Playgroup & The Brother Moves On present 'Them Who Feeds You Owns You'

The main inquiry was: what would happen if we created a theatrical arena for social activity (with loosely defined edges), based on a provisional recognition that place is what Hayden Lorimer calls a “nexus of intersecting biographies”? Can these biographies create an ephemeral community? Do ephemeral communities bring forth the story of the street?

There are equivocal affective atmospheres that define space. On the one hand there is the domestic soundscape, Melville, as a leafy suburb, and on the other, there’s something sonically urban about 7th Avenue. It’s somewhere in between, ecotonal, where listening horizons overlap. This is both a spatial and a temporal phenomenon. The street becomes a hole between 2:00 and 8:00 and slowly becomes reactivated. But this activity is that of banal and repetitive activity, traffic, customers being pacified with background music. Listening here is regularized (we can call this silent Melville exemplified by painting the wall white, like a Rauschenberg). Walking down the street though, the listening experience is modular, in the way that one restaurant projects sound streetward, then the next, then the next, the type of music whose loudness is mediators of inclusion or exclusion. Our intervention disrupted this regularity in many ways. The poetry sessions and soap box quite literally expressed the above mentioned intersecting biographies, live music, and improvisations bled onto the street, and then there were silent pieces that allowed the street to bleed back into the space. In this sense the sonic activation was a conversation between inside and out and the very soft boundary between the two. The investigation resulted in the discovery that there is a relationship between place making and sound making, difference and belonging (sound/sound maker is in or out of place), and public and private. The public acoustic territory of 7th by night in opposition to the leafy suburb of Melville by day. These are themes that are very well known to urban geographers. Would they have emerged by studying Melville in any other way than by artistic intervention based on sound?