Earth Makes No Sound at UCL East

The free lunchtime performance incorporated song, movement and percussive sounds in a specially devised version of the company’s Earth Makes No Sound collaborative choral work.

Performers quietly appeared in the atrium of the ground floor of our Marshgate building below the Gaia globe artwork, at first appearing to roam randomly around the space, each carrying a plastic bottle, before mesmerising onlookers with an exquisitely choreographed build up of music, dance and song.

UCL East Engagement team's creative producer for Gaia Holly Hunter worked with the theatre company to create the moment around the Treow of Time installation as part of a series of experiences aimed at involving the public and UCL’s community in art and culture on the campus.

Holly Hunter said:

“It was brilliant to see the performance in this space and how staff, students and visitors interacted with it. Some joined and stayed for the whole time. You could see others looking surprised and realising they’d walked into it something and wondering, ‘What’s that?!’ and then staying for a little while.

“The piece, Earth Makes No Sound by Filament Theatre company, was written in 2017 as a response to the way the earth is changing in the climate crisis. With Luke Jerram’s Gaia globe artwork being here and with the theme of sustainability running through the study and research that happens on the campus, it felt right to bring the performance to UCL East.

"We wanted to stage it in a public space rather than a traditional theatre space as a way to highlight Gaia and also Larry Achiampong and David Blandy’s Treow of Time sculpture. The aim was to highlight themes like plastic pollution in our oceans by singing about them too, hence the plastic bottles carried by the performers, bringing to life for this audience the kind of challenges that research in this building is tackling every day.

“I confess I was a bit nervous about how the whole thing would work – parts of the piece are very intimate and very quiet, so I wondered how it would feel in such a big building. But I think it worked really beautifully. We should be really ambitious about the type of work we offer audiences here and around our campus, whether it’s hundreds and hundreds of performers or just one or two.

“Now that we’ve begun to experiment, we can support different art forms and different modes of expression, inviting different artists and community groups to respond to the ground breaking research that is happening here to secure the future of our planet – I think it’s really exciting.”

The UCL East Engagement Team has commissioned a new song, which will be written in response to and as a collaboration with academic researchers at UCL East, to be performed in 2024 as part of the ongoing public programming around Gaia.

Learn more about art at UCL East