BEHIND THE SCENES with Melanie Wilson
Where did the idea for "The View from Here" come from? What inspired you to make the piece? I was asked to make this piece around the theme All Day Everyday, which posed a challenge for me to begin with because I find I tend to make work that is idiosyncratic and peculiar. So I decided my chance to contribute something meaningful to this theme might reside in regarding the preciousness of everyday moments of tranquillity, beauty, or rarity from a position of remove. Where the everyday became something completely desirable and utterly unattainable. And I happened to be reading a lot about climate change at the time. At the time of making the piece, I was also writing a script for a new solo performance and was tying myself to my chair trying to make headway with it. Making "The View From Here" was meant to be a little treat, a pleasing diversion from the other business, but I think that those sensations of exile with the other script also got a bit of light in the theme of this one too. The sounds in this piece are beautiful in their subtlety. Did you have a sound design for the piece in mind before you started putting it together or was that something that developed organically as you created the piece? And could you talk about how you approached the narration
The sound really took its cue from the writing. I confess, my conjuring powers for sound effects were outstripped by the images on a number of occasions. I decided to narrate the piece by "performing" it, by which I mean I recorded it in bed with my DAT. I was keen on getting a slightly pathetic, querulous quality for the patient's voice, that voice one has when lying down. My choice to voice the other characters too though was more conceptual, partly as an attempt to push the piece down a more ambiguous, psychologically internal path, and partly because I like doing silly voices. A single voice entertains the possibility of an oddly schizophrenic wrangle in one person's head; a conversation between conflicting voices of surrender, exhortation, and exasperation
Was it difficult to imagine the world as a sightless person? How did you make that imaginative leap
I suppose that the narrative of the piece utilizes the predicament of a sightless person to engage with more universal impulses towards aspiration, fantasy and escapism. Which is a sightlessness of the present that everyone can be prone to from time to time, a sort of insight. I very much hope that that doesn't sound glib or cheap, but in truth it might be that imagining the world as a sightless person also functions as a metaphor for a person coping with a profoundly caged sense of powerlessness at their situation, but who has recourse to the stock of memory and the ameliorating effect of imagination