Broken Record and the Oddity was a site-specific installation performance in Troy NY, from March-April of 2022. Together with Troy Foundry Theatre and Director Katie Pedro, we created a sonic performance space where the audience was encouraged to touch the sound-responsive installations and make music in their world. Through an hour long performance three guides would walk the space and create intimate performance moments with different “instruments” made from a combination of everyday household objects and digital midi-mapping, audio technology that brought music to everything you touched.

https://www.mediasanctuary.org/stories/2022/experience-the-broken-record-the-oddity/

(radio description of the project)

HERE Artist Residency Program original puppetry performance conceived of by Normandy Sherwood and Craig Flanagin. This piece premiered in its most recent ideation September 2023. It heavily featured a blend of curtains and fabrics that were projection surfaces, sonic instruments, and characters onstage with the cast to help move the audience through a dystopian world of the mind. We used a combination of live modular synthesizers, contact mics, pre-recorded effects and frequency feedback to create a dizzying sonic landscape, perfect for capturing the audiences’ focus and pulling them along with the mystical performer’s journey.

In The Heights - Colorado Springs Fine Arts Cener

Director : Elise Hernandez Santora

Scenic Designer: Rodrigo Hernandez Matinez

Costume Designer: Oriana Sophia

Lighting Designer: Maria Cristina Fuste

Sound Designer: Travis Joseph Wright

With this production of In the Heights I focused on bringing the elements of NYC soundscape to the background. Multiple Live recordings of the streets of 181st street made their way into the production bringing a live sense of the city living and breathing underneath the production. The city is always alive and though it may have moments of stillness and peace, there is always someone serenading the city in the dark.

Constellation Stage and Screen’s - ELF

Director: Richard Roland

Musical Director: Brandon Magid

Scenic Designer: C. David Higgins

Lighting Designer: Keith A. Truax

Costume Designer: Brittany Kugler

Sound Designer: Travis Joseph Wright

How do you build believable Christmas Magic onstage? Its more than a bunch of twinkling lights and sleigh bells. With this production I experimented with layering diverse sounds to blend into the effects that brought santa’s toyshop and Macy’s Superstore to life. Hammers on anvils, woodpeckers looking for grubs, Hammer dulcimers and children’s souvenir whistles all went into the making of some of these magical moments and the results were beautiful.

Rags Parkland at Lehigh University

Director: Lyam B Gabel

Scenic Designer: Sasha Schwartz

Media Designer: Joseph Amodei

Lighting Designer: Will Lowry

Music Director: Travis Joseph Wright

This performance highlights social inequity through the lens of futuristic folk music and the love between humans and constructed beings. The 5 piece band features banjo, guitar, accordion, saxophone, electric bass and drums and was a blast to learn and teach with the students at Lehigh university. As a show where the live band are our focus and the characters in the play, these students had to build a relationship with each other and really come together to form this band, an experience that was new to nearly all of them. The music is worth a listen, I highly recommend.

https://open.spotify.com/album/61Hdj7EJmJupWzuvEKXXIy?si=K9DICg5cRf2jL7W_Nxo0Xw

An original work by Playwright/Director Katie Pedro performed with he company of Troy Foundry Theatre in their Alleyway Series.

This play pushed the boundaries of what’s possible for creating and producing theater during a pandemic. We brought the audience and the performers outside into a parking lot near our rehearsal space and built three large containers from which the emotions and characters could capture our attention. The sound used in this piece functionally connected the three rooms by allowing the performers to hear each other through walls in an outdoor environment in addition to that we used their voices and sighs and vocal expressions with some digital remixing to allow the actors to vocally fill the spaces they inhabited with sound.

Exploded Ensemble is a student driven experimental composition studio at Carnegie Mellon University. Each performer is also a composer of two pieces per term that are performed as a group. Both of these pieces took place during the coronavirus pandemic and we had to come up with new innovative ways of performing together across distances. The first image is a piece I wrote entitled Flashlight Tag where the performers used their flashlights to control Max for Live patches of variable samples and could alter the pitch and volume of their samples by moving the light around on the screen. The second image is from Performing Synethesia a similar piece that I created to control midi arpeggiators with a color selected object.

Desdemona’s Child follows the story of a young woman revisiting the town from her youth where police misconduct and a large flood forced her out twenty years ago. She comes back now with the urging of her mother’s ghost to uncover the stories behind why her parents died and discovers that the people are going through the same struggles that they were when she was young.

