PROJECT

“Maybe the real drama is actually that there is not enough drama.”

Bruno Latour

Since the beginning of my career I have been putting special attention on the spectators’ active participation in the situation that is proposed. With The Actual Event (working title) I would like to introduce a new level of participation that I’d like to call hyper-participation. In this piece, it is not their action that makes the spectators participate in an event, but their mere presence with each other in a given space.

The Actual Event (working title) is a solo performance. It starts with the expression of a wish I have had for years, to realise a very specific performance, the ultimate performance so to speak. It would be a performance where the spectators would be affected by a sort of hyper-awareness. An awareness for all the uncontrollable, non-human agents that are active while they are together in a space: the dust that was resting in the space for years, the air they’ve taken along while entering the space, the waves of different lengths that fly across it, the meeting of bacteria…

The Actual Event (working title) starts with my question to the audience to imagine this performance with me. In the course of developing the imagined narrative, filling the stage with imaginary objects, human and non-human actors and events, the actual situation is gradually infected by the imagined one. The tension between the imagined event and the actual situation slowly builds up towards an inexplicable awareness in time and space. An almost tangible state of sensibility fills the space, opening the pores of those sharing the space for all that is at stake – here and now.

The performance oscillates between speculative strategies (letting people imagine how things could be) and material awareness (make them aware of what is actually happening in the space) and is part of an ongoing research on how to bring urgent ecological issues at the core of the theatre experience.