No Real Sing-A-Long

“I spend a lot of time in front of a screen and it drives me crazy, I've got to get away from it sometimes,' explains Song's artistic director Adriano Cortese, adding that he wanted to “create a moment” where we could all get away from that. The answer? Building a set that emulates the natural world – with a sun disk, sounds from nature, breezes and even the odours of the outdoors – and inviting the audience to lounge on a synthetic grass floor.

The set isn't just a novelty slice of indoor nature, but designed to encourage the audience to focus their senses. “We are creating a giant listening room. We started with wanting to present a song cycle, except we didn't want to do a gig or concert.” When Brazilian visual artist Laura Lima was invited to contribute she brought her own ideas about environment and landscape to bear on the project. It soon grew from a modest proposal to an immersive installation. “I thought it would be just a small little project, but now it's become one of our biggest shows in years.” There's a romanticism to the natural setting, which is informed in part by French Romantic writer Victor Hugo's book The Toilers of the Sea. Cortese admits that his collaborator, UK songwriter James Tyson, had a mild case of writer's block to start with, but after happening on Hugo's book they found themselves inspired. “That was our first springboard to writing the songs, which are about work and relationships [but also] Nature and isolation.”

The song-cycle, which Cortese is reluctant to assign a genre, takes place in 18 short sections. “They aren't always pleasing little pieces in song form, with a chorus, hook or stuff like that. They end as fragments of songs, and sometimes they stop in the middle and suspend and then continue. It's about trying to break up the song itself.”

It's a free-form style that is in keeping with the relaxed and non-prescriptive setting. Not only are the audience invited to relax on the grass as they listen, but they can wander in and out of the performance – which lasts for a little over an hour – as they please. Counter-intuitively, it's all part of making the audience feel more involved, says Cortese. “When you look at a performance there's a passive sort of relationship; you receive it and then you applaud at the end. And we didn't want to do that.”  The environment is designed to stimulate the audience's senses subtly, and without the kind of visual overload that digital technology creates. “The sun disk actually starts off in day and then moves into sunset; over a very long period of time it actually changes colour. It's slow and gentle, and we're hoping that people can stay in the moment with it.” And not forgetting the most important thing: “They can go out and get a beer and come back!” Cortese laughs.