Ciudades Paralelas

Ciudades Paralelas was an international theatre production curated by Lola Arias and Stefan Kaegi that invited a group of internationally acclaimed artists to create unique projects in libraries, hotel rooms, shopping centres and other unusual locations. Staging eight shows in eight separate spaces across the city, each project provided audiences with a new perspective of its site, and Cork city as a whole. This 2012 performance was an Irish premiere.

Concept

Ciudades Paralelas offers eight perspectives on one city. It doesn’t transport stage sets or companies of actors but ideas. In different cities all over the world, the projects are recontextualized and staged with performers from these city. The projects make theatre out of public spaces used every day, and seduce you into staying long enough for your perception to change. They invite you to personally experience places built for anonymous crowds. Each of the Ciudades Paralelas works is a unique and intimite theatrical event in itself, but the real way to engage with them is by experiencing them all — build your own tour of the city and see it in a whole new light.

Featured Artists, locations and peformances

Gerardo Naumann (Buenos Aires)
Factory
La Fábrica

For La Fábrica, we travel to the fringes of the city, to look at a factory that might be a stage set. Like a product going from one person to the next, we travel along the assembly line, and get a glimpse into the minds of different workers during working hours. Do they see and hear the same things every day? Are their thoughts also identical, day in, day out? What is the factory of today, and what does it represent?

Christian Garcia (Lausanne/Berlin)
Court
In the Name of the People

For In The Name Of The People, we encounter a choir in the imposing entrance hall of the court house, who move through the space and sing an a capella rendition of a Renaissance liturgy as well as texts from judgements laid down in this building. It brings a spiritual tradition of choral singing into a secular institution, where the law is reinterpreted every day, and where hundreds of defendants, lawyers, prosecutors, judges and visitors hurry to their appointments.

Ligna (Hamburg/Berlin)
Shopping Centre
The First International of Shopping Malls

Ligna have spent the last ten years creating radio-ballets: interactive radio-plays where the audience listen through headphones and are given a series of instructions on how to behave in public space. The First International of Shopping Malls creates one of these theatrical expeditions for a shopping mall, inviting us to look at it as a form of parallel city.

Dominic Huber/blendwerk (Zurich)
House
Prime Time

In Prime Time, we visit an apartment block. Standing outside and wearing headphones, we watch what happens on several floors of the building: as well as listen in. Like detectives investigating a crime never committed, we can spy on the residents and hear their conversations.

Ant Hampton (London) & Tim Etchells (Sheffield)
Library
The Quiet Volume

The Quiet Volume exploits the combination of silence and concentration common to any library worldwide within which different peoples’ experiences of reading unfold. It exposes the strange magic at the heart of the library, allowing aspects of it we think of as deeply internal to reach out, leaking from one reader’s space into another’s.

Lola Arias (Buenos Aires)
Hotel
Chamber Maids

In this piece, you adopt the role of a chambermaid responsible for five rooms per hour. Instead of cleaning, you will discover portraits of the cleaning staff: films, original voice recordings and photographs that shed light on the ‘invisible’ beings who clean up after others. Who are these people who go into your room when you’re not there?

Mariano Pensotti (Buenos Aires)
Station
Sometimes I Think I Can See You

A train station. Three authors observe the space from various perspectives. Typing into their laptops, they write, live, about what they see in the railway station and other things, too: private observations, things they make up, or historical information. Every word they type is projected onto a large screen, a separate one for each author.

Stefan Kaegi (Berlin)
Rooftop
Review

On the rooftop of the city hall, this place of representation and political decisions, will you see the city through new eyes after a blind musician shares his life and experiences? Will you be able to remember it from his point of view?

Headline event sponsor: BAM Construction. Supported by the Arts Council, Cork City Council, the British Council, UUC Library, Goethe Institut, Swiss Arts Council, Maldron Hotel, Iarnród Éireann & Bus Éireann.

Ciudades Paralelas is a coproduction between HAU Berlin and Schauspielhaus Zürich, in collaboration with Goethe-Institute Warschau, Teatr Nowy and the foundation of Teatr Nowy. Commissioned by Kulturstiftung des Bundes, the Swiss Cultural foundation Pro Helvetia and Goethe Institut Buenos Aires.