The Sound Design Of Balls' World Premiere

The year was 1973, when women’s tennis star Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in an exhibition match. The 55-year-old former Wimbledon champion Riggs had claimed that he could still beat any female player, and King proved him, and thousands more, wrong. More than 30,000 fans filled Houston’s Astrodome for the “Battle of the Sexes,” then the largest crowd to ever watch a tennis match.

Balls, a co-production between Stages Repertory Theatre and One Year Lease Theater Company, recreates that match shot for shot, move for move, right down to adjusting glasses or smiling for a photographer. Co-written by Tony Award nominee Bryony Lavery and Stage Edinburgh Award winner Kevin Armento, and co-directed by One Year Lease’s co-artistic directors Ianthe Demos and Nick Flint, Balls launched its world premiere for the month of October at Stages in Houston, Texas, with sets by Kristen Robinson, lighting by Mike Riggs, sound design by Brendan Aanes, and costumes by Kenisha Kelly. From January 16 to February 25, the play will move to 59E59 Theatre in New York for a six-week Off-Broadway run.

 

Despite the production’s title, the tennis match did not include balls. Movement director Natalie Lomonte worked closely with the directors on the tennis choreography, determining that no balls would be used during the Battle of the Sexes. “Instead, a digital Foley operator trigger-fired in time with every ball bounce, swing, ace, fault, and let,” says Joel Burkholder, the production manager at Stages Rep.

Aanes recorded numerous tennis racquet sounds with a cast member, using different racquets, some even vintage-style, and assembled those into sample libraries based on the velocity of the hits. “I created more sets of hits from these processed to sound from different perspectives,” he explains. “Some were close as originally recorded, some with their transients artificially boosted for even more impact, and then some farther and farther away to sit under dialogue, or to exist in more stylized worlds as the play progresses.”

The sounds had to localize close to where the actors were swinging their racquets. “With Stages’ three-quarters thrust environment,” Aanes continues, “audiences are on three sides of the stage, and the sound localization had to be convincing in all of them.” The final result included six front-of-house speakers and four speakers on stage, with each tennis set matrixing differently since the net rotated throughout the show. Aanes also added four Turbosound Pro Sound passive cabinets to better localize sound.

The Foley operator watched the game with a Novation Launchpad controller with a 64-button grid in hand and triggered samples in realtime with the action. Rather than repeat sample sounds, each button pulled a random sample from a group of approximately four to ten that were similar in sound. “With regard to localization,” Aanes adds, “the Launchpad is essentially divided up so that the left and right sides mirror each other and are panned to opposite sides of the stage. This sample bank changes with each of the 28 games, or sometimes multiple times in a game, so as to allow adjustments in the samples used as well as volume and panning changes.” The entire show was done in QLab, with Foley sounds batch armed-disarmed as separate cue lists: Five to ten samples per button with 20-40 buttons for each of the 28 games adds up to thousands of cues for Foley alone.

In addition to recreating the action of the match, the sound design also heavily influenced the story arc. To recreate the environment of the Astrodome in 1973, crowd ambience tracks ebbed and flowed in response to the game, including specific audience response cues, such as cheering when a point was scored. “Ambient sound is tricky here because the audience of the show are themselves the audience of the tennis match,” Aanes explains, “and their ability to emotionally follow the match on stage is the most important thing. The pre-recorded audience reactions must support the real theatre audience in their experience without alienating them by bringing in any sense of artificiality.” Aanes positioned mics in each audience section and piped some of their sound into other sections to bolster the apparent size and reactiveness of the audience in a way that was natural. A TC Reverb 4000 was crucial in shaping the ambience of the stadium.

While the tennis match continues throughout the entire show, there are many scenes outside the game that take place on stage as the match continues around them, and the sound design was integral to informing the audience where to focus their attention. For moments depicting characters’ fantasies, the sound sets changed wildly into something more stylized, almost musical at times, even using samples of chords from songs of the 1970s. “The challenge was to make sure that this transition from natural to stylized was graceful and something that would carry the audience along with it,” says Aanes.

For the sound system, QLab 4 drove a Yamaha LS9-16 digital mixer via Motu 8m and a Motu 16a with 24 outputs for localizing sound. Some cast members were outfitted with Sennheiser ew 300 wireless microphones with Countryman elements, while a Sennheiser ew 300 G3 IEM acted as a prompting monitor for an actor. One Mac Pro generated all the sound, and much of it was triggered by a Novation Launchpad connected over USB. In addition to the Foley operator, show control programmer/operator Tyler Barhorst fired all other sound and lighting cues from the show control Mac Mini via QLab on a midi keypad. The stage manager fired the prompting cues on an x-keys.

“Kate Shelton, our stage manager, is savant-like,” praises Riggs. “She barely gets to look up from her calling script, it’s so full of cues. She learned that tennis match in the same way that a good dance stage manager learns all of the choreography.”

“In total, there were 10,480 sound cues across four different cue lists,” added Burkholder, “all for a 90-minute show!”

Read about the lighting design here, and stay tuned for more on the staging of Balls.