a possible landscape

An interdisciplinary piece, based on the stage animation of a hand crafted robot and mechanical animals. An imaginary landscape is being created on stage, it reflects a recognized fauna and yet suggests the image of a mythical garden in which life has just begun.

The landscape of “Savanna” is an intensive yet delicate world that brings together two different forces: one can look at it as an image of paradise where life is being created for the first time; on the other hand, it is a scary possibility of an artificial nature, that could only exist in a room, isolated from “real world”, a lost paradise. In this piece, man master nature, creates it, operates it and manipulates it. In return, the landscape and the animals that inhabit it reflect a mirror image of human thought and emotion.

The mechanism of the theatre is the environment of this world: the materials and technical elements that are normally hidden back stage take their place on stage and transform themselves into elements of topography and action. In this theatre of images, the story is told in the space between the image and its creation.

The robotic animals are handcrafted objects, technological yet constructed as very personal sculptures. The clear line that divides nature and civilization is breaking down here, in the attempt to treat the machine as a sensitive creature. Unlike the industrial world, where machines are made for functional use, the only function of these robots is to reflect human emotions and imagination. These are poetic robots. The animals had to go through a training process, in which we created banks of behavior patterns, actions and expressions. On stage, we recall it to express human thought and emotion: curiosity, loneliness, empathy, grief and intimacy