Ear Stories

Ear Stories/Oorverhalen is a concert-length performance by composer Oren Boneh, GloW Collective, and Foley artist Élodie Fiat. The work explores how sound tells stories — with words, without words, and sometimes against them. Using texts by Italo Calvino, Julio Cortázar, and Margaret Atwood, live musicians join forces with the virtuosic sound effects of a radio Foley artist, moving between narrative scenes and passages where sound stands entirely on its own.

Rather than simply setting literature to music, Ear Stories brings the audience into the mechanics of sound-making, from hand, to wood and metal, to loudspeaker…to ear. On stage, musicians and Foley artist exchange roles and blur boundaries among music, gesture and sound. Instruments imitate objects; objects rival instruments. The act of producing sound becomes visible, physical, and theatrical.

  
Oren Boneh’s music feeds on contrast and energy. Sounds act like characters: stubborn, mischievous, unpredictable, sometimes to the point of disorientation. Ear Stories shines a spotlight on Boneh’s keen sense of the absurd. A hand gesture may promise one sound and deliver another. The sound of an airplane overhead may weave into rhythm; frantic footsteps may unravel into texture.

  
By placing Foley at the center of the stage experience, Ear Stories turns the materiality of sound into a vehicle for imagination, humor, and emotion. It invites the audience to witness sound being built and dismantled, and to rediscover the narrative power of what usually remains unseen.