Performing arts and immersive technology.
The case of CREW

in collaboration with CCC Strozzina

A meeting with Eric Joris, artistic director of the Belgian collective CREW to present the new project between performing arts and immersive technology Terra Nova.

Terra Nova is part of a European collaboration project on the role of the spectator in contemporary performing arts. First presented at Avignon Festival in 2011 and subsequently in Brussels, Paris, Budapest, Graz and Lille, Terra Nova will also travel to Florence, Rotterdam, Ghent, Zagreb, Hasselt and Prato.

Terra Nova is performance and an immersive adventure that takes us back to R. F. Scott’s fatal expedition to the South Pole, in 1911. Beaten by only a month by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, the English explorer and his team perish dramatically on their way back. Unfolding the steps and thoughts of the commander, Peter Verhelst’s text plunges the audience into the debacle of the expedition. But the adventure does not end there. During the performance, each spectator is immersed in other bewildering realities. His senses are stretched beyond limits, his emotions and concentration challenged. Scott’s solitary disarray is echoed by the immersive and transitional experience of the audience, leaving them, in turn, in doubt. And so, the spectator’s own remarkable voyage unveils a universe of the ‘self’, previously unknown to him: his own interior Terra Nova…

CREW is a company that operates on the border between art and science, between performance art and new technology. Artist Eric Joris develops his live-art projects in close collaboration with a collective of artists and scientists. Electronic and digital media form the basis of a unique artistic way of thinking and the engine for aesthetic experiences and reflection. This results in hybrid performances that question and redefine commonly accepted performative parameters.

Terra Nova will be presented at
Teatro Fabbricone of Prato
within Contemporanea Festival – Teatro Metastasio
Stabile della Toscana, Prato
from 22nd to 25th September 2012

by Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato
Contemporanea Festival, Prato
Fabbrica Europa