RYAN GAMBLIN - EXPO APP MATERIALS

Cover letter

Hello.

My name is Ryan. I spend most of my time designing sound and writing music for theatre and dance. I’ve worked with a lot of artists that I’m proud to call friends and collaborators, and my work has been heard in every hemisphere. I have a lot of gratitude for the work I’ve been able to make and the life I’ve led already.

Recently, recognizing that I faced a potential lifetime of alienated art-making unless I made a radical change, I’ve begun a journey of lead artistry. In the last year, I debuted a solo work – SPLICE (2025), a sound artwork composed live with the use of four cassette decks and a combination of found and original sound – and received a fellowship at the Target Margin Theatre Institute, whose resources have provided me with concentrated time to write, lead rehearsal rooms, and explore performance from viewpoints other than sound. My practice is in a moment of dramatic (and postdramatic) expansion, and I’ve begun the development process of new performance work as an artist and deviser, finding meaning and renewed potential in theatre through this new approach. Originating work not in text but in sound, light, sensation, and movement has proven revelatory for me, and I’m now in search of opportunities to present and self-produce.

Perhaps unsurprising when considering my background as a sound designer, INTERFACE is an exploration of the mediation of human relationships. Sound design is fundamentally an art of semiotics and sensation; we use signs to bring connections into focus while activating an audience at a level that often bypasses the conscious mind. In contemporary mediated society, we are all designers operating in signs and simulacra. The images we post on instagram, the memes we reference in person, the zoomer stare and the millennial pause are symptoms of a societal depersonalization. On a larger scale, technological mediation enables disinformation and segmentation of communities into ideological spheres, which then become disparate realities. Every individual exists within a reality separate from that of their neighbor. This has already enabled countless abuses of power and will allow for even more if continued unchecked. With this show, we pull at one thread of this mediation, in hopes of starting to unravel the sweater.

The show is a two-to-six-person inter-generational cast composed of actual romantic partners collaging choreography, sound, and text, revealing the ways in which mediation has formed and deformed their connections. In-ear monitoring systems keep their actions in time, at times diverging and uniting. The cast recites their actual truths, synchronized in motion to music that the audience never hears, attention shifting at the speed of information. Hopefully by the end of the show we exist in the same reality, in one form or another.

Thanks for reading,

Ry

RESUME

AUDIO SAMPLE, Script, and summary

Below is an audio sample and corresponding script for the opening scene of INTERFACE. This is the section that will presented as a work in progress at Catch 81. Be aware that the audio sample gets louder at unpredictable times – don’t turn up your headphones too loud at first!