Confessional stories, unuttered truths and personal memories are whispered through headphones in a documentary-style walking tour through Edinburgh created by Asa Wember (Temping 2022 – 2024). Whisper Walk is partly inspired by the Japanese Kaze no Denwa (“wind phone”) and explores how memories are deeply connected to a seemingly ordinary place. Each audience member, equipped with their smartphone and a pair of headphones, is guided through Edinburgh as voices gently whisper stories and personal memories tied to the locations they pass. As participants become trusted confidants, they are invited to contribute their own place-related memory – whispered into a phone placed at the end of the Whisper Walk – to be archived in the ever-growing Whisper Museum.
Dutch Kills Theater Company will also be bringing an immersive sound experience, Channel, to the Fringe this year in collaboration with Wet Hands (Assembly Roxy, Snug, 14.40-15.40). Whisper Walk is part of their AFOOT series, which is a series of theatrical walking tours designed to directly engage the audience member with particular locations where parts of the story, or sometimes whole stories, will be told with the aid of a smartphone and a pair of headphones. This series premiered at the Adelaide Fringe in 2024 and also includes Gaia and Shadows of the Past.
Writer Alexandra Silber said, “Whisperwalk is, I think, a really beautiful and unique storytelling theatrical experience, under the notion that places hold memories. It explores the notion that our memories are tied heavily to place, and sort of revels in the idea that a seemingly ordinary, singular, flat park bench, a tree, a series of steps, a street corner, a churchyard, a pub, a very specific cross-section of longitude and latitude, can contain a multitude of stacked memories belonging to countless people—really holding these stories and memories from every human who ever crosses that location. This is very much the way we receive podcasts nowadays, and certainly builds upon the radio drama tradition, but the individual audience member, as a result of this, will end up in a specific geographical place and will hear a story about the place in which they are standing, and thus serves as a confessional, a confidant, a stranger on the road to whom the speaker of the story can speak more candidly than to a regular person in their everyday lives.”
Alexandra Silber is a Grammy-nominated artist based in New York. Some highlights from her career so far include the Sheffield Crucible's 2007 production of Fiddler on the Roof and its subsequent West End transfer, Carousel (2008), the world premiere of Ken Ludwig's adaptation Murder on the Orient Express, and her Grammy-nominated performance as Maria in West Side Story (2014). Alexandra is also an author with her debut novel After Anatevka published in 2017 and followed by her memoir White Hot Grief Parade in 2018.
Creator and designer Asa Wember is a sound video and technical systems designer for theatre, installation and live events. Asa is a company member of Wolf 359 and an associate of The Assembly and Dutch Kills Theatre Company, with previous Edinburgh Festival Fringe credits including Temping (2022 – 2024), KlaxAlterian Sequester (2021), and The Sister (2016).
Dutch Kills Theater Company is based in New York, developing and producing new work by emerging artists. Founded in 2011, they brought The Sister and Adventure Quest to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2016. This was followed by the critically acclaimed The Providence of Neighbouring Bodies by Jean Ann Douglass in 2018, and Solitary—a powerful look at solitary confinement in the U.S.—by Duane Cooper and Blake Haberman in 2019. In 2021, they staged the immersive UK premiere of KlaxAlterian Sequester on demand, and in 2022 presented Intelligence at Assembly Roxy alongside the critically-acclaimed Temping that ran from 2022 – 2024.
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