poem without a heroine

The audience were invited by performer Leicy Valenzuela on a journey around the theatre where they encountered different parts of the story in different spaces of the theatre often through radio transmissions to radios in different parts of the building. The video design, created in collaboration with designer Mihaela Dobreva, was used in a few different ways: to create an illusion of a faded painting on a wall, projection mapped to the existing marks on the wall; shadows of passers by projected through the doors of a corridor, creating the illusion of people walking on the other side perhaps in a different time; a participatory silent film screening where the audience are invited to click their fingers to participate in the creation of all things; and a rushed magic lantern presentation by a fictional projectionist who apologetically explains the content of a destroyed film in a series of marker-scribbled glass slides. 

One of my favourite things about the design is the magic lantern moment. Earlier in the piece, the silent film the audience is viewing "gets stuck in the projector" and the image burns right in front of them. They then move on in their journey around the building. When they come back later, and after several other scenes, the wall lights up with the light of a magic lantern.

A magic lantern is an early image projector that used printed or hand-painted glass slides. I did some research into these and found lots of fascinating images of the kinds of tools used to operate them. One of things I found was a long tray that holds a few different glass slides in a line, and the operator can slide this into the projector and move along to the next slide. In the video design I emulated this, as if a real operator is pushing these slides through the magic lantern for the audience to see. I laughed at the idea that there is, up in the projection room, a lone projectionist who is absolutely mortified and embarrassed that the film was destroyed before the very eyes of the audience, and has quickly grabbed the magic lantern, which was just sitting around, and scribbled with a marker on some glass slides the events that happened in the rest of the film. Thinking about my time working in various theatres and cinemas over the years, there is quite often old equipment lying around that hardly ever gets used anymore. I liked the idea that perhaps in the era we were emulating, there is still an old magic lantern lying around from the days when theatres and picture houses would use them for all sorts of things, like advertising, information for audiences etc.

These designs were made together with the fabulous designer Mihaela Dobreva, situated in Iana Boitcova’s beautifully vivid lighting design and Alexandar Hadjiev and Jan Brauer’s gorgeously dense, atmospheric music and sound design, in a cold, dark, snowy Berlin winter in what I’m glad to say was a very special night at the theatre.