Cliff Caruthers, Sound Designer
Interview and Excerpts from Past Work with The Cutting Ball

From Macbeth by William Shakespeare

From Fighter Airplanes by Richard Foreman

From Mr. Fujiyama’s Electric Beach by Kevin Oakes

From The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World by Suzan-Lori Parks

Interview

You have a long history with Cutting Ball, a company well known for its experimental approach to classical work, what liberties has this approach afforded your own work?

Those of us who enjoy experimental theater want to be challenged, to question at each moment how our work is getting an idea or feeling across. When I work on a Cutting Ball project, I know we'll be trying something that will surprise or astonish me - these kinds of surprises are what allow me to be inventive.

Do you have a preference between creating sound for new works or classical pieces?

I think that each informs the other, but that said it is certainly a thrill to discover something for the first time in a new piece. When there is an open dialog with the playwright, putting a new play on its feet can be a real thrill.

Can you describe ways in which sound designs you've created for a Cutting Ball production have developed towards other ends?

One thing I like about my work with Cutting Ball is that we often blur the line between music and sound design - it's in this niche that I feel most comfortable. So often I've taken excerpts of electronic music pieces I've made for concert settings and adapted them for use in a play. With Cutting Ball the reverse has been true in several cases. For Avantgardarama, I made 30 minutes of walk in 'music' to introduce Richard Foreman's Fighter Airplanes - a sort of aural journey involving jets, airports, and snippets of music which ended in a cascading wall of sound. Later I adapted that piece, called Blue Sky to be played as a standalone electronic music piece on a 20 speaker array at the San Francisco Tape Music Festival. Similarly, I took a scene from a recent reading of Kevin Oakes Mr. Fujiyama and the Electric Beach, and presented it as a text and sound composition. Both of these pieces were accepted as part of the sound design exhibit for the Prague Quadrennial 2007 as well.