The Builders Association and dbox, SUPER VISION: SCORE


SUPER VISION tells three stories

1. As he crosses successive borders, a solitary traveller gradually is forced to reveal all of his personal information, until his identity becomes transparent, with no part of his life left outside the boundaries of datasurveillance.

2. A young woman (Jen), addicted to the white noise of constant connection, maintains a long-distance relationship with her Grandmother. As she makes efforts to digitally archive her Grandmother's past, the Grandmother slips into senility.

3. A father covertly exploits his young son's personal data to meet the demands of the family's lifestyle. This ploy escalates beyond the father's control, until he is compelled to disappear. His wife and son are left with a starkly diminished data portrait, and his escape is shadowed by the long reach of the datasphere.


Rizwan Mirza

Nick Kaye: One of the things that comes across very strongly from the performance is a kind of musical structure - and I mean to include Dan Dobson’s work in that - but also the way the various elements of the performance as a whole relate to each other musically. In SUPER VISION, the way in which these stories are told, their tone and rhythm, is certainly as important, if not more important, as the stories themselves.

Rizwan Mirza: Yes. The story is scored by everything that is happening on stage. When I say the story is scored, I am talking about the thing you kind of don’t see or is nothing to do with the actors – that is, everything to do with what surrounds the idea, is being scored. That’s how I would put it.


David Pence

Nick Kaye: Yours seems to me a very musical performance, in a way that complements Dan Dobson’s development of the sound score. A very important part of your performance seems to be the musical aspect of your tone of voice. What you are talking about, the humanising, or warmer aspects of the performance, comes across to me very strongly in your tone of voice.

David Pence: Thank you, I appreciate that. I think, as you mentioned, Dan Dobson’s role is obviously crucial, but I would say also that in terms of The Builders Association’s work, it is very important that Marianne Weems is a musician. She is a viola player, and more importantly her sensibility is musical. Even in my earliest memories of Marianne and me working together, which stretches back to 1989, I can remember her using the word score to talk about the progress of my performance over the course of a scene or over the course of a piece. ‘Figuring out your score.’ So since that time it has always been part of our vocabulary and my way of thinking. I’m a sometime musician with a decent ear—in any case, I’m tuned into sound. I think of my voice as one of my most important tools in this work. I craft my vocal performance pretty tightly, and at the same time I try to stay available in the moment for something new that might happen.


see also: musicality | soundscape |


SUPER VISION credits