“Murmur is an endlessly joyful sensory adventure conjured by a performer combining physical skill, and wonderfully playful performance instincts.”
📍 The Studio, Edinburgh
📅 31st May – 3rd June 2023
🕖 Running time: 45 minutes
👥 Featuring: Grensgeval & Camiel Corneille
🎂 4+
🎭 Wheelchair Accessible Venue, Wheelchair Accessible Toilet
The QR’s final show at this year’s Imaginate Edinburgh International Children’s Festival, Murmur, is a winner.
On one level, this is a live composed concert, woven from sounds, many sampled from the everyday world. Purring cats, swarming bees, revving engines, roaring sees, and a panoply of synthesised percussion and tone, all intertwined to create a living, emerging sounscape. On another level, Murmur is a thrilling exercise in acrobatic choregraphy, and a display of Camiel Corneille’s aerial, and tumbling excellence.
It’s in the combination of the two, and some ingenious use of wireless speaker technology that Ghent-based Grensgeval’s show becomes something well beyond the ordinary. Whilst there’s no story persay, there is still a strong sense of journey as Camiel begins with a gradual deployment of numerous petit wireless speakers. A carefully, and elegantly choreographed sequence, each speaker is produced from a hidden pocket heralded by a different sound.
The audience, arranged on two rows of benches set in the round are each equipped with a backpack, the only instruction being to take good care of them. These come into play later in the show, and make sure each attendee is an integral part of the performance in the end.
For now, once all the (visible) speakers are deployed, Camile embraces a child-like joy in responding to, and conducting this emerging landscape of noise. The devices themselves, and thus the myriad sounds are intertwined with a spinning Capoeira-influenced dance to thrilling effect. Adding another dimension, some in the audience are entrusted with the keeping of the speakers, a few prompted into rhythmic and synchronized action.
Camiel, meanwhile is consistently developing his performance, breaking into a vertical dimension thanks to two aerialist’s straps suspended from high above. Both performer and speakers are now prone to soaring, spinning motion, quite literally raising the action and sound roofwards.
Then it’s time for the big guns: two large, encased sub-woofer units offering a new depth, and gravity to proceedings. Both, it transpires, are equipped for flight, and this ushers in an adrenaline-fuelled final act, which if not quite death-defying, is not without the possibility of a few broken ribs and/or a concussion.
Oh, and those packs on the audiences back? Well by now they’ve come alive too, each part of a chorus. It’s now one can fully appreciate the meticulous preparations and technological choreography which Grensgeval have lavished upon the show. This is no sheet of noise, but a dancing, living orchestra of sound, which migrates around the ringed watchers, lurking here and there, and exploding on command.
Ultimately, of course, the show must end, but not before a rip-roaring, thrilling finale; Camiel leaves nothing in the dressing room. Murmur is not a narrative experience persay, rather it’s sound and motion distilled into experience alone. It wraps the audience in a sonic embrace, mesmerises them with refined circus mastery, and deposits them on that distant shore only reachable for those having crested waves of surging adrenaline.
Perhaps something is lost once the sound equipment migrates from small to large speaker, the fluid play of the first section sacrified for spectacle. It’s certainly impressive, but as the new speakers aren’t particularly loud, the soundscape doesn’t quite swell to the levels the audience might hope.
Camiel does however exhibit true bravery, not only in risking his physical health whilst sailing around the room at the ends of straining straps, but in capturing a child from the audience to partake in his dance. One assumes consent has been arranged prior, but to the remainder watching it’s a moment they will never forget. It’s audience participation, but not as we know it!
Ultimately Murmur is an endlessly joyful sensory adventure conjured by a performer combining physical skill, and wonderfully playful performance instincts.
Murmur is a production of Grensgeval, Aifoon, Provincial domain Dommelhof/Theater op de Markt,
C-Takt, The Great Post, MiraMiro, and La Breche
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