As you can see in the photos, Todd Dicken's set design for Dancing at Lughnasa was
a unit set, portraying both the inside and outside of the house simultaneously. It was,
therefore,
important to differentiate between the indoor and outdoor scenes with other
technical elements. I had several discussions with lighting designer Matt Filmek
about how this could be accomplished. Between the two of us, I believe
that the feel in the room changed subtly yet dramatically to fit the location of the action.
For my part, I used four different recordings of "English Birds" from the BBC
sound effects collection. I played them back simultaneously through four stereo speaker pairs
located behind the arena style seating (see the system drawings). The four
different stereo locations of similar yet unique country ambiances opened up
the intimate space. Unfortunately, the audio sample here is but a poor stereo
simulation of this effect, but I'm sure you'll get the point.
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