For Festival a/d Werf 2012  the project Ciudades Paralelas / Parallel Cities by curators Stefan Kaegi and Lola Arias was brought to Utrecht, The Netherlands. The project has been one of the most ambitious in the area of international location theater for the last two years. It consists of several sub-projects, such as ‘House‘: Dominic Huber is directing the inhabitants of an apartmentcomplex while onlookers are listening and eavesdropping across the street. 

There are several other public projects which disrupt the everyday by manipulating and creating interactions between strangers, such as ‘Library‘; which involves two participants sitting side by side in a reading room, reading a book. Taking cues from a series of library cards, marginalia and sound from headphones they find themselves burrowing an unlikely path through a pile of books. The piece exposes the strange magic at the heart of the reading experience, allowing aspects of it we think of as deeply internal to lean out into the surrounding space, and to leak from one reader’s sphere into another’s.

For ‘Station‘ Mariano Pensotti turns four authors into ‘literairy securitycamera’s’ as they describe scenes at the station they are residing in. Passers-by can read these on a large screen, thereby playing the part of the onlookers. However roles are shifting: the passers-by can also be turned into extra’s by the authors when they choose to incorporate them in their written comments. View the video of this project executed in Berlin for an impression.

As mentioned earlier: the project Parallel Cities will be presented in The Netherlands at Festival a/d Werf, from May  17th to 26th. More info here.