Cartography – “I find myself caught between the twin impulse of remembrance and erasure”
Directed by Anthony Skuse and Samantha Chester
Devised by ACA Graduating Company 2016
Performed at ACA Sydney in November 2014
Lighting and vision designer: Matthew Osborne
A show that invited the audience to navigate and traverse the terrain of our existence, Cartography looked at ideas of home, understanding and journey, the intimate exchanges and mapping that make us who we are.
3 laptops running Qlab and network linked, provided the vision content and audio for this performance. One machine was the show master, with the other two receiving their cues from this over Ethernet.
Vision content was custom made this included intersecting lines, star constellations, hand drawn coordinates and compass dials.
Most of this was bold white shapes transparencies so to avoid any obvious projection edges.
The coordinates which appeared as if they were being drawn in chalk across the whole space, were hand draw by the cast on the iPad, edited together and projected across all the surfaces.
A black scrim was utilised along with the cyclorama as a projection surfaces, hanging light globes behind the scrim were used to create the effect of cast appearing and disappearing.
A central chandelier piece was created using 16 vintage style hanging globes, around the octagonal shaped centre bars. These were distributed across 4 dimmers to create fade effects.
The performance evoked very powerful and atmospheric dimensions on stage which the cast could move in between. This resulted in an audience experience that created a strong sense of reflection and wonder which proved a provocative landscape for the rich and poetic dialogue to live inside of.
What is it to belong? What are the coordinates that we call home and how do we map our lives? Is it by the stars, love or remembrance that we anchor
ourselves to this world?
As we navigate and traverse the terrain of our existence, Cartography looks at ideas of home, understanding and journey; the intimate exchanges and mapping
that make us who we are.
So come on, get your coat, get your bag, you wont need shoes where we are going.
Technical:
- Lighting and Vision design by Matt Osborne
- 4 projectors
- 3 Qlab systems
- 21 individual bulbs