Theatre x Sound — by grinalds

I am a musician, playwright, and installation artist passionate about experimental sound and immersive design.

My work explores the intersections of technology, myth, and community ritual/catharsis, often through surrealist dramaturgies and sonic architectures. My interests include magical realism, psychoanalysis, and figuring both the Anthropocene and the Post-human. I thrive in collaboration among choreographers and researchers.

Please find script descriptions, manuscripts, and clips of past productions below.

Soundscapes

Love Languages — Paris 2025

Soundscape explores the “flesh” and parentheses of spoken language through resonant frequencies, morse code, and tonal languages. These resonant frequencies are actually transformed voices, which appear in the soundscape elsewhere sharing memories and reflections. The resonant frequencies emerge when soundwaves reinforce each other, amplifying certain tones until they become pure, vibrating essences of speech. The resulting resonances shape the rhythms and harmonies of the soundscape, creating something saturated with itself and yet estranged; with familiar voices unfurling into the stretched traces of siren-like synths.

Spilling in Curves — Dublin 2024

Soundscape explores the flux between catastrophe and creation, examining the similarity across sounds of the womb, water passing through soil, and black hole x-ray sonifications. Encouraged by the resemblance in these sounds despite such different contexts, I wondered if the voids could be connected, if destructive fluxes like black holes lead into new worlds, with new roots and new wombs. Soundscape made for David Ferreira and Co. choreography.

Work from Home — Dublin 2024

Soundscape made for installation, Work from Home, linked into film Corporate Speak (dir. Gemma Robotham). Uses AI voices, corporate catch phrases, and the ASMR of office work to highlight trends in work from home culture.

The Absconding — Dublin 2024

Soundscape made for play, The Absconding. Seeks to explore sensory experience of mainstream media flows and short form visual content through audio alone, with special attention to news streams and sensational/viral coverage of world events.

Script Descriptions

Icarus and Other Party Tricks takes place in the world of therapeutic culture, where the rhetoric of healing is ubiquitous. Grinalds’ play nods at the stretching repression of trauma, diagrams of avoidant and anxious attachment styles, and the variety of psychoactives in shining armor. She notes that despite familiarity with the therapeutic vocabulary, which seems to offer diagnoses, roadmaps, and solutions, many still struggle with healing. In the new ubiquity of therapeutic culture, audiences encounter the new protagonist: deeply traumatized, aware of said trauma, and yet traumatized nonetheless.
Semi-produced at Princeton University. Explores late bloomers, Kafka, climate change, and familial catharsis. Especially influenced by surrealist eco-political texts and therapeutic culture.
Choreography and soundscape produced at Trinity College Dublin.
What does it mean to climb into the uncanny, to feel safe and held within its embrace? When we do not know or trust ourselves, the uncanny may become a new comfort, (m)othering us. The Absconding seeks to capture the tension between carnal entanglement and self-estrangement, reaching into the third space: a home in the unheimlich.
The swoop from virginity to motherhood is well known; religious and psychoanalytical archetypes outline the lenses with which to interpret stories and scrutinize (or, as Hélène Cixous argues, despise) women. But what follows, when the angst and desire held in the male gaze driving archetypes starts to wane, when for women with wrinkles, there is not a common counterpart to silver fox’s allure, there is not even interest? Without desire complexes to categorize older women, do their stories end?