The Whisper Of The Sea, & I

The Whisper of the Sea and I was a deeply formative design experience for me — a live dubbing performance built for visually-impaired audiences. There was no projected image; the story existed entirely through performance, voice, and sound. The audience sat inside a theatre, but what they received was a cinema of the ears.

The play depicts a foreign film being dubbed into a lighter, romantic narrative — while fragments of the original soundtrack keep bleeding through. Gradually, the audience realizes the truth behind the fabrication: the concealed story is not a love drama, but a woman surviving the loneliness and devastation of war. In this rupture between what is said and what is real, the show exposes manipulation, censorship, and the politics of storytelling.

Designing a radio-theatre hybrid required a completely new spatial logic. Actors were seated behind microphones like in a broadcast studio, yet they performed physically — revealing the mechanics of the fiction. A live Foley artist created footsteps, doors, breaths, and clothing sounds in real time. Musicians and voice actors occupied designated “sound stations” across the stage, transforming the theatre into a multi-source acoustic landscape.

My visual design was intentionally minimal — large speaker stacks, isolated performer zones, and exposed sound-making devices — to sharpen audience immersion into the sonic world and keep emotional attention on the pain beneath the distortion. The space amplified the ethical tension of the piece:

Who controls the narrative when the image is gone?