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Behind the Scenes with Susan Stone, producer of Heat and Ruby
Interview conducted by Lauren Dee
> Do you define your work as documentary or drama or something in
between? Where do you draw the line between the two forms?
Pesky thing, audio nomenclature. It makes me a bit dodgy when it comes to a
hardening of the categories. The ear craves sensation as much as it may
information, don't you think? So how to involve the listener in the story, and
leave one feeling something, not simply informed, on some new level. How to
keep the adventure. I much prefer the slippery slope, where the origins and
entrails of a story blur, and language or motives are tweaked to elaborate a
reality, brighten the colors of a place. For me, it's less about where fact and
fiction separate, but rather overlap (gossip vs. gospel), which is, perhaps
truer to those little audio slices of life after all: what is seen as truth is
often suspected as fiction. These days, our government is taking that idea to
unparalleled heights: "Intelligence doesn't necessarily mean something is true.
It's just —it's intelligence…It doesn't mean it's a fact," said General Richard
Myers just last week, confidence-inspiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff.
Even in wrestling with the film medium, Jean-Luc Godard said something to the
effect that some people start with a documentary and end up with fiction;
others start with fiction and end up with a documentary.
Find the voice. Don't fret about the name 'til it's born.
>The story Heat is made up of many aural layers. Which parts are "true"
(interviews, documentation of a real space, etc.) and which are created
(written or acted)?
Heat is science in fiction. The set-up is derived from those sunny real estate
pitches for life in coastal Floridian splendor.
Along the Miami shoreline come stories from the flotsam of tenants living in a
kind of refuge from the glare and the furnace in their tenement tinderbox.
Somewhere the polar ice caps are melting.
The aural weave is that of true stories edited and constructed as scenes taking
place within various rooms in a seaside transient hotel. Except the opening
woman's tale, which I wrote for a lovely, moody voice to perform, based
initially upon a tenant's tale, who killed herself before we completed the
interview. (That, as you might suspect, is another story.)
The stories you have here (these two, excerpted from the longer version) are
commingled with observations on global warming.
What else is true? My latent love and dusty collegiate study of earth and
atmospheric sciences gave vent to my script for the mellifluous Erik
Bauersfeld. Not quite time to get out the hip boots, but things are heating up.
What became increasingly transparent (as I collected these stories) was the
common thread of vulnerability in everyone's story. Isolation, old age,
disappointment, rootlessness. A certain kind of suffocation, like a lowering
ceiling in the glass house/green house.
> In producing a story, do you begin by writing, interviewing or
collecting sound?
I think first about the sound, and what that sound might provoke in terms of
resonance. Feeling, over content. Matter over mind. Sensation before
information. It suggests a narrative thread, offering the first dramatic bones
of the piece.
The initial sound has often been a voice. Something once said, or someone now
speaking. Above all, accents, intonation, cadence can be so arresting. The
resulting piece is often, simply, about the voice, revealing character or story
through gathered field tape and studio recordings of raw as well as studied
delivery…an elaborated inner monologue, conjuring surprise or suggestion
through the simplicity of the cut, or through emotional shorthand of the looped
sigh.
Who isn't riveted by the sound of the calving glacier, the car crash. The most
seductive audio play to me is in the evocative power of the soundscape. I wish,
for instance, I spent more time in the southeastern United States where I grew
up, playing around more in the linguistic landscape of tobacco auctioneers,
apostolic faith worshippers, square dance callers, revival meetings, errant
riflemen on the run (Virginia Real, created for WDR-Koln, Germany; Snake
Charming in America, New American Radio), where the cars are on blocks and the
houses on wheels.
Instead, it's terra infirma: the geological events that happen in biblical
shape-shifting proportions here in northern California have inspired a few
soundscapes and some very wacky recording situations.
Lately, I'm caught up in recording stories of how and where people would choose
(or have attempted) to take their lives if they could pull it off. The missed
bullet. The failed leap. And why. (Recording, not pondering.)
