CHRISTOPHER BRADDOCK

Skull Acoustics (2016)

Chris Braddock & Olivia Webb, Skull Acoustics (collaborative live performance), 12:30-13:00, Thursday 7 July and Friday 8 July, University of Melbourne Law Quad, Melbourne. Performance Studies International PSi#22

Olivia Webb is a Ph.D. candidate at AUT University. Her research combines her experience as a choral singer with various time based art forms.

Olivia and I had been discussing the First Workset (1963- 1969) of 58 objects by the sculptor Franz Erhard Walther. He was creating objects from fabric and other materials that spectators could interact with, sometimes in pairs or groups. We were looking with interest at a long fabric ‘hood’ that covered the heads of both participants.  At the same time we heard news items about how the Queen’s plastic umbrella ‘acted like a satellite dish’ and amplified her rebuke of ‘rude’ Chinese state officials, reported by Australia’s Daily Mail on 12 May 2016. Apparently, her majesty was clutching a clear plastic brolly in the drizzle which amplified her comments and sent them towards a sensitive directional microphone belonging to her BBC cameraman. An insider told the Telegraph: “Because it’s plastic, it reflects the sound like a satellite dish.” Olivia and I went immediately to Smith & Caughey’s department store on Auckland’s Queen Street and tried out identical clear plastic umbrellas imagining that we might use them to reflect the humming voice in Skull Acoustics. They didn’t work! It was not the umbrella! But what transpired was a hybrid of a Franz Erhard Walther First Workset object and the Queen’s umbrella.