong>\u00a0It was a bit stressful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Boarding Darkfield’s existentially challenged airline for New Scientist, 28 November 2018 There\u2019s a shipping container sitting outside 14th-century Dartington Hall in south Devon, offering cheap flights to an unspecified destination. Even by the standards of today\u2019s budget airlines,\u00a0Flight, by theatrical … Continue reading ![\"B54XA8\"](\"https:\/\/images.newscientist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/28171424\/b54xa8-800x533.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
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