Reviews

“Thrillingly intense… rich and rewarding” (The Guardian)

"A playground for the imagination... the air crackles with excitement" (The Metro)

“The remarkable thing about Electric Hotel – what makes it both distancing and enticing, half-and-half – is it’s wielding together of sensations caused by different media, as if Rosenberg has had opportunity to cherry-pick the choicest effects of various art-forms. First, there’s the astonishment of its actual occurrence, live and in the moment. We marvel at the miracle of its precision in synchronicity, both between performers themselves and with the pre-recorded soundtrack. Then, there are more mediatised effects: the distortion of things and the controlled (but consciously registered) pull on our focus, the awareness of one’s panning gaze, zooming-in and zooming-out. The combined design is also able to make use of trickery, manipulating the confusion of vision caused by the glass screen such that the live seems specially effected or edited into the impossible. Often characters skip through space, exiting through one door and appearing instantaneously in another.” (Carousel of Fantasies)

Audience feedback

“Haunting, bizarre and beautiful. This show was remarkable.” Norwich

“Excellent! Thought provoking. Frightening. Challenging. Very well staged. Well executed and delivered. Café a nice touch” Brighton

“I haven't enjoyed a piece of theatre as much in 20 years of living in Norwich. Wonderful, professional, exciting, rivating, dynamic, original, rewarding piece. Unforgettable! Right in the right way.” Norwich

“This show was another example of what makes the festival great! As long as you are open minded your imagination does work. Excellent!” Brighton

Video

To watch a trailer for Electric Hotel click here.

Dance

The movement language has been developed with our creative cast working with a large array of tasks to generate material. Some were based around a particular scene, character or ideas of synchronicity but often the movements that made it into the show derived from more removed introductions: through looking at surrealist pictures, improvising with each other or tasks based on physical or spatial ideas such as: ‘make up a sequence consisting of opposite lines that cross in front of your body’ or ‘do a section that looks like chaos and then do it really fast’. It is always surprising how a movement is created and, for some unexplained reason, it feels meaningful.

To me dance has the ability to convey a particular atmosphere whilst allowing space for interpretation. It can portrait a multiplicity of meaning that resonates with our embodied experience of being in the world.

FRAUKE REQUARDT, choreographer and co-director

Design & Construction

Seeking a balance between interior volume and exterior presence is the challenge for this project and inspiration comes mainly from the early Modernist movement in architecture. Various other aspects have a major impact on the overall design, such as the spatial relationship between the dancers and audience, the logistics of transport, and the impact of this entity on its immediate urban surroundings.

Our hotel is built from six 40 foot high cube (taller than standard) shipping containers which were all hacked apart to fit the floor to ceiling windows, stairwells and larger rooms. Although there is well documented experience of shipping containers being turned into a variety of different buildings, there are few examples where the finished building then gets broken down into its component parts, driven across country to get put together again in less than three days - this is a leap into the void and at the time of writing we are still not sure whether we will achieve it: whether the interiors will hold together in transit; whether we can crane the penthouse back up onto the roof; whether three days is simply not enough time.

BÕRKUR JÓNSSON, designer

Sound

For many years I have had an interest in hearing; an interest I inherited from my father who is a physiologist specialising in this field. My first television appearance was on a Royal Institution Christmas Lecture, where he was demonstrating a functional model of the inner ear, and I was shifting about awkwardly wearing an unusual jumper that clearly places the lecture in the late 70s. (My only other television appearance was on an episode of Sooty 25 years later - not looking much less awkward.)

DAVID ROSENBERG, director

The challenge of Electric Hotel was how the sound could create a feeling of inclusion and intimacy for the audience despite their distance and separation from the action and performers. We wanted to create sound environments that helped to transport the listener through the windows and into the rooms that they are watching. And also to take the performance aurally into the physical space where the audience are sitting.

Thanks to a period of research supported by the Wellcome Trust, we were able to collaborate with neuroscientists working at the Ear Institute to help us understand and employ various physiological effects and curiosities of perception that could all contribute to how the audience locate sounds, distinguish between sounds and how their focus could be guided through the performance.

Binaural Recordings

A typical binaural recording unit has two high-fidelity microphones mounted in a dummy head, inset in ear-shaped moulds to fully capture all of the audio frequency adjustments that happen naturally as sound wraps around the human head and is "shaped" by the form of the outer and inner ear. This technique creates an almost palpable sonic presence. Wearing headphones the listener experiences the sound as if present in the exact place where that sound is being recorded.

Auditory Ambiguity

Although it is possible to locate certain sounds very accurately in a three dimensional space, visual localisation is far more powerful. This is why cinemas can get away with haphazard speaker placement and yet we still perceive the voices to be coming from the characters on the screen. But what happens when the action you are following is no longer visible, or you hear something that appears to come from outside your visual field (from behind your head, for example)? These situations allow the listener to create their own image of their environment according to what they are hearing.

Cocktail Party Effect

“Sound reaches the ear and the eardrum vibrates as a whole. This signal has to be analysed (in some way). When two or more natural sounds occur at once, all the components of the simultaneously active sounds are received at the same time, or overlapped in time, by the ears of listeners. This faces their auditory systems with a problem: Which parts of the sound should be grouped together and treated as parts of the same source or object? Grouping them incorrectly can cause the listener to hear non-existent sounds built from the wrong combinations of the original components.” Albert Bregman (Auditory scene analysis)

More details about this collaboration can be found at wellcome.ac.uk