In 1865 the Neo-classical St George’s Hall in Liverpool played host to a week of performances by the Victorian Spiritualist sensation the Davenport Brothers. Satisfying the twin Victorian appetites for the paranormal and the spectacular, the brothers would sit, bound with rope, in their sealed ‘spirit cabinet’ and summon other-worldly beings, who would enthusiastically announce their presence with a cacophony of noise from musical instruments also secured inside the cabinet.
Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard have used historical reconstruction in the past, but their performance Silent Sound did not pretend to be a straightforward re-enactment of the Davenport Brothers’ act. Rather, it was a translation of the original, borrowing its solemn tone in a demonstration of the power of subliminal messaging. Once the audience had settled, Dr Ciarán O’Keefe took to the stage to introduce the performance. While the Davenport Brothers had two ‘gentleman assistants’ to guide the audience in an appropriately awed response, so too Forsyth and Pollard took ‘co-conspirators’ in O’Keefe, a doctor of parapsychology, and musician Jason Pierce, of the band Spiritualized.
O’Keefe explained that every aspect of the performance had been carefully designed by a team of specialists in subliminal suggestion. Nothing could be taken at face value or trusted, it seemed – least of all our breathless ‘doctor’ on stage. A steel box stood on the stage, studded with glowing analogue dials. Behind this, Forsyth and Pollard entered a larger steel cabinet, sitting opposite each other, visible through windows in the front. As the first notes began from the orchestra, the artists could be seen speaking into microphones, repeating a secret message that apparently would be known only to the artists and their conspirators.
This message was then supposedly transmuted via the mysterious silver box on the stage into infrasound; the barely audible noise that emerged from the speakers around the hall sounded much like someone in the far distance pushing a squeaky wheelbarrow. I waited expectantly. Was my heart beating faster? Was anything happening? If indeed a verbal message was being transmitted, nobody I spoke to seemed to have any idea what it might be (although I did hear that some members of the audience were moved to tears). For what it’s worth, ‘I love you’ was the phrase that kept returning to me; the simple repetitive cadences of Pierce’s music hinted at both redemptive sentimentality and the oldest song in the book. But ultimately the content of the ‘message’ was hardly the point. The performance was an exercise in highlighting the trust and belief that precedes non-verbal modes of communication in art, music and performance. There was much about Silent Sound that suggested that it was nothing more than a glorious piece of extravagant flummery, but I for one was ready to surrender myself (albeit temporarily) to the gilt of the concert hall, the lush orchestration and the spurious but alluring offer of transcendence through techniques beyond my understanding or control.
