Hugh McCann from 40KM talks about the process behind this innovative, experimental performance

40KM is a live performance entirely generated from the field recordings and field notes gathered from a marathon walk through the surrounding space of the host venue.

For our Plymouth walk we began at the Train Station at 0921, before meandering through Cattedown, the Barbican, Stonehouse, Mt. Edgecumbe, Stoke, Peverell, Crownhill, Manadon, Hartley and Mutley before climbing back aboard the train at 2213 with reams of notepaper and gigabytes of audio recording.

These notes and sounds are then condensed into a palette of the most interesting and broadly ranging pieces. We did not aim to capture the whole of Plymouth, just a walk through it, and neither did we aim to project our own ideas into it. It cannot be an objective representation of a city, but we aim to avoid subjectivity.

This palette of sounds and words is then used to create a live, semi-improvised audio performance, which takes place in the dark. We are interested in combining meditation and live performance, and the text is treated in the second person tense, and sounds form one continuous soundscape to get lost in.

We are interested in offering audiences a chance to reimagine and reinhabit spaces which have become overly familiar, and allow chance encounters in the environment to shape and dictate the content of the work. We have developed this piece in response to a visually dominated culture, in which our dependence on visual stimuli dictate our actions and hamper our ability to consider new ways of interacting with the city.

We aim to take this piece across the country and create an ever larger portrait of cities, towns, and spaces and start conversations about how we engage with the places we offer ourselves to.

If you are interested in experiencing a 40KM walk through Plymouth in the space of an hour, through your ears alone – come along!

You can also find out more about 40KM at 40kms.com

Tickets for 40KM at Plymouth Fringe Festival 2017 can be purchased now from plymouthfringe.com