> What can documentarians learn from dramatists?
Okay.
The artful uses of sound and silence.
Subvert the expected with the wiliness of the unpredictable beat.
Choose a non-narrative path by mining the riches of self-sustaining interview
material.
Dispense with the repetitive uses of identifying framework of the Who said
what.
In other words, top and tail a story with all the necessary credentials of the
doctor, soldier, tailor, spy, but let the content flow without the painful I.D.
logjam book-ending the tale.
> Where did you first hear about Ruby's story? How much of Ruby is your
translation or interpretation?
Writer Sumner Carnahan first introduced me to the waitress Ruby, who told
inarticulately but searingly of her philandering ex-husband. Ruby is a
deaf-mute, who speaks in halting, pseudo-aphasiac phrases of her sexual
betrayal and loyalties. Her story is written in a letter to Carnahan in the way
Ruby perceived language: a mosaic of facts tiny enough to draw only a few
details.
Ruby was the essence of the disembodied voice. How to convey the heat of the
truly voiceless waitress? Tall order.
I imagined voices in Ruby's head debating the good/bad, and then built loops
out of different "takes" about Ruby loving these men to echo her multiple
frustrations. In using my own voice I was trying to sound out her resolve, the
desire, the anguish of a woman in waiting.
> Considering that a lot of your work blends fact with fiction, how do
you convince your audience to trust what they're listening to?
Certainly, there's the risk of too many odd tricks, of leading a listener in
labyrinthine ways through sound to story, through too much effect, devoid of a
lead. The desire to tantalize might, dang it, ostracize. How to execute the
story and not kill the tale? It's fun to play fast and loose with narrative
deceptions, and sidetrack the tale through provocative uses of sound and
language. But then comes the question, to whom are you telling the story, and
don't you care? And in the pursuit of painstaking constructs of silence as
accent, in the uses of manipulated voice as ambient material, doesn't it
matter? This is not navel-gazing.
You want the listener to participate in the creation, relate to the acoustic
field of associations. That's the adventure. Not to be provocative in an
alienating way, but to poke around and provoke a bit. Because you hope the work
is anchored in a way which resonates, which means something in the end to the
listener.
In that netherland between fact and fiction, there is always creative
possibility of recomposing radio through novel ways of imparting information
about the pressing issue, the hot topic. It can be in the writing, the
sound-gathering, the assembly, the mix. How to whet the ear, that infinitely
erotic orifice which always discerns what really matters (your name across a
crowded room)…the last door to close at night.
To the eye appeals the outer man; the inner to the ear (Wagner, McLuhan,
Schafer, and probably a lot of other people).
> Your production style is so distinct. How did this develop over time?
The first, truly arresting audio compositions that caught my ear were the radio
plays of horspieler Peter Handke, the text/song compositions of Luciano Berio
performed by Cathy Berberian, a little trilling seahorse and flying fish poem
of dada poet Tristan Tzara, and Helene Sisoux's audio play Dora. Works that can
change the temperature in a room.
Lilting, looping, sonorous voicings, luscious and bizarre. Rhythms and layers,
multilingual collages, polyphonic. Bon-bons. The constructions seemingly
serendipitous. Artists in love with language, with the abstract and
nonsensical, taking pure pleasure in utterance, noise, and ambient sound.
It led to a love of cyphers, riddles and charades. Fertile ground to someone
with a little kinky Appalachian family lore—where accents can weigh down speech
just long enough that a voice seem mores instrument than message.
So my work began, and returns, to nuances of language and inflection of the
human voice to reveal character and conflict within a story. Early pieces were
drawn primarily from imagined inner monologues, building outward to a physical
plane linking the character's relationship to the space (the bedroom, the
hotel, the snake pit, the bridge). It's still easy to fall back into the
construction of collage or portraits based on imagined thought rather than what
was said. And to frame it all based on what bearing the landscape has on the
subject. But there are new things bumping along now.
I must keep asking myself: what makes the tale—if not tall—at least tilt?
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