In this video Hannah Nepilova talks to Steph Singer, Founder of BitterSuite, about HELD, their upcoming multisensory show created specially for performance during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Although she describes herself as not a synaesthete in the traditional sense, BitterSuite founder Stephanie Singer has always had a multisensory relationship with music. As a child listening to a Stravinsky concert she remembers seeing birds shooting around the concert hall, bouncing off the audience’s head.
That is what BitterSuite is all about – helping people dive into the music and experience it in ways they haven’t been able to before. At their events, the audience is blindfolded and then guided by an individual ‘performer’ through a series of touches, tastes and smells all related somehow to the music.
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In a performance of Debussy’s String Quartet, for example, they worked with a couple of perfumiers to find out what kind of scents they wanted to use with the quartet and, through layering the scents for each movement, accidentally ended up with a scent called ‘mitsuka’, which is what fashionable Parisians in the 1890s used to scent their curtains with.
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As well as a performance based around Leoš Janáček’s first string quartet, ‘Kreutzer Sonata’, which takes the work’s distinctive musical use of speech patterns as a starting point for engaging the other senses, other Bittersuite projects have included working in a multisensory way with young composers and ensembles as a way of helping them engage with audiences.
This is the first in a series of video interviews with artists putting on unusual performances throughout the COVID-19 crisis
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