Interview: Sophie Yuqing Nie on Shaping the Sonic World of SPACEBRIDGE

Written by Tom White

Sound designer and audio engineer Sophie Yuqing Nie has been building bold sonic worlds across the downtown stage, and helped shape SpaceBridge, Irina Kruzhilina’s multimedia documentary work featuring Russian refugee youth and their American peers. After its New York premiere at La MaMa as part of Under the Radar, the production went on to a Boston engagement at ArtsEmerson. BroadwayWorld spoke with Nie, one of the show’s sound designers, about crafting tasteful cues for documentary theatre, designing with young performers, and how sound helps audiences listen more closely.

SpaceBridge reached major visibility and later toured after its NYC run. What do you think audiences and critics responded to most strongly?

People responded to how urgent the piece feels, and how genuine it is. It deals with displacement, war, immigration, rebuilding a life, but it never turns into a lecture. The center of the work is the children and young teens, and their directness creates an immediacy you can’t manufacture. Audiences lean in because it feels like listening to real lives.

At the same time, it’s very carefully made. Text, movement, video, and sound work in a precise theatrical language that guides the audience through emotional shifts without pushing them. That combination of sincerity and strong design is what makes it so moving, and it gives people a way to hold difficult truths in the room together.

When a work is socially and politically urgent, what can sound do that words alone can’t, especially in helping an audience feel responsibility, empathy, or closeness?

Sound can carry emotion before it becomes language. Sometimes you feel something deeply, but you don’t have words for it yet, and music can reach that place immediately, without asking the audience to “agree” first. In SpaceBridge, there’s a snow scene where the children walk on with illuminated suitcases and no one speaks. We used a variation of a Russian folk song under it, alongside projection and voiceover about what “home” means when you close your eyes. It’s simple, but it brought tears, not because the audience shared those exact memories, but because the aural environment let them feel the longing directly. 

Sound can also bridge distance in cross-cultural work. When performers speak in Russian and the audience relies on translation, you can understand and still feel slightly separated. Music helps keep everyone inside the same emotional moment. The story is being spoken in the performers’ mother tongue for a reason, and it isn’t being pushed away by “foreignness”. Sound invites the audience to connect through feeling in real time.

 A review praised the sound for “tasteful sound cues and voiceovers.” What does “tasteful” mean to you in a documentary piece like this?

For me, “tasteful” is restraint with purpose. Documentary work doesn’t need sound to tell the audience what to feel. The cues should hold space, supporting clarity, pacing, and attention, without turning testimony into spectacle.

Practically, that means being very intentional about when sound should lead, like for atmosphere, transitions, or create a shared emotional container, while also being willing to stay minimal so the voices and the room can breathe. If the sound feels like part of the world, and it helps people listen more closely, then it’s doing its job.

How do you decide when music should lead emotion versus when silence, or minimal texture, protects the truth of testimony?

I think of music and silence as two different kinds of leadership. Music can lead when a scene needs a shared inner language, when words aren’t enough, or when the stage needs an energetic shift or a container that helps the audience stay with something difficult. It can guide pacing and help people feel subtext without forcing it.

Silence, or near-silence, is just as intentional. If a moment already carries its own truth, music can dilute it. I ask whether sound clarifies and supports, or competes. There’s a scene where Samantha reads unwelcoming tweets on the projection while the performers move chairs, and each chair hits the floor with a heavy impact. We kept it raw: the voice, the text, and the physical sound. Any added music would have explained the feeling instead of letting the audience encounter it.

Most of the performers are children and young teens. How is designing with children, especially those with refugee backgrounds and uneven English fluency, different from designing for trained adults?

With children, sound isn’t only framing the story. It becomes part of what makes the performance possible. Many of the performers were around 9 to 14, with little formal theatre training, but they were incredibly intuitive and responsive to sound. Small shifts in texture or timing can change how they speak and move in the moment.

Trained adults can often maintain a consistent performance container even if the environment changes. With kids, the environment is part of that container. So sound became emotional infrastructure: guiding pacing, building safety, and offering a shared language when words, or English fluency, weren’t stable.

Can you share a moment when sonic decisions changed the kids’ energy, pacing, or emotional clarity onstage?

One moment is the shelter section: four children sharing one bed, followed by a shadow-puppetry sequence where a child imagines exploring the galaxy while still inside that room. My instinct was to build a soundscape in contrast to the limited physical reality, an expansive, ethereal musical atmosphere under his voiceover, so the audience could travel with him into imagination. That openness in sound gave the moment emotional lift.

Later, we gather the young performers in a choreographed game right after heavier material about shelter life and homesickness. The goal was a genuine shift in energy. Choosing an energetic Strauss polka was essential: the instant the music arrived, it sparked real delight and playfulness in the kids and turned the stage into a playground.