Conversation might be ubiquitous in our world, but how much do we truly listen?
Theatre-maker Roslyn Oades’s work has long concerned itself with the human voice and the complexity of aural communication. With shows such as Hello, Goodbye and Happy Birthday and I’m Your Man, she helped pioneer a “headphone verbatim” technique where actors re-speak live the recorded words of real people as they listen to them.
Her new piece for Melbourne’s newest arts festival, Rising, encourages audiences to listen in a different, deeply intimate way. The Nightline is a solo, self-directed theatre piece that uses the old-fashioned telephone as a portal to a world we usually sleep through: the long Melbourne nights of shift workers and insomniacs.
“I’ve always struggled with sleep,” Oades confesses in her tiny artist’s studio at Abbotsford Convent. Here, personal photos abound, face-out books with telling titles like Death, Poison and Symbols catch the eye, and one wall is given over to index cards that contain the key to her working methods.
“I’ve long been a night walker. Walking at night, I’m always curious to imagine who else is awake, what people are doing when the rest of the city sleeps.”
Oades put out the call to Melbourne’s night owls via late-night radio and mysterious posters plastered on city walls. “Unlike previous work, I didn’t ask anyone to contribute,” she says. For a verbatim artist accustomed to going into communities and eliciting responses, “that was a curious flip for me, to put the invitation out there, to sort of beam it into the night sky and see if anyone would answer that call.”
She established a website and a phone number where people could leave messages, ostensibly about whatever they wanted, even though she provided some cues or suggestions. “We asked, ‘Why are you awake?’ We asked people to share a night story, a memorable night shift, an anonymous confession, or to leave a message for someone you’ve lost touch with.” There were also some sample recordings and a privacy policy, “so people could know exactly what it would be used for”.
The messages go for a maximum of five minutes. “The technology will brutally cut you off after five minutes. Some people call back and leave the rest of their message, some don’t. Some get cut off at a very dramatic point, and you are just left not knowing what happened in the story.”
These highly unpredictable turns are what excite Oades – their potential for revelation. “I’ve always found rude interruptions fascinating. And I’m very interested in the vocal print, the way that people speak. I think there’s as much information in the way someone speaks, the way they phrase themselves, the pauses they take, as in what they actually say.”
There are plenty of theatrical and aural tricks in store for audiences of The Nightline, which has been created in collaboration with the internationally renowned music and sound designer Bob Scott. The phones – gorgeously clunky old plastic ones with handheld receivers and switchboard plugs that let people swap lines at will – have been rewired and their receivers deactivated.
“When you arrive, the phones are all whispering,” a kind of forest of discarded tech, Oades says. “We’ve played with the idea of crossed lines and interference, so conversations intrude and at times everyone in the space hears the same thing.”
The physical environment, a half-used commercial building in Melbourne’s city centre, is deliberately utilitarian, staffed by actual shift workers, “a kind of anonymous pop-up space”. It beautifully offsets the delicacy of the recordings, which Oades describes as “secular prayers, like these people are in conversation with the night”.
Encouraging people to talk was one thing, but surely the real nightmare lay in the collating of those recordings, organising 700-odd intimate vocal portraits into something cohesive and presumably dramatic?
“That’s the skill of being a creative nonfiction composer,” Oades says. “It’s all in how you craft that collage.”
An intense interest in cataloguing meant that she could curate stories around a particular word or image, or a particular time of night, or even a vocal imprint or mood. “In the end, I want the work to have the varied dynamics of a good play or story. So even though it’s non-narrative, I want the stories, the moods and textures, to build in a way that’s dramatically satisfying.”
There is a marked sense of the documentary film-maker or investigative journalist about Oades, and the way she embeds herself in a community to reveal it to the larger population. “I’m interested in the ability of documentary to talk about the here and now, to capture a moment in time and to witness our world around us,” she says.
While the show isn’t intentionally about Covid, it taps directly into the despair and isolation of the city’s long lockdowns.
“The work feels like a vessel for restlessness,” Oades says. “It’s also a map of the city’s resilience, a snapshot of the voices of Melbourne going on a journey together through a very dark night and coming out the other side.”
• The Nightline is showing at Melbourne’s Rising festival from 26 May to 7 June
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