visiting someone else's theatrical space

Last year I was approached by the Swiss company Trickster-p, and asked to design a proposal for the second work within their ongoing trilogy of theatre installation pieces, structured as audio led journeys through theatrical environments - not a form that I have an affinity for, as they well knew - but that in itself made the conversation interesting.

My own intentions - coming very much from a desire to help enable the company's poetic, while also looking for a literal physical intervention for the project - inevitably echoed those that endlessly circle my attempts to locate my own work, regardless of its form or context. I have always found it helpful to approach theatrical space as simply another location. Especially when being asked to build within someone else's.

However immersive a journey through the interior of the work was hoped to be, it seemed very clear to me that a credible interior has to be contained - by both an architecture and an exterior. To say that only an actual container can really have an inside, is clearly as much a truism as a conceptual position - but in my experience, the task usually comes down to the act of choosing and reasserting something self-evident.

If my questions, at their simplest, were about how to context a theatrical journey within a pragmatic structure of undisguised elements - then my answer, in this case, was a directly placed collection of visibly freestanding temporary rooms...

b exterior #1

b exterior #2

The resulting work - called b - opened in Bellinzona, Switzerland, last month. Stills from a selection of the interiors can be found in the archive [ here ].

 

Follow @mike_brookes in twitter, and Mike's personal blog <fragments

 

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Comment by Guy O'Donnell on April 10, 2012 at 8:11

I loved the selection of images on your blog Mike, would've been great to have seen the actual work.

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