How we made Tight Roaring Circle

Joel Ryan, 9 April2002

Joel Ryan. Photograph by Sarah Ainslie

From the first moment I walked into the Roundhouse it was clear that here was a sonic contraption of absolute brilliance, which would elaborate and assert itself on whatever I made. Though we could not have anticipated the dance spawned in the cloud-white invulnerability of Tight Roaring Circle, there were many attempts to predict some of its contours. I started with the belief that there were natural durations present in the setting which, if built into the music, could put it in tune with the dance. Some of these had to be quantifiable, intrinsic to the architecture and acoustics of the Roundhouse and the dynamics of a human body of so and so many kilos rebounding ballistically. I tried to extract from measurements of space, 'time constants' for calibrating the structure of the music. But knowing there were many more subtler, and harder to pin down, I decided to do the final mixing in the Roundhouse with the sound system in place.

Visits to the Roundhouse were undoubtedly the most fruitful source of ideas for everyone involved. I saw it first alone on a cold January night during a run of the Chinese State Circus complete with its famous 17 Girls on a Bicycle. The building dwarfed the gymnasts and resisted the romance of the exotic, an important clue about the authenticity of its scale. But the band, thin reeds, strings and the barking gong of Chinese opera, provided as bewildering an initiation as could have been hoped for.

Later that year we all went together when the building was empty and began to grasp the scale of what was crouching behind the parking lot. The presence of the building refuted most of the ideas about the installation that had been imagined at a distance. The scale of the upper space, its round sky-eyed wooden roof, the wiry prosthetic iron work mystifying gravity, and the hidden plan of the undercroft, suggested an animist script concealed in this invention of industrial Britain. The symmetry of the scaling circles served the scope of a new mode of transportation, but traced the cosmology of a tribe grown away from magic.