Those who stopped by the Lindemann Performing Arts Center last weekend may have heard a cacophony of distorted voices echoing through the building. Those who followed the sound to the Performance Lab would have seen Noah Martinez ’27 bathed in colored light as he debuted his solo performance “Echo Chamber.”
Martinez began writing the 90-minute solo performance as a first-year at Dartmouth. Now a junior at Brown, he aimed to use the exhibition to embrace “storytelling as a means of archive,” Martinez said in an interview with The Herald.
In his performance, Martinez interacted with different objects positioned around the room. In each of ten episodes, he visited a phase or topic that has impacted his life, inviting the audience into his mind.
In one episode, “cobweb,” he tangled himself into a pre-made web of rope to conjure childhood feelings of entrapment. In another, “confessional,” he spoke into an LED light as a heavily distorted, pre-recorded audio responded to him — as if he were speaking to a deity. He asked questions about his place and involvement in religion, and the voice answered acting as the voice of a religious figure.
The final three episodes took a different tone. The clear transitions between composed moments were abandoned in favor of a more chaotic depiction of Martinez’s memories.
“Episodes eight through 10 are like the culmination of the anger and the rage,” Martinez said. In these episodes he broke apart the different exhibits and threw them into a corner, interrogating the need to relive the experiences at all.
Will Holland ’26, the show’s production operator and co-designer, worked closely with Martinez to transform the concept into last weekend’s production.
The two sat down with the script “to try and figure out the intention and the feeling that Noah was trying to convey,” Holland said. To achieve the impactful sensory effects which dominated the performance, Holland spent his time digging through sound libraries, manipulating vocals and testing lighting.
The pair lit the show with two LED lights in the room’s corners, so they could “play with backlighting,” Holland added. The performance made use of pre-recorded audio from voice actors close to Martinez.
Alyse Harrell ’28, a friend of Martinez who contributed audio to the performance, recalled receiving a script from him and recording her lines under a blanket with her phone. “I felt really honored that he would approach me,” she said.
Like the performance’s other voice actors, Harrell’s words represented influences in Martinez’s life or his internal dialogue.
Noah “is a very intentional theater maker,” Tony Fusco ’28, another voice actor and friend of Martinez, said. He added that the way the performance dealt with delicate topics meant “everyone was able to be so vulnerable.”
For Martinez, this was intentional. Initially hesitant about showing the exhibition at Brown, he aimed to “create space and room for people to talk about these things in a way that was appropriate and respectful,” he said.
At the end of “Echo Chamber,” Martinez encouraged the audience to write a note to him about their experience — one of many moments where he involved the audience. This allowed him to touch on what he described as the “voyeuristic watching of privacy,” a concept central to the performance.
“I approached a lot of sensitive subject matter in a way that I think (abstracted) it and made it more interpretive and introspective for an audience,” Martinez said. “I could preserve my own privacy and my own history without also being afraid to share these experiences.”
Millie Barter is a senior staff writer covering RISD.
