Megahertz on finding life amidst RUINS

Glasgow based Megahertz, cutting-edge makers of visual theatre, will close this year’s Manipulate Festival with their newest production, RUINS. Billed as, ‘highly visual dance performance that explores how we can find a way through pain, damage, and isolation…’ the show promises an ambitious blend of movement and digital video. The team behind Megahertz, creative duo Bex Anson and Dav Bernard were kind enough to answer a few questions and go on a bit of a deep dive into this piece and their philosophies…

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Hi folks, Donna Haraway’s writings are named as inspiration for Ruins, can you say a little about the road from page to stage?

Donna Haraway’s writings served as a springboard for our show, RUINS. Her work speaks of “sowing worlds,” “following sticky threads,” and “fabulating multi-species futures,” creating a playful space for exploring care, thought, hope, and possibility.

While dense, her language is also visceral and exhilarating, weaving together speculative fiction, scientific fact, and references to other activists, scientists, and artists exploring similar ideas. The concept of a “multi-species entailment” or “more-than-human world” challenges anthropocentrism and encourages acknowledging the interconnectedness of all beings, including humans, animals, plants, machines, and the environment. This interconnectedness is further reinforced by the physicality and movement inherent in her words.

Our creative process involved collaging themes, phrases, and images from Haraway’s work, then building tasks and improvisations to explore both physical and psychological landscapes. This process was often informed by our performers’ backgrounds and interests, including embodied practices like Butoh and freestyle dance, as well as the haunting and ethereal soundscapes of musician Cucina Povera.

Haraway’s use of the term “compost” tells a specific story about the planet as a metaphor for the world that might exist after humans. She uses the term “posthumus” rather than “posthumanism,” suggesting the need to “relate” to the Earth’s soils and acknowledge the inherent complexity and imperfection of the present, with its messy, monstrous beauty.

Here are some of our favourite pieces of writing from Haraway that resonated with us:

• “Playing games of string figures is about giving and receiving patterns, dropping threads and failing but sometimes finding something consequential and maybe even beautiful. SF requires holding still in order to receive and pass on. SF can be played by many, on all sorts of limbs, as long as the rhythm of accepting and giving is sustained. Scholarship and politics are like that too – passing on in twists and skeins that require passion and action, holding still and moving, anchoring and launching.”
  
• “Staying with the trouble requires being truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.”
  
• “Chthonic ones are beings of the earth, both ancient and up to minute. I imagine Chthonic ones are replete with tentacles, feelers, digits, cords, whiptails, spiders legs, unruly hair. Chthonic ones romp in multi-critter humus but have no truck with sky gazing Homo. Chthonic ones are monsters in the best sense; they demonstrate and perform the material meaningfulness of earth processes and critters. They belong to know-one, writhe and luxuriate in manifold forms and manifold names in all the airs, waters, and places of earth.”

Music & Dance, which comes first? Or is the truth something more complex?

Ooh good question – each show oscillates in different ways. We view our scenography practice as pulsing with movement and energy, making it a frequent starting point. The cube from RUINS truly came alive when we experimented with hand-drawn, subterranean words. It allowed us and our performers to watch, daydream and play, either camouflaging or enhancing them, or witnessing them ‘floating’ or being ‘blown around’ within the scorching noise patterns or elemental states. It’s within these transient worlds, both we and the performers begin exploring form, fluidity, and sculpting gestural creatures.

However, there was another powerful force driving our process: the desire for a sculptural, hypnotic soundscape. This often involves us entering trance-like states ourselves, immersing ourselves in the musician’s lengthy improvisations (even if it means enduring occasional playful jabs from our dramaturg for their marathon length!). Gradually images, atmospheres, and creatures begin to emerge from this.  

It’s here that the true magic happens. The challenge lies in sculpting and editing this raw material, drawing from both visual and auditory elements. Each aspect informs and inspires the other, hopefully creating an interwoven network of movement, sound, and imagery.

Ultimately, there’s no strict hierarchy in our creative process. Music and dance exist in a symbiotic relationship, each influencing and shaping the other until they coalesce into a unified, multi-sensory experience.

Your site describes you as having a ‘reputation for striking projects that mesh digital technology with experimental choreography, freestyle dance or circus.’ Do you ever feel conflicted when employing that digital tech?

Yes, absolutely. It’s been a long journey from our early involvement with tech, back when Techno was truly transgressive and stood against the Criminal Justice Bill. Now, tech and electronic artforms in general seem nicely integrated in all aspects of consumerism – including cultural, so it needs to be used with consideration to make sure it serves the work with intent, rather than the work being read as techno-evangelism.

Before starting Megahertz, we went through a no-tech phase with 85A collective, where all the sculptural and performative work was created with humble physical material, often salvaged.

Similarly, MHz takes pride in using redundant technology, our projectors are over 15 years old, the cabling has been given to us as companies move on to newer standards and we’ve built some of our lighting units ourselves.

And whilst we’re not using the latest generation equipment we still manage to create spellbinding scenography where the performers remain the focus (at least we think so).

We’re seeing so many stage sets – especially those using LED screens – where the screens are so bright and crisp that the humans next to them seem to fade in the background – Yuck!

Old tech rocks, and we love making good use of overhead projectors (OHPs), and early video mixers to create fabulous feedback glitchy imagery.

What are you hoping to send your audience away from the theatre thinking about?

We hope to transport you to another headspace, where you feel uplifted and hungry for life’s “gnarly twists and turns.” As Donna Haraway says, “Staying with the trouble requires making oddkin; that is where we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become with each other or not at all.”

Are you able to express your capacity for site-specific work with Ruins?

Not quite with this one. The cube material is very fragile and loves the controlled environment of the theatre black box. We managed to go from stage to motorway underpass with our first show VOID but the structure (a chain link fence) was a lot sturdier. We’re concurrently touring our other show STRUT, which is a night-time dance performance taking in the middle of the street – so we’re definitely scratching that site-specific itch still!

What brought you to dance/circus?

We started with circus when we joined festival favourites Bassline Circus, working with them on touring shows as well as Cabaraves, where performers would let loose above the audience in a 3000 capacity Bass music venue. We worked on visuals, sets and costume for these, and the circus lifestyle was great fun. Back in Glasgow, we wanted to further experiment with the combination of movement and scenography and worked out that dance was a terrific vehicle for this exploration – dancers have incredible talent to work sculpturally, emotionally and are able to work for longer periods in more restricted spaces compared with circus artists. There is also an incredible freedom in contemporary dance where concepts and styles (including musical) can be pushed to the extreme and audiences love it.

As artists how do you feel about the future of our sector?

Oh, that’s a tough question! Everything feels quite precarious and fragile, but we live in hope and keep looking for new ways to collaborate and create. I can only speak for our company and our individual practices, but we genuinely love bouncing between genres and contexts. Whether it’s running free drama classes in our local area, creating community spectacles, or designing shows for other artists, we crave variety and a challenge! I often think our job is about finding adaptable ideas that can thrive in unconventional spaces.

And to finish on a brighter note, what brings you joy?

We love it when we reach a state of ‘flow’ whilst devising work, especially when we first meet new performers. In an improvisation, the music, movement and visuals start to influence each other and it becomes obvious there is something exciting in the making. This definitely keeps us going and wanting more.

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RUINS will play the Traverse Theatre tonight, the 11th of February, for tickets, and more information, click here.

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