Arts House Listening Program

Acclaimed performance maker Tamara Saulwick employs portable turntables, reel-to-reel tape players and live performance in a moving meditation on cycles and the ending of things. Featuring the voice of Paddy Mann (Grand Salvo), an electro-acoustic score by Peter Knight, and design by Ben Cobham, Endings explores the experiences – both ordinary and extraordinary – that cluster around death, dying and afterlife. Endings is built, in part, from one-on-one interviews: real people’s stories, reflections and voices. Cut onto bespoke vinyl records, these voices are embedded in a richly textured sound design; operated, accompanied and extended through live performance and song. Voices of the living emerge from the crackle of records turning, vintage reel-to-reels send tape loops round the space. Performers converse with recorded thoughts from the past…and a voice floats through this evocative sound-world, singing an ode to the recently departed… “It’s remarkable theatre, executed with an exact brilliance that mak