again, upon the bench of solace

Amplified quartet, and fixed & interactive media

again, upon the bench of solace is a musical dramaticule that manifests on the verge of music and theatre. It draws on an original play script, revolving around a cycle of seemingly hallucinated dialogues between four shadowed voices – A, B, C, and an eventually humanised ‘Room’ – each portrayed by the four ensemble members on stage.

Inspired by elements of Samuel Beckett’s Come and Go (1966) and Cascando (1963), this work zooms in on the artefacts of spoken words and the human voice. These artefacts are sounds full of meaning, suggestive of multiple layers of lived experience – both of the characters of the play, and of the musicians portraying them. They are probed as embodied musical gestures, attentively responded to by an AI software tool (PRiSM Musical Gesture Recogniser) that constantly tries to listen, to unpack stratified meaning, to make sense.

The six-scene script was written in collaboration with OpenAI’s large language model GPT-4, resulting from a highly iterative process of prompt finding, data filtering and monitoring, and creative writing / fine-tuning. The resultant plot deliberates themes of cyclical lived experience, socio-cultural utterance, and an increasingly problematised encounter with public space, with impartiality.