Tonight:
10°c
The orchestra that wants you to listen to real rubbish
Simon Kirby02.09.08
An orchestra playing instruments fashioned from junk is to perform at the Royal Festival Hall.
The Lost and Found Orchestra is the latest venture from the creators of Stomp, the hit musical that has been running in the West End for six years.
The new show, which opens at Christmas, features 50 actors, dancers, singers and classicallytrained instrumentalists, all playing found and invented instruments.
The timpani section will be made up of soup cauldrons, saws will replace violins, traffic cones will become trombones and a brass bed a bass.
Directors Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas also promise swinging aerial artists banging 6ft rubber tubes, flying filing cabinets, performing shopping trolleys and a musical vacuum cleaner.
McNicholas told the Evening Standard the pair scoured junk shops, metal recycling facilities and plumbers' merchants to create their instruments.
They invested long hours to ensure their inventions sounded exactly as they wanted and would withstand the rigours of repeated performance.
He said: "The principles of making instruments have been established for centuries. There's a whole subculture of people who devise bizarre instruments all over the world.
"But you still find yourself experimenting to get something sounding just right."
McNicholas said some of the unique instruments such as the squonkaphone - a tube with a balloon over the end that sounds like an oboe - play only one note.
"It takes eight people to play an eight-note sequence. It becomes a visual demonstration of how a tune is made up and how harmony comes together. It's a very labour intensive way of doing it but that creates the theatre."
The show runs from 19 December to 11 January next year.
