Overview
Two thousand guests, six voices.
A waterfront festival asked for a closing ceremony that felt civic, not corporate. We cast six recitalists — actors, a poet, a choir soloist — and staged ninety minutes of spoken word against a light installation on the harbour wall.
The Challenge
Words that reach the back row.
Outdoor recital swallows subtlety. Microphones flatten delivery, wind steals pauses, and two thousand people will check their phones the moment the energy dips below the spectacle around it.
Our Approach
Score the text like music.
We rehearsed outdoors from the first week — wind, gulls, ferries and all — and set every piece to breath counts the light rig could follow. When the installation pulsed, the words landed inside it instead of competing with it.
Deliverables
What the festival kept.
- Six directed recitalists with understudy cover.
- A cued script synced to the light installation.
- Full-length recording for broadcast and archive.
Outcome
Silence you could hear.
Two thousand people went quiet for the final piece — the festival’s words, not ours. The ceremony returns each year, and the recital format is now the festival’s closing tradition.
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