Introduction
‘In Between Silence, where we really exist is a collection of intimate personal stories by diverse participants, including many leading Irish writers and artists. Devised by groundbreaking Irish artist STANO. The project launched at the International Literature Festival Dublin in May 2016 and made its North American debut in December 2016, in the off Broadway Barrow Street Theatre, New York.
Where it Began
‘In Between Silence, where we really exist’ like a lot of Stano’s work began by chance and has organically grown by word of mouth to a collection of almost 100 stories.
“I was in my studio recording harmonica player Brian Palm, during a break Brian began telling a story about a trip he had made some years before. A few sentences in I asked him to stop and go back into the studio and let me record it. I had been working on some new tracks with Dutch jazz guitarist Jeen Rabs, experimenting with new tunings, I opened up a random track and Brian told his story, he asked what would he do if he needed to pause, I said just play your harmonica in the gaps.
The piece of music was around 6mins long and Brian amazingly finished his story about 10 seconds before the end of the track. In that moment I knew something extraordinary had happened. I brought the track home and played it to my wife and said, all my 30 years of recording has brought to this point.
Working with Stano was an extraordinary, surprising experience. I was deeply moved when I first heard the music that he had joined to my words, and how he’d filled and stretched the gaps between the words and sentences, how he’d taken a couple of hundred spoken words and made, to my ear, something brand new, a new form of story-telling, out of them.
Roddy Doyle, Writer
The Process
‘In Between Silence -where we really exist’ is a project which is the first of its kind. Many would go so far as to say that it is a new genre. Irish poet, Theo Dorgan, describes it as “a total experience…a multidimensional world in sound… the way the soundscape travels you into the story, is really quite uncanny”. The stories are told by some of Ireland’s finest writers and artists, including Dermot Bolger, Anne Enright, Roddy Doyle, Paula Meehan, Joseph O’Connor and Robert Ballagh. Stano is a very strong force inside the artistic life of Ireland. ‘In Between Silence’ is an entirely Irish conception celebrating universal consciousness – the value of people’s ordinary thoughts – in a communal and universally beguiling manner.
STANO himself says of the project: “I create a musical composition for each participant in advance of their coming to the studio. I don’t hear the story and the participants don’t hear the composition until they start to record. I want to capture the spontaneous response of each person to the music and the impact it has on their delivery. Seated in the darkness, the stories unfold for the audience, punctuated only by the appearance of a single image of significance to the story, which appears at the end of each piece. My interest is in rediscovering the power of the shared experience of music and storytelling, of listening, of allowing our imagination to bring us on our own journey while engaging with the voice of the storyteller”
The audience sit comfortably in a darkened space and hear a range of stories, that pull at their heartstrings, make them laugh, but most of all they share in the most basic of human interactions, our desire to share the stories of our lives with each other. The stories are more than words, they connect with us at a deep level that we carry with us long after the experience of listening.”
The National Museum of Ireland Sept 4 2016 “I listened to Brian Palms story and within 90 seconds of it I knew that I trusted Stano implicitly and that sense of trust is so important. You don’t always trust people and particularly when you’re a writer, because you’re dealing with producers and people are trying to make you say things in a certain way and there was a sense that here was somebody who was opening up this space where you could say what you wanted to say. With this project, Stano is producing a reservoir of stories of our lives, of what it’s like to be in the world.”
Dermot Bolger – Writer
The Storytellers
It’s a kind of a paradox. Stano has brought us to the cinema to listen to stories and look at nothing, but of course you’re not looking at nothing, you’re looking at something that’s inside the whole imaginative space of your own consciousness. There’s an image at the end of each piece so you do get a little bit of visual stimulus but the stimulus is in the sounds and in the words, it’s in the soundscape. It’s more than what we think of as music….I don’t think I’ve ever experienced such a kaleidoscope of images in the dark.
THEO DORGAN, Poet – Arena RTE Radio 1, May 19 2016
The Porcelain Book
created by ceramic artist Kevin Pierce
The Porcelain Book is part of a Spoken Word recording project ‘In Between Silence’. The project is a combination of the music, the story, and the written word committed to porcelain. Porcelain is a material that has a permanence, when fired it will last forever.
The project is designed to capture stories of our time, from great writers, artists from many disciplines and most significantly the man in the street. You are presented with a fragment of the story selected by the author and scribed on to the page, you can then choose to listen to the entire story in the voice of the author or read their selected lines.
Its purpose is to be a physical and visual representation of the spoken word, of the personal stories, recorded to individually devised music scores in the studio. The porcelain page will be a lasting permanent testament to these stories of our time.
It combines the new and the ancient, the recording studio being the new technological method of recording stories and the porcelain representing man’s desire to leave his mark and his story for future generations. It represents man’s desire to never be forgotten. It also captures the handwriting of the author.
Each chapter will be held together using porcelain nuts and bolts.
