Ness: an audio landscape

*You must first purchase your timed entry to Orford Ness and then add Ness: an audio landscape to your basket. After you have booked, you will receive instructions for how to download the bespoke Ness app to your phone.

Step off the boat at Orford Ness, put on your headphones, and wander through a world of sound.

Ness speaks gull, speaks wave, speaks bracken & lapwing, speaks bullet, ruin, gale, deception.

An immersive performance re-imagining award-winning nature writer Robert Macfarlane’s poem, Ness, for a site-responsive performance in which you follow the five forms of nature – She, He, It, They, As – as they converge to solve a crisis in this forbidden and forgotten place. Across Orford Ness, you will encounter sonic fragments; wisps of sound caught in the landscape via GPS, in more than 150 geo-located zones, weaving an encounter that’s specific to where you walk.

Listen to the rumoured motion of the rumoured bodies on the rumoured shore.

Please note, Orford Ness is only accessible by boat and there is currently no step-free access to the site, so is unsuitable for wheelchair users, and those with limited mobility. However, HighTide is currently creating an ‘off-site’ version of this immersive performance – Ness: displaced, which can be experienced in any landscape, anywhere. Details to be announced – please sign up to hear more. 

Now a protected nature reserve offering temporary refuge to many species of migratory birds, Orford Ness is a former secret military test site in which throughout the cold war, the apparatus for launching and detonating nuclear bombs was tested. 

HighTide associate artist Zoë Svendsen has teamed up with long-term collaborator, sound designer Carolyn Downing (Tony Award 2024 for Life of Pi on Broadway) to sculpt Robert Macfarlane’s words in the unique and uncanny environment of Orford Ness. Created using the principles of climate dramaturgy (see here), this sonic immersive performance entwines itself with the natural world to question human overreach, and to explore the power of nature to respond. 

After you have booked, you will receive instructions via email for how to download the bespoke Ness app to your phone. On arrival you will be provided with a kit bag and specialist headphones for listening, which allow the natural sounds of the site to mingle with the sounds triggered by your movements.

Ness: an audio landscape is a HighTide production in collaboration with the National Trust 

Created and Directed by Zoë Svendsen & Carolyn Downing 

Adapted from the prose poem by Robert Macfarlane & Stanley Donwood

Ness: an audio landscape is supported by the University of Cambridge and was originally commissioned by Metal for Estuary 2021. 

Cast & Creatives