EarFilms is coming to UF – to give your sense of vision a break.
The EarFilms presentation will be held Aug. 25 through Aug. 29 at 7:30 p.m. each night in the Squitieri Studio Theatre in the West Wing of the Phillips Center for the Performing Arts.
Amy Douglas, the director of Marketing and Communications for UF Performing Arts, said it is a unique performance in that audience members will not be able to see anything.
"EarFilms has been described as ‘a sonic storytelling experience for the ears and the imagination,’" Douglas said.
The story that will be narrated, "To Sleep To Dream," is about a society where dreaming has been outlawed.
"An EarFilms is an immersive 3-D film that uses no visuals, instead 3-D sound surrounds the listener and places them, and their imaginations, right into the heart of the story," said Daniel Marcus Clark, founding artist of the UK-based EarFilms company and writer, director and narrator of "To Sleep To Dream."
Clark said he will be narrating the piece live as audience members sit inside with more than 20 loudspeakers surrounding them. They will put on blindfolds and step into a 90-minute experience for their imaginations.
The idea grew out of the desire to create a format that had the immediacy of film with the imaginative potential of literature. Clark said it is also exciting to begin to give sound a storytelling voice it had previously struggled to have in other audio and visual formats that are led either by voice or image.
He said he has been exploring this work for about 12 years and that it is inspired by the idea of finding the most powerful ways that music and spoken stories could sit together. EarFilms grew out of that work as sound design started to come into the mix.
"As a company we’ve now been working together for the last five years, and prototypes have been created, but this is our debut feature piece," Clark said. "To get this one right we ended up remaking the piece around four times."
This will be the first tour in the U.S., though an extract of the show was presented at an art and technology center in New York City a couple of years ago.
"We’re really excited to be coming to the University of Florida," Clark said. "We’ve heard audiences are great there and always up for exciting new experiences."
Douglas said it is a different kind of presentation in that it asks the audience to become a part of the storytelling process. She said she thinks audience members will find it not only innovative but hopefully also refreshing and, perhaps, inspiring.
It is not like a traditional film, where the filmmaker creates the images of the story; it allows the audience to create their own, she said. Audience members experiences will be based on what they have created in their imaginations. Total capacity for each performance is small and the intimacy of the house will make the experience seem that much more personal. About 400 people are expected during the five-performance run.
"In a world filled with screens, both big and small, as well as a constant influx of news, information and entertainment from a variety of sources," Douglas said, "EarFilms strips all of that away, asking the audience to rely solely on two elements: sound and their imagination."
General admission tickets are $35 and $10 for UF students. Purchase tickets at bit.ly/1v7LW9Q.
[A version of this story ran on page 7 on 8/7/2014 under the headline "UK-based company to bring non-visual films to campus"]
Chris Timpson and Daniel Marcus Clark of Earfilms based in Dartington Hall's 'Space' Earfilm is an audio film for the ears and the imagination that fuse live story-telling, 3D sound and a cinematic musical score to create an experience.
