Invisible Cities

An intermedia performance inspired by the Invisible Cities of Italo Calvino, a poetic novel that imagines and narrates a series of 55 fantastical cities that perhaps exist only in the mind.

Using the Active Space intermedia performance system, John Crawford created a live video mix that combined live onstage camera feeds and dance footage with architectural renderings of fragments from Calvino’s text, projected on a large transparent scrim stretching across the front of the stage to create an abstract, painterly scenic environment that enveloped the dance.

This project in 2004 became the first iteration of a performative media framework that was later expanded to become Urban Fabric, a series of interactive dance/media works staged in Prague, Paris and Beijing in 2005–06. These works situated performers in a processed landscape of media fragments (images, texts, sounds, movement, memories) sampled from cities real and imaginary. Inspired by Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the Urban Fabric project reflected on the urban experience as an embodiment of collective memory.

Venue