Voices of the Earth Sound Walks
Photograph by Danielle Adair
SRT proudly announces a new interactive project, that takes you out into the natural world, guided and enriched by audio passages drawn from our Voices of the Earth project.
The five sound walks represent a cross section of the Bay Area’s natural beauty. The collection offers participants varied landscapes and views from which to experience audio from SRT’s Voices of the Earth production. The walks include city, county, regional, state, and nationally managed areas, differing in length and difficulty (one route is ADA accessible). The flora and fauna of each walk changes throughout the seasons, inviting returns visits.
Free to enjoy, the five sound walks are set within Pearson–Arastradero Preserve, Wunderlich Park, Coyote Hills Regional Park, Mount Diablo State Park, and Mori Point. Parking is free at each walk. Coyote Hills Regional Park has an entrance fee; however, you don’t have pay if you park just outside the Park to access the walk.
The selected quotations from the Voices of the Earth production reflect and respond to the different locations, mapped via the Echoes app, which you can download on your smartphone. We encourage you to stop and listen to the audio selections at the specified locations, building a narrative that enriches your experience of the surrounding landscape and your relationship to it.
Please click here for information on how to download (free!) the Echoes app on your smartphone, and for detailed instructions on how to access the Sound Walks audio. It may look intimidating, but you can do it all in a couple of minutes. It’s a bit like the audio guides at museums, but instead of entering a number linked to a painting, the Echoes app will “locate you” as you take a Sound Walk in one of our five areas. When you arrive at a specified location, the Echo “app” will allow you to hear audio tracks carefully selected to fit that location.
Supported by Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, SRT’s Sound Walks is curated by Danielle Adair, with Dan Holland as Audio Editor and Composer. Enjoy any or all of these walks, enriched by SRT’s Voices of the Earth.
Voices of the Earth script and production material Available FREE
In honor of 50+ years of Earth Day, we are making Voices of the Earth: From Sophocles to Rachel Carson and Beyond available free of charge for non-commercial use, to promote environmental awareness and activism, for use in schools and by arts councils, and for free public readings and performances.
With a cast of 90 different characters – poets, naturalists, scientists, politicos, deniers, and heroes – all of them real, most of them sane, Voices of the Earth presents a kaleidoscope of views on the earth we inhabit, and the existential crisis we face, ending with a call to action.
The project is available in several forms: the script for reading and performance; an 80-minute audio/visual presentation for screening or ZOOM; the same audio/visual presentation separated into nine roughly 9-minute episodes; the full-length program audio only; and 22 three-minute episodes designed for radio or other audio formats.
To register for access to Voices of the Earth, click here.
Compiled by Rush Rehm (Professor of Theater and Classics, Artistic Director of Stanford Repertory Theater) and Charles Junkerman (Director Emeritus, Stanford Continuing Studies), Voices of the Earth deals with the troubled relationship between humans and the natural world.
The script features environmental pioneers (Muir, Carson, Stegner, Leopold), great nature writers (Thoreau, Snyder, Abbey), playwrights who turn to the environment for inspiration (Sophocles, Chekhov, O’Neill), native American voices (Crowfoot, Chief Luther Standing Bear, Walking Buffalo), natural philosophers (Aristotle, Galileo, Rousseau, Emerson), poets who honor the earth (Li Po, Rumi, Neruda, Levertov, Lorde), international environmental activists (Mendes, Saro-wiwa, Maathai, Goodall, McKibben), climate change deniers who insist we face no crisis, and scientists who know better. Voices of the Earth brings home the threat that looms over our survival on the planet, even as it lifts the spirits and calls us to action.
Voices of the Earth on the radio!
Voices of the Earth 3-minute radio segments have aired every weekday during April 2021, Earth Month, on NPR station KCBX, on the California central coast. The station also broadcast a news feature, part of their Arts Beat series, that rrunning locally during both Morning Edition and All Things Considered:
On Thursday April 8, KCBX broadcast an hour-long discussion of Voices of the Earth with director Rush Rehm, actress Gabriella Goldstein, and Magnus Torens, director of the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur, which will present the full audio/visual version of Voices this fall.
https://www.kcbx.org/post/central-coast-voices-voices-earth
On Thursday April 15, KALW in San Franciso presented a Peter Robinson's live interview with Rush Rehm on Open Air as we head into Earth Day April 22.
SRT's 2018 Hecuba/Helen received great reviews, including the following from Lily Janiak, San Francisco Chronicle:
"Aleta Hayes’ choreography ... keeps Hecuba/Helen ceaselessly dynamic ... This group of young women is constantly darting about the space, pitching, heaving and lunging their limbs, arranging and rearranging themselves like electrons that then pause for an instant to blossom into a kaleidoscopic pattern."
"The script demands that Walsh mine symphonic range out of grief ... A few bold choices, like a foray into song, lend new shading to suffering; she’s like Shakespeare’s Ophelia, at once fathoming too much and not fathoming at all, the song both a veil over a clouded gaze and a clear-eyed immersion into sadness, the likes of which those who hold onto sanity can never know."
"It’s always invigorating to witness one of Western theater’s titanic women, but to see two of them in implied dialogue with one another opens up a new range of possibilities, both for classic drama and for our own."
SRT's 2017 The Many Faces of Farce was nominated for a Theater Bay Area Critics Award for best production in the South Bay. "It’s a wonderful production, well performed and well directed. … an entertaining and thoughtful evening of theater.” Palo Alto Daily Post
SRT's 2016 production of Odet's Waiting for Lefty: "Kudos to Stanford Repertory Theater and artistic director Rush Rehm for bringing this pithy production to Bay Area audiences." San Jose Mercury News
SRT's 2015 production of Coward's Hay Fever received three Bay Area Theater Critic Award Nominations: Best Production, Best Costumes (Connie Strayer), Best Supporting Actress (Kathleen Kelso)
SRT's 2014 production of Welles' Moby Dick - Rehearsed received ten Theater Bay Area nominations, and won in four categories: Outstanding Production, Outstanding Ensemble, Outstanding Direction (Rush Rehm and Courtney Walsh), and Outstanding Sound Design (Michael Keck)