Inside Yellow Sound

it is like being inside a poem, it is not very difficult to understand but it is still not prose, it is a different way of operating […] and allowing yourself to do that rather than mechanical, or logistical or organisational thought.

Installation Participant

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Inside Yellow Sound is an interactive installation for sighted, partially sighted and blind audiences, developed in collaboration with theatre director Maria Oshodi and based on Wassily Kandinsky’s stage composition Yellow Sound (1912). Yellow Sound was never realised during Kandinsky’s lifetime, but Kandinsky envisaged the staging in a proscenium theatre. The first production took place in 1972 and most of the productions, since then, have taken place in seated auditoria.

As the title suggests, Inside Yellow Sound aimed to replace conventional arrangements between stage and auditorium by positioning the audience member ‘inside’ the world of Kandinsky’s text. This change necessitated a radical reconfiguration of the relationship between performance material and audience. No longer seated opposite a stage, the participant in IYS was directly involved in the action; in fact, the elements of the composition (the lights, colours, and sounds) could only become possible through the participant’s movement. This was made possible through the handling of five different stones, which were custom fitted with the motion sensors. As the participants lift the stone, the sound and light material for each scene of the composition becomes avaiable for exploration through movement.

Sound was a key element in Kandinsky's work and thinking. Influenced by early twentieth century occultism, Kandinsky equates sound with a kind of life force that permeates the world and enables entities of different kind to affect one another. Sound, and one’s ability to hear it, reveals that the world is far from the dead matter postulated by positivism and becomes the means through which the affective potential of art (in general) and an artwork (in particular) can be organised and communicated. Sound and music therefore served and guided Kandinsky's attempt to liberate the constituent elements of painting (shapes and colours) from their representational baggage and foreground their affective dimension.

Photo Credit Nikos Stavropoulos

Inside Yellow Sound tested Kandinsky's understanding of sound not only by foregrounding sonic material in the installation, but by making the production of sound directly linked to the participant's movement within the installation space. In this way, the installation transferred the action from the body of the performer on stage to the body of the participant. In what ways can the creation of sonic material support and structure the audience’s experience? How does the sonic material activate the imagination, in the process expanding the participant’s meanings and

experience? In a way, IYS took Kandinsky at his word and, through the use of echome, sound became the means through which the other elements were organised and their “sound” became heard.