Pittsburgh Arts, Regional Theatre, New Work, Producing, Copyright, Labor Unions,
New Products, Coping Skills, J-O-Bs...
Theatre industry news, University & School of Drama Announcements, plus occasional course support for
Carnegie Mellon School of Drama Faculty, Staff, Students, and Alumni.
CMU School of Drama
Monday, September 22, 2025
‘We spent a week on the cow birth!’ The eye-opening play about animals with sound effects instead of words
Theatre | The Guardian: ‘I’m really into cow farming,” says Katie Mitchell. It seems an unexpected interest for one of Europe’s most rigorous, eco-conscious theatre directors. But she was “brought up in the 1970s self-sufficiency movement, in the Brecon Beacons”, and now has “a little place in Wales, opposite a cow farm”.
5 comments:
NeonGreen
said...
This sounds like a foley artist’s dream! I also appreciate this new take on theater: combining the intentional experience of immersing the audience in the soundscape with the feeling that you are in a theater that comes from watching the performers move objects to create those realistic sounds. I think that the art of foley really lends itself to that disconnect, because of the ability to turn everyday objects into completely different sounds. It is always so fun to listen to media for the foley and think about what might have been used to create the sound effects. In the Lego Movie, it seems that a lot of the sound effects sound like everyday objects, contrasting the legos which would normally sound plastic. To add dimension, the movie also uses a lot of music, to influence the tone of the scene. This is an especially cool technique that most movies use to subtly impact the audience's opinions and feelings around a scene.
My most important question for this piece is: is it going to be awkward? What does watching a cow give birth look like on a stage? Sometimes sitting in an audience watching a gross, uncomfortable, or awkward scene can just be plain weird. Are the animals actors or puppets, or a mix of both? Whatever the case, the sound opportunity for this is so cool. The fact that harvesters sound like “the apocalypse” to animals is really interesting. I’ve never thought about how the noise our machines make disturb nature so much more than it disturbs us. I wonder if that kind of world-ending sound could be created or sourced–how different does it sound to what we hear? Can it be changed, warped, turned more dangerous to fit what the animal hears and how it feels? I love the picture of the foley artists working with all the natural materials that the animals would come across, it makes it feel so much more real.
I can already hear people online saying that this is crude and weird, and it is. HOWEVER, that is absolutely not a bad thing and in my opinion, exactly what theater needs to be. The whole point of theater (and art in general) is figuring out ways to express yourselves, your interests, your ideas, and anything that you want people to see. Not only is the topic of a cow birth something that we haven’t seen hit the stage, the way they are approaching the sound aspect of it is very fascinating and creates a lot of new opportunities for the designers to explore. To go a bit off topic, I also am a strong advocate for animal rights and believe that the stories of these animals deserve to be told. By using sound and capturing their emotions, the audience will likely be able to have their own emotional reaction to them and sympathize with them more.
I found it very interesting that they spent 2 whole days studying and experiencing and tuning into the farm and the world and lives of the animals. It was interesting that they chose sound as their medium. Animals are living breathing things and the first thing that I think about animals would be their look or smell. Maybe it is just me but sound isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of bringing animals to the theatrical world, so I think it is interesting to create the world using mainly sound. I really enjoyed how hard they worked finding the sound effects and how they tuned in to find each sound, even the smallest sounds such as the cows swishing their tails. I really admired the sentence were they talk about how to fully experience the world of animals you have to fully tune in to your surroundings and use all of your senses.
One time when I was a kid I went to an overnight program with my school called farm school, where we lived on a dairy farm for a week and learned about livestock and agriculture. Now on a dairy farm, there are often cows born, because that how you get milk, and it just so happened that one day while I was there a cow gave birth, and and like 20 something 4th graders watched the whole thing go down. My experience watching this alleged "miracle of life" is what makes this concept incredibly intriguing to me, albeit very strange and slightly uncomfortable. They seem to have done a huge deal of research, and put an insane amount of thought into every single choice they're making about this piece, which I can very much appreciate. I think sound has such a huge potential to influence the feelings of a person watching a piece without them fully realizing it, and that seems to be what they're going for here.
5 comments:
This sounds like a foley artist’s dream! I also appreciate this new take on theater: combining the intentional experience of immersing the audience in the soundscape with the feeling that you are in a theater that comes from watching the performers move objects to create those realistic sounds. I think that the art of foley really lends itself to that disconnect, because of the ability to turn everyday objects into completely different sounds. It is always so fun to listen to media for the foley and think about what might have been used to create the sound effects. In the Lego Movie, it seems that a lot of the sound effects sound like everyday objects, contrasting the legos which would normally sound plastic. To add dimension, the movie also uses a lot of music, to influence the tone of the scene. This is an especially cool technique that most movies use to subtly impact the audience's opinions and feelings around a scene.
My most important question for this piece is: is it going to be awkward? What does watching a cow give birth look like on a stage? Sometimes sitting in an audience watching a gross, uncomfortable, or awkward scene can just be plain weird. Are the animals actors or puppets, or a mix of both?
Whatever the case, the sound opportunity for this is so cool. The fact that harvesters sound like “the apocalypse” to animals is really interesting. I’ve never thought about how the noise our machines make disturb nature so much more than it disturbs us. I wonder if that kind of world-ending sound could be created or sourced–how different does it sound to what we hear? Can it be changed, warped, turned more dangerous to fit what the animal hears and how it feels? I love the picture of the foley artists working with all the natural materials that the animals would come across, it makes it feel so much more real.
I can already hear people online saying that this is crude and weird, and it is. HOWEVER, that is absolutely not a bad thing and in my opinion, exactly what theater needs to be. The whole point of theater (and art in general) is figuring out ways to express yourselves, your interests, your ideas, and anything that you want people to see. Not only is the topic of a cow birth something that we haven’t seen hit the stage, the way they are approaching the sound aspect of it is very fascinating and creates a lot of new opportunities for the designers to explore. To go a bit off topic, I also am a strong advocate for animal rights and believe that the stories of these animals deserve to be told. By using sound and capturing their emotions, the audience will likely be able to have their own emotional reaction to them and sympathize with them more.
I found it very interesting that they spent 2 whole days studying and experiencing and tuning into the farm and the world and lives of the animals. It was interesting that they chose sound as their medium. Animals are living breathing things and the first thing that I think about animals would be their look or smell. Maybe it is just me but sound isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of bringing animals to the theatrical world, so I think it is interesting to create the world using mainly sound. I really enjoyed how hard they worked finding the sound effects and how they tuned in to find each sound, even the smallest sounds such as the cows swishing their tails. I really admired the sentence were they talk about how to fully experience the world of animals you have to fully tune in to your surroundings and use all of your senses.
One time when I was a kid I went to an overnight program with my school called farm school, where we lived on a dairy farm for a week and learned about livestock and agriculture. Now on a dairy farm, there are often cows born, because that how you get milk, and it just so happened that one day while I was there a cow gave birth, and and like 20 something 4th graders watched the whole thing go down. My experience watching this alleged "miracle of life" is what makes this concept incredibly intriguing to me, albeit very strange and slightly uncomfortable. They seem to have done a huge deal of research, and put an insane amount of thought into every single choice they're making about this piece, which I can very much appreciate. I think sound has such a huge potential to influence the feelings of a person watching a piece without them fully realizing it, and that seems to be what they're going for here.
Post a Comment