FULL CREDITS

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Produced by Scirocco Dance Theatre Company

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Choreography and Light Design by Irene Fiordilino

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Performance by Sofia Burnay & Irene Fiordilino

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Original music by Peter Nagle

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Performed at:

2021, Runt of the Litter, London, UK

2021, Laban Theatre, Trinity Laban, London, UK

Live screening and exhibition at Allegorical Impulse Online Exhibition https://www.rummancollective.org

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Supported by the Rummãn Collective with the online residency programme ‘Allegorical Impulse’

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Synopsis: 
Invisible cities - inspired by Calvino’s homonym book - is an interdisciplinary performance which blends choreography with live drawing in an immersive experience. The performance unfolds as a journey through some imaginary cities described in Calvino’s book, a tangle of colours, textures, objects and affects which form surreal and dreamlike architectures. Memory and archive coexist in the two performers’ body, the one element of tangible continuity within a journey which leaves only ephemeral traces.

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An overhead projector dominates the performative space, acting as a portal between two realms: the physical and the imaginary, offering an escape door from a post-pandemic reality of confinement and isolation, and yet enhancing a familiar sense of spatiotemporal suspension. Cardboard blackouts with pop-up windows, and old-style, slide-through transitions make of this work a nostalgic jump into old cinematographic experiments, where simple sleights of hand would do the trick in framing the image and smoothly changing scenarios.

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 In the cinematographic outlook of this work, each city is associated one distinct spatial set up of both the physical and the projected space: this performance takes place in two liminal, communicating stages, one contained and yet over-imposed onto the other, a setting for overlapping dimensions which create a twofold realm for action and interaction.

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The choreographic score can be described as a process of continuous mediation between: exploring each invisible city through movement; translating the experience of movement (as both doers and observers) into a tangible archive of live-drawn maps; noticing how this mode of archiving is itself a form of doing performatively; using the archive as a real-time source of inspiration and therefore re-translating the archive into movement; negotiating between kinaesthetic memory and tangible archival residuals; repeating and intertwining cycles of moving, translating/ archiving, remembering and negotiating whilst the journey continues to unfold city after city.

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The live-drawn maps stand for tangible archival residuals of the past, a real-time translation of the present, and a potential guideline to embody and interpret the future. Re-enacting these maps as they are drawn, then, means entangling present, past, and future, as well as provoking a hiatus of agency between the mover and the mapper, who are both influencing and participating in each other’s experience...

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Which unmapped territories lay in the gap between memory and archive?

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Interposing these cycles of reciprocal influence between live-drawing and moving, there is also the manipulation of other materials: not only the cardboard used to mask the projected image with multiple windows and silhouettes, but also holographic sheets, transparent straws, cellophane, sweet wrappers, mini transparent lego bricks, and glass, aiming to expose the richness of multi-textural images inherent in Calvino’s narrative.

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