The Invisible Theatre

This project is intended to raise the underachieving consciousness in everyday life. The consciousness of a person to their surroundings heightens dramatically when there is the existence of an audience. Through experiencing a place just as the performer, the audience discovers details of this place that were not revealed before; even if he/she is passing by every day. Performers’ stories are not so far away from our own stories and emotions, and are not so far away from our own experiences. Set in the Lace Market in Nottingham, the study envisages tunnels of peeps that perform multiple functions:

1. The invisible theatre is a continuation from the Nottingham Contemporary, acting as an important promenade that embraces the passers-by into the experience of performance. Through the language of thresholds originating from door transformations, the tight fit of anticipated threshold, shifting threshold, and delayed threshold together with the notion of peeping create the catalyst for contemporary performance. Framed openings in the building come into play when people walk up to them and “perform”.

2. The invisible theatre inhabits a dance school with two studios, a laboratory of movement and the secret theatre. The transformation begins as dance studios undergo the shift in function; the theatre unfolds itself into the landscape and expands its boundaries from hidden places to the streets. Performances question the ideas of what and where is the stage. The experience starts from concealing and its opposite and all the in-betweens.

3. The open access penetrating the theatre also serves as a circuit in a city with a strong acoustic experience of leaving the outside world behind and entering a building. The involvement pushes the act of observation and questioning. Everyday gestures have high value in movements. The tunnel of peep is layered with dense overlapping. Flexibility in structure allows spaces to flow into and out of each other. The inside and outside are directly spoken to.

The theory of the audience as performers is tested in the context of Nottingham.