... a richly imagined and stunningly performed examination of the relationship between the individual and the collective.”
Marijn Lems, Vlaams Cultuurhuis de Brakke Grond
For All Ears Kate McIntosh sets up the stage as an improvised adhoc laboratory for a series of unusual recordings and acoustic experiments, using everyday objects and materials. Chairs are dragged, paper is torn, glasses are toppled. Sounds are gathered, recorded and played back – the action of one part of the performance providing soundtrack, background or atmosphere for another. Along the way McIntosh – as combination curious scientist, mischievous questioner and eclectic storyteller – leads us on a distinctive journey through a diverse landscape of ideas.
There are parables of human and animal behavior, fragments on crowd control and linguistics, jokes about politics and group dynamics, maps of birds and traffic jams, stories about systems, societies and social interactions. At the heart of the piece – in the silence between the sounds recorded, at the centre of the listening crowd – are questions about who we are alone and how we are together, about what it might take to change a culture and what we could be missing in the push for individual self-sufficiency.
All Ears is driven by McIntosh's ongoing fascination with destruction and creation, sense and nonsense, the whole and the fractured - by her playfulness with the audience, and her love of theatrical images. With an off-beat humour and moments of lucid thought, the performance balances on the thin line between experiment and entertainment.
"...[the audience members play] with a wonderfully senseless soundscape of chairs scraping over the floor and shattering porcelain. Finally Kate McIntosh holds up a gigantic microphone into the silence after the storm. It's in this beautiful moment of 'nothingness' that the togetherness of everyone in the space becomes apparent."
Melanie Suchy, WAZ, 29/05/13
