Details

A performance installation. Walk into Station House Opera's new production and you find yourself in a unique space, hovering uncannily between two different countries, where things are both tangible and unreal. Masters of reconstructed reality, Station House Opera have expanded their reach and created a piece that is truly international, giving us the chance to (almost) be in two places at once. This is Station House Opera's first new work since the city scale site-specific project Dominoes in 2009 and follows earlier intercontinental performances developed as far back as 2004. Their distinctive engagement with audiences crosses new boundaries with an installation and performance that uses live video streaming to dissolve creative public spaces in London and Berlin, bringing people from both cities into dynamic connection. Beaconsfield's stunning London gallery space in a converted Victorian Ragged School and Sophiens?le, former centre of the revolutionary left in Berlin, are merged and overlaid to create a new space that is half there, half not there, caught in a perpetual cross-fade. A door opens wide in one space and slams shut in another. A wall exists and doesn't, putting up an invisible barrier. People and objects find they are both one thing and another, sometimes dissolving together to make a third, in a disconcerting, arresting and occasionally hilarious meditation on the instability of culture and identity. Each evening the installation morphs into a performance as the visitors find their place - merging with the audience gathering in Berlin - and watch a parable for our globalised times emerge, in turns paranoid, buffoonish, beautiful, humorous and banal. Dissolved is presented for three weeks during March, with nine evenings of performances, where the installation is brought to life by a group of three performers in both locations, who merge and occupy each other, in an ambiguous doubled space. By day the installation is open to visitors in London and Berlin, Wednesday - Saturday, 11-5pm, who can explore the transformed spaces and find themselves merging with their international counterparts. Dissolved is a collaboration between Station House Opera, Berlin-based artists Florian Feigl and Christopher Hewitt, with Beaconsfield and Sophiens?le, produced by Artsadmin.

Creatives/Company

Company: Station House Opera