SLEEPDOGS
Circadial
The sounds of this town’s streets, wildlife, nightlife, vehicles, venues, homes, musicians and offices are looped, sieved, filtered, warped and stretched to make new, beautiful and perturbing music.
Originally created for Theaster Gates’ Bristol Sanctum in 2015, Circadial is a place-specific,
live improvised sound performance. Each version of Circadial is unique and created specially for each location Sleepdogs play. They make local field recordings over the days and nights preceding
the show; then cut these recordings up, and transform them into beats, tones and echoes they can play live as an improvised, shifting music performance made entirely from the sounds of the town they’re in.
Circadial is about the rhythms and polyphony of a place; the way that sound can locate you in time and geography. There’s so much noise in the world that we naturally tune out the tones and frequencies we don’t need to hear. But when you take time to really listen, you can often feel the landscape reshaping around you in an almost physical way. Circadial invites the audience to think about and reimagine their hometown through a new way of hearing it. The music that emerges is sometimes perturbing, often beautiful, always surprising.
Sleepdogs have used these techniques of digitally manipulating field recordings as the basis of music composition in lots of their theatre work, but this is the first project where they’ve put location and process at the centre of the performance.
Each version of Circadial is unique and created specially for each location they play.
Sleepdogs originally made Circadial for Theaster Gates’ Sanctum, at Bristol’s Temple Church.
Previous Presentations
Circadial (Bristol) 1-4: Sanctum at Bristol Temple Church
Circadial (Bristol) 5: Bristol Old Vic, as part of Ferment
Circadial (Bristol) 6: The Station, as part of Mayfest
Circadial (Bristol) 7: The Wardrobe Theatre, as part of Mayfest
Circadial (Bristol Old Vic Studio RIP remix) 8: Bristol Old Vic Studio
Circadial (London) 9-10: at the National Theatre, River Stage as part of the Mayfest takeover weekend
Funders and Partners
Produced by MAYK. A Jerwood Charitable Foundation and Bristol Old Vic Ferment commission. Developed with support from Bristol University Drama Department. Supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
About Sleepdogs
Sleepdogs is a collaboration between director/producer Tanuja Amarasuriya and writer/composer Timothy X Atack. They make theatre, film, audio and digital work characterised by surprising storytelling and detailed sound design. They are wilfully interdisciplinary in their process and are interested in the splicing of traditions, scenic routes not yet taken, stories that haven’t been told quite that way before, familiar emotions made complex again.