set and film design realisation

Mare Nostrum
music by Mauricio Kagel
Theatre Basel, Switzerland
February 2002

team

director and designer: Tim Hopkins
set and film design realiser: Pippa Nissen
costume designer: Tania Spooner
musical director: Jürg Henneberger

description

The whole theatre becomes the set for the staging of the opera. The audience sits both on boxes on the stage, and within the seats of the auditorium. Some seats are ripped out, and others become like waves with the pollution from the sea covering them (including plastic bags and paper). The entrance at the back of the auditorium is the beach, everything below is water. The beach is built out through the auditorium from the back of the theatre to the stage via a long platform. On this the two protagonists face each other and play various percussion instruments. Parts of the auditorium are left exposed, dressed with ropes and lights and appear to be the sea, as well as expressing the ‘real’ theatre backstage.

Against the back wall of the stage, there is a backdrop made out of ‘real’ materials which are patch-worked together like a patchwork landscape. This forms the background to the projected film-work; a series of portholes with graphic images of the sea, and an abstracted language of the moving horizon. Moments in the music - such as the storm or finding a new land - are coordinated between the film and the percussion instruments.

The film is shuttered by a series of templates so that the images remain sharp. These templates are visibly changed in the gallery, and so the projector becomes another percussion instrument.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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