There’s a warren of tunnels under Brighton’s Old Ship Hotel. Composer Claudia Molitor and director Dan Ayling have trapped a patch of winter there under a sunny May Brighton day, with dimly lit fake snow drifting into the edges of tunnels and rubbed off white distemper doing accidental duty as snow on suited men’s jackets.
Their performance/installation hybrid is tied together by Molitor’s music, which evolves or deconstructs as we follow it to different underground spaces. This journey is led by a narrative that’s concerned with attempted replication and notation of sights and sounds. Performer Susie Trayling is haunted by projected images of a still, snowbound forest. Twangs of a bass imitate the surprising falls of single pinecones, magnified by the silence. Gentle piano chords settle – she reflects them by playing piano notes of her own, then by putting on a record that doesn’t play.
At first it’s hard to connect with these alien, still spaces and the sparse music that fills it. But Trayling is like a lightning rod for the emotionalism built into the piece — there’s a romanticism to her sob-wracked body huddled around a cushion, surrounded by endless flickering candles. Rhiannon Newman Brown’s design fetishises the natural, with piles of logs or flames becoming ritualistic by repetition. And there’s a spell-like intensity in Trayling’s attempts to replicate the music of snow until she can disappear into it. We’re forced to consider the relationship between the recordings, musical scores and the live sounds she makes – and to recognise the inadequacy of her red crayon tracings of snow-covered benches next to the beautifully shot reality projected on a wall behind her.
This is slow performance where we’re encouraged to stop and reflect, then notice the quiet click of a record being put on with the surprised wonder that follows a pinecone falling in the snow. The trooping audience took a while to adjust from the wedding disco, swirly carpeted blare of the hotel foyer upstairs to this kind of quiet spookiness that didn’t need their ghost impressions or exaggerated shudders.
But although the tunnels might have set overly theatrical expectations at first, they’re also a way of channeling an audience into a an artwork they might file past in a gallery. The conventions of the performance means that we are silent and engaged, and don’t use words to explain this wordless piece to each other — our interpretations are just another silent layer in this soft hymn to snow.