All Day Permanent Red

Description

An immersive electro-acoustic performance based on Christopher Logue's All Day Permanent Red — his visceral, anachronism-laden adaptation of Homer's Iliad — presented at The Mercantile Library on April 29, 2017. Rather than staging the text as traditional theater, the piece functioned as an installation-like concert merging pre-recorded and live spoken word with a reactive, improvised score. Kat Reynolds's pre-recorded narration was distributed across a multichannel speaker array alongside three live readers, spatializing the voice so it physically surrounded the audience — shifting perspective from the claustrophobic center of hand-to-hand combat to a distant, god's-eye view of the Aegean Sea. The Knee Play trio (Justin West, Sam Ferris-Morris, Zach Larabee) performed a hybrid of composed frameworks and live improvisation built on piano, extensive percussion, and live electronics. Rather than serving as accompaniment, the music acted as a structural environment: percussive strikes, electronic swells, and deep sonic textures emulated rolling thunderclaps, thundering chariot hooves, and the psychological dread of soldiers on the battlefield. The soundscape actively reacted to the poem's pacing — ratcheting tension during frantic combat sequences, then expanding into spacious, echoing tones when the text pulled back to cosmic scale. Atmospheric lighting heightened the sensory impact without competing with the theater of the mind. The result was tense, monumental, and at times terrifying — capturing the chaotic scale of ancient warfare and the relentless, mechanical nature of human conflict through pure sound.