Guest Blog: Kieron Vanstone On SOUNDS AND SORCERY CELEBRATING DISNEY FANTASIA

This year, The Vaults celebrated its fifth birthday. It's a milestone that will culminate in our most ambitious project to date, Sounds and Sorcery Celebrating Disney Fantasia.

Sounds and Sorcery started life after my better half committed us to a year-long membership of the V&A. Like all good year-long memberships, we missed out on a lot of great exhibitions, but luckily caught David Bowie Is.

The exhibition, in collaboration with Sennheiser, used infrared technology to beam the beautiful sounds of Bowie into a pair of headphones you were given at the start of the show. As you moved around the exhibition, the seamless precision of music changing in your ears - depending on where you stood - was staggering.

However, it wasn't until I experienced binaural sound in Complicite's The Encounter that I felt like this could be a new way of delivering immersive theatre like never before.

Theatre-makers are forever looking for ways to give an audience member an individually unique experience: Punchdrunk puts its audiences in masks, Secret Cinema makes sure you're immersed before you even arrive, and shows like Trainspotting Live bring you so close to the action that you're practically submerged.

With binaural sound on headphones, we're able to put you in a 3D world where it can feel like someone is stood right behind you whispering in your ear. That individual experience is the holy grail of immersive theatre.

I set myself a task of combining these two ideas: a show that an audience could freely explore, like an exhibition, but where music would be triggered by your physical presence, incorporating binaural technology to bring those worlds to life through music and sound design.

As with all ideas, for this to come to fruition a number of celestial stars need to be aligned. Around the same time, I was fortunate enough to make contact with Disney; I composed my thoughts and began to piece together an immersive music concert inspired by Disney Fantasia.

It would be an event that would take a seemingly un-stage-able piece of cinematic history as inspiration to create a new multi-sensory way of experiencing classical music. I imagined a show where adults would get goosebumps listening to an iconic piece of music they hadn't heard in decades, alongside children hearing it for the first time, being blown away by a visual feast.

The creative team working on the show fell into place in a way I couldn't have dreamed of. Director Daisy Evans, founder of Silent Opera (opera on headphones), wore out her VHS copy of the original movie after playing it on repeat, inspiring her to focus her creative career on bringing classical music and opera to new audiences.

Disney Fantasia was the first colour movie our Video Designer, Doug Foster, had been to, inspiring him to become an artist developing his own style of abstract animation. And our Sound Designer, David Gregory, expressed such a love for Disney he flung himself at the project.

With so much passion, the team has been tirelessly developing a cross-art experience inspired by their own love of this exceptional movie.

As we prepare to begin previews on 3 July, we've reimagined an exhilarating and absorbing way of going to a concert. The worlds of Disney Fantasia will be seen as never seen before, and hopefully Walt Disney himself would be proud of how we've followed his own guidelines for what Fantasia is: "Not really a concert, not a vaudeville or a revue, but a grand mixture of comedy, fantasy, ballet, drama, impressionism, colour, sound and epic fury."

Sounds and Sorcery Celebrating Disney Fantasia is at The Vaults 3 July to 30 September

Kieron Vanstone is Director of The Vaults and the producer of Sounds and Sorcery

Picture credit: Daniel Denton