REVIEW: RAW! ASMR (Auckland Fringe)

[Gonzo! The musical]

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) refers to particular audio-visual stimuli which trigger a person to expertise a tingling sensation across the head and the again of the top. 

Outside of youtube suggestions and commercials, I’ve virtually no expertise with ASMR.

That ignorance was hammered dwelling about 0.5 seconds into the present when creator/performer Amy Atkins requested the viewers what the acronym stood for.

The set is barebones – a trestle desk stands in entrance of a display screen, with a microphone stand within the far left nook of the stage. 

Projected on the display screen is the stay feed from a cellphone digicam on a tripod, pointing on the desk.

The desk would possibly as properly be referred to as Checkov’s Showcase – an array of assorted onerous and gentle fruit are positioned in a row, like suspects in a lineup.

While the present is designed for ASMR, all these fruit jogged my memory of a kind of mannequin cities Godzilla would destroy. 

Directed by Sara Hirsch, RAW! is charming in its lack of deeper which means.

It is ASMR, and it’s uncooked.

But what makes the present work is how Atkins makes use of silence, and quiet, to focus the viewers’s consideration and draw out suspense. 

As the present progresses, she pushes on the viewers’s senses and sensibilities, including and subtracting the visible to make the expertise extra disorienting. 

Since that is Fringe and happening within the Basement’s Studio, it will definitely descends into chaos. 

Because of the space of conventional stagecraft, that chaos is amplified by cinematic methods – lingering close-ups and – in a gloriously wicked contact – contrapuntal sound, because the sounds Atkins creates are separated, replayed and drawn out till they kind a delirious wall of sound.

It is ridiculous, it’s gonzo and it is extremely humorous.

RAW! ASMR performs Basement Theatre Studio thirtieth August to third September, 2022 as a part of Auckland Fringe.