Take a Sound Break with Lightning Rod Special’s New Audio Series

Lightning Rod Special (LRS) launches Sound Break, a new series of theatrical audio works, with a new work by Lee Minora and Scott R. Sheppard along with director/creator Nell Bang-Jensen and creator Matteo Scammell.

Designed for at-home listening, available for free online to all listeners, Sound Break is billed as “theater when and where you want it”. The premiere work, Nosejob, crosses medieval legend with American sexual politics. It tells the story of a 9th-century abbey of nuns who cut off their noses to repel a pack of rapacious Vikings, and a 21st-century college, where boys are “burying” their faces in girls’ cleavage as part of a schoolwide prank. At the center of this wicked satire is college student Devon Chase, a feminist in search of a fantasy life she can live with. Charting the contours of consent, power, and fantasy, Nosejob ask what has changed about rape culture in the last thirteen centuries.

Nosejob is the first of three new audio works presented by award-winning theater company Lightning Rod Special. When the Covid pandemic dramatically shifted the landscape of live performance in March 2020, the began experimenting with new forms of collaborative creation. Through the summer of 2020, company members convened by Zoom as part of a digital performance gym. They decided to apply their skills towards the creation of original audio works, launching the first piece, SUPERHOST, in late 2021.

Sound Break continues this experiment, bringing LRS’s theatrical techniques and approaches to the medium of audio storytelling and making the results available free of charge to audiences across the globe.

Nosejob is performed by Cathy Ang, Melanye Finister, Annette Hammond, Lee Minora, Matteo Scammell, Scott R. Sheppard, and Leah Walton, with sound design by Kathy Ruvuna. It  will be available for free online to the public starting on April 16, 2021 on lightningrodspecial.com. Or light some votive candles, slip on a pair of your favorite headphones, and join LRS artists for the virtual listening party premiere of Nosejob on April 15: RSVP here.

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