Somewhere – For your Eyes and Ears

As the last part of my thesis exploration, I created an installation based on the play Somewhere written by Marisela Trevino Orta. It is about the end of the world, how people are facing the lack of resources, and how they deal with their dreams and pursuits in life while the world is ending. Magical Realism is incorporated in this play where the protagonist Cassandra is looking for this group of hundreds of butterflies that are migrating, expressing the dreams and hope that later metamorphosed into acceptance or something else, by Cassandra herself turning into butterflies flying away. War, endings, and hope have been a very big theme on earth this year (these few years), and I really hope to create a theatrical experience that provokes some thoughts and resonance. It is an immersive walk-through experience in a room that is sized about 15 by 20 feet.

It is very important to note that studying visual and sound gestures working together is one of the main goals in this exploration, while storytelling is the end goal of the experience. Therefore, I considered different ways of making motion visually that work with sounds, which would potentially also serve the storytelling. This is different from how I approach designing for more traditional theater pieces, where actors are mostly the movers in the scenes. The association that an audience makes between a visual movement, a visual texture, and a space in an audio experience, is the focus of this experiment.

Credits:

Aditi Kabra, Sagar Bharadwaj- Engineers

This project was made possible with support from FRFF Grant #2024-047.