Witness Stand Brighton

How do we understand where we are through listening?

At 5 sites across the Brighton region, we hear the soundtraces of the live performance events of Witness Stand at Brighton Festival 2022.

Each trace begins with a prologue text by Akila M Richards and the writers connected to each site, and flow into the live performance energies recorded at the opening performances.

We encourage you to sit and listen. These pieces were made for these places with attention and time.

From across the city, drifting over land, sea and forgotten sites, comes an invitation to gather, sit and listen together.

Australian artists Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey have commissioned a community of writers and sound artists with a connection to Brighton to design sound works that respond to five specific sites that reverberate with ancient, recent, and future stories of the city.

Each chosen site is a place where we can experience the confluence of past and future, the ebb and flow of time and tide. Places that hover around dereliction and renewal, separation and coming together. The Adur Estuary at Shoreham-by-Sea, the Chattri, the West Pier, East Brighton, and Brighton Marina will all be linked in a physical and aural network. We gathered together with the artists, on simple seating stands, to contemplate vistas that we rarely pause properly to see, to spend time together in a place where the site is both companion and performer.

This unique perspective merged with an immersive soundscape, live performance and each area’s natural ambience, gives us the opportunity to look outwards and consider what it means to be here now, what it meant in the past, and what it might mean in the future. A chance to witness, together, exactly what it is that makes these places so unique.

Concept and direction: Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey

Lead writer: Akila M Richards

Artists: Razia Aziz, Johanna Bramli, Thor McIntyre Burnie, Ed Chivers, Scott Smith, Emma-Kate Matthews, Gene Pool, Quinta, Ingrid Plum, James C Wilkie, Mrisi

Writers: Georgina Aboud, Jenny Arach, Sheila Auguste, Dulani Kulasinghe, Zaid S Sethi

Cultural Consultants: Dave Searby Mason, Richard Bickers, Davinder Dhillon, Richard Williams, Katie Sollohub, Rachel Clark Supported by the Sustaining Creative Workers Initiative, Victoria, Australia https://brightonfestival.org/whats-on/witness-stand-4545/