Three of the scenes in this play were written with the express intention from the playwright that their text be used as the lyrics for three songs. We decided to set the play generally around the Pittsburgh area and so I wrote the songs to bring out the kind of Appalachian Folk tradition that still resides in that region.

After working on the development of this play for six months and then starting rehearsals the world was hit with Covid-19 and we had to rebuild our production to take place in a zoom performance setting. Still we built the show together and developed some unique performance language to help us understand how to create work during these times.

This installation, which was a joint project with media designer Joseph Amodei, sought to give a moment of calm reflection against a background of stress and artistic pressure. The participants entered into this sound insulated room where the noise of the outside world was lessened. Their entrance triggered a six minute meditation that slowly gave the viewer time to relax in the space before asking questions about them. The viewers responses to these questions were captured by a microphone in the room and fed into a program that compiled their answers and generated a visual pattern of their words which then was printed out on a sticker that the user could take home. The final minute of the experience then lifted the energy of the user out of their meditative state and elevated their consciousness back to a calm but awake state, ready to face the world. One of our main objectives with this piece was to allow people to have a space to let their stress go so that they could reflect on times they had been comfortable with themselves. The audience was able to see into the chamber where the participant rested but the audio dampening gave the space a separate enough feeling from reality that many visitors felt a sense of release and comfort, even in front of a crowd.

A retelling of the Trojan War just before it started, asking the question, was there ever a moment that this tragedy could have been avoided? Or are the wheels of fate goverened by too many forces to stop this war from happening? The lead character Hector works the whole play to convince the senators, his family, Helen, and the entire populace of Troy that they cannot afford another war. Then the greek landing party gets to the gates and treaty looks at hand but will the want for war win out? It’s one of those tipping points of history that perhaps is not governed by the choice of man alone.

I worked closely with the composer William Lowe to realize this play and together we focused on how can the pitch or frequency of a sound influence the mood of the play. What happens when the audience feels the bass rumble from their feet? Does a high pitch trumpet automatically call us to action or do we still have agency? Do we still have a choice?

A musical celebration of the music of Fats Waller and his orchestra, Portland stage took on this classic as a co-production with Maine State Music Theatre. E. Faye Butler who has toured with this production around the United States for years directed an energetic and engaging performance. This tight cast of 5 actors and four musicians with the lead pianist and conductor sitting directly onstage, brought the music of the Harlem Renaissance back to life again every night.

Broadway World Review

“Travis Wright's sound design is nicely balanced for an appealing acoustic in this intimate house.”

A production from Rat Queen Theatre, that told the story of an imaginary trip Nancy Reagan took to a small town and was stranded there during the storm of the century. The story follows a young girl who meets Nancy and is immediately besotted by her. She drags her friend along with her schemes to meet Nancy and then when her dream comes true abandons them to be with her idol, only to learn that her idol doesn’t have her best interests at heart.

This project brought together sound artists from around the world to develop an experimental sound workshop as a part of the Prague Quadrennial in conjunction with 36Q° Blue Hour. Led by sound designer John Richards the group experimented with form by building sound objects on walls attached to stethoscopes and bass shakers. We created sonic devices that we used to perform at a number of local prague venues such as Punctum and Kino NFA Ponrepo. In addition we built a zine that described our process of making, doing, experimenting and creating in an unconventional setting. As well as producing an album of sounds that you can listen to by clicking on any picture.

Dark Play: or Stories for Boys is a dramatic retelling of a 2003 news article out of Britain where a young teenage boy Catfishes another boy on the internet. This leads to a dangerous manipulation of the two boys understanding of love and sexual desire ending in physical harm. The physical action onstage is seen through the lens of a third character Rachel who is the catfisher Nick’s supposed persona. The challenge of this play was how to represent digital interaction through the lens of live performance and we achieved this with a mixture of visual obstruction/projection on a plastic screen surface that stretched across the stage, as well as the familiar dial up sounds present in early 2000’s computers.

Artist Gabrielle Mertz’s exhibition at SL Gallery in NYC translated data from a variety of media sources into different structures and forms in order to distill and reconstruct the process of viewing. One of the pieces she built was a collection of hijacked smartphones that displayed moving image works in response to breaking news stories during each week of the exhibition. She hired me to build an audio loop for one of the works that included news reel intros and sound clips.