At Salford’s Sounds from the Other City music festival I was led across a university campus with nineteen others to an out-of-the-way departmental building. After being shepherded through its corridors, we entered a smoke-dark room where, once we were all inside, drums were beaten deafeningly every time that lightning, somewhere, struck Earth. Then we entered another room, where no sound existed at all.
Mishka Henner’s The Conductor prompts a bodily response in its audience and experiencing it involves submission to a derangement of the senses. The piece takes place as part of the University of Salford Art Collection’s Artist in Residence programme at Energy House 2.0, in which artists are offered an eighteen-month residency connecting them with science and research facilities. Given free rein in terms of artistic output, Henner has created his first performance, judiciously employing the spaces—and even the university personnel—he felt drawn towards, and assembled them into a work of great feeling and immediacy.
The bulk of the piece occurs in a reverberation chamber, where each sound lives a much longer life than it would in the outside world. The audience have been clued-in as to what will happen in the chamber—we know a percussionist will play, and that the score will be determined by a live data feed from the Blitzortung.org project, the drum-beats coinciding with each new mark added to its live map of lightning strikes across the globe. Forewarned isn’t forearmed, though, and the understanding of what is going to happen does nothing to temper the physicality of the experience, the context deepening and refining it.
Though we arrive as a group—chatting about the festival, what we’ve heard and what we’re going to hear, after an assistant performer called ‘The Protector’ has asked us to follow them ‘to all the world’s thunder’—we enter the chamber one by one, and the darkness is absolute. The use of haze in the lightless space means for a long time it is impossible to get one’s bearings. Depth perception blinks out, so the dark is completely flat, as if thick fabric has been hung just in front of your eyes. You therefore come to The Conductor in a state of vulnerability, and for a brief time your sensory experience shrinks to perceiving only the quiet apologies of other audience members as they nudge into one another, the long echoes of their speech tailing away like ice cubes melting. Being in the dark like this is a thrilling disruption of the communal experience, shoving you—as abruptly as the door that clangs shut and seals us in—into your own inescapable self. This is how The Conductor is experienced, as something immediate and overwhelming, happening directly to your person.
When at last we see something, it’s only for seconds. The window to the antechamber in which Jennifer Walinetski is about to drum is illuminated in deep blue for a moment, then disappears again. The shock of the sudden image—musician and drums in striking silhouette—lends it an iconic power, especially given our disorientation before seeing it. The transition from total darkness to flat, rectangular image—the viewer’s limited perspective carefully stage-managed—is immediately redolent of film, bringing to mind quick, frenetic cutting (I thought of the jarring half-second in Psycho when the exterior electric lights burst on). The audience now knows where to point themselves—as Henner later confirms to me, ‘briefly turning the lights on is a way to direct the audience towards the performer’, after they ‘enjoy the reverb and drama of the new situation’. He uses the language of cinema to describe the moment too: ‘a freeze frame’, suggesting that the Conductor is always active. Perhaps more simply, the conjuring of brief, vivid light, is a powerful evocation of lightning.
The piece itself is exhilarating. The percussion—opening with a rumbling of timpani, giving way to the crashing of toms, snares, other drums—feels enormous, the reverberation in the chamber adding gigantic impact to every stomach-rattling crash. Taken purely at the level of a performance of avant-garde music, it’s a strong one. This represents a new departure for Henner, who noted over email that though this was his first performance and musical work, he was emboldened to make it by the works of artists like John Cage and Robert Wilson. ‘The avant-garde opens the door for others to walk through’, he said. Certainly, The Conductor’s positioning as one of the offerings at Sounds from the Other City, where gig-goers moved freely all day between different performances of experimental and alternative music, seemed a great fit, allowing audiences to meet the artwork openly—Henner described ‘appreciative and inquisitive’ audiences. As a great gig among great gigs, The Conductor holds its own.
Elevating it, however, is the audience’s understanding of its simultaneity with the lightning data—that when each thunderous crash fills the room, the sky really is splitting somewhere. Catapulting us out of our immediate location, we recalibrate where we consider ourselves to be, which expands in a flash from a dark room in Salford to the whole planet. Even if the lightning we’re hearing interpreted is striking multiple continents at once, each present moment is of equal intensity. It’s happening to us all at once, right here, right now.
As a work with something to say about the climate emergency, this is a powerful approach—compressing the world to a tiny space where its weather events shake your body. After the piece’s conclusion, when Henner is taking questions from the audience, I ask what made him pick lightning—why not the more immediately threatening weather events associated with the worsening climate, like flash floods, extreme heat? He spoke about lightning’s theatricality, its presence, the drama of it we all have some familiarity with. The awe provoked by The Conductor, the real storms it asks us to visualise, don’t need to translate literally to a singular message we can understand intellectually before getting something out of the piece. Our bodies understand it for us.
The work doesn’t end in the reverberation chamber. When the drummer stops drumming, we’re led out, split into smaller groups, and taken into a different room—dark again, a quiet ticking noise like the chuckling of a Geiger counter coming from the corner. Once the door is sealed, a performer all in black quietly intones to us that we are in an anechoic chamber: one of the quietest spaces in the world. He shines a small light around, revealing the pyramids of sound-proof foam that cover the ceiling, the walls, the floor under the metal springs we’re standing on. The clicking we hear in this room comes from a small, concealed speaker, playing the data feed the percussionist received: here, too, where it is quietest, the sky is attacking the earth. Afterwards, we’re informed that the charismatic figure who tells us about this mystic-seeming space isn’t a performer—he’s the lab manager, Danny Wong-McSweeney, whom Henner rightly noted had a remarkable presence when he first received a tour of the space. ‘I wanted the audience to experience what I experienced when I was first introduced to those remarkable acoustic spaces’, said Henner. It’s another surprise. We have not only witnessed an artist wringing symbols, noise, and light from the university’s technical equipment, but a lively collaboration with one of the institution’s scientists. In a work that utilises scientific tools to explore the climate catastrophe, it’s refreshing that the experts who use them aren’t a far-off abstraction, but rather, very much present.
Before we leave the room, the feed is cut, and we experience The Conductor’s conclusion. After all the world’s thunder, we stand together in as perfect a silence as we will likely ever encounter.
Mishka Henner, The Conductor, was at Sounds from the Other City, Salford, Sunday 5 May 2024.
Jack Nicholls is a writer living in Manchester.
This review is supported by the University of Salford Art Collection.
The Artist in Residence programme at Energy House 2.0 is organised by the University of Salford Art Collection in partnership with Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool as part of the LOOK Photo Biennial and Castlefield Gallery, Manchester and generously supported by Friends of Energy House Labs.
Published 29.05.2024 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
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