Mercurious NET app
SWIMMING HOME
Are you ready to dive in? 35 minutes immersive experience in your bathroom
★★★★ The Stage Swimming Home plays with the liminal, with the gap between imagination and reality, and urges you to let go and float away. It pays off: when you are finally allowed to submerge and dip your head under the water, it is oddly exhilarating. Swimming Home is an immersive theatre experience for an audience of one that takes place in their own bathroom, developed through interviews with swimmers from all over the UK and delivered directly into people's home through a phone App. Are you ready to dive in? Swimming Home, Silvia Mercuriali's latest Autoteatro show, brings a fully immersive theatre experience into people's homes, transforming their bathroom into a filmic water-world. Standing in their bathroom, wearing a swimming costume, goggles and some headphones, the audience is led through a journey of rediscovery of their relationship with water as they prepare to enter their bath (or shower). A sonic reality matches the participants' actions as they are instructed to move around their bathroom, inviting them to watch their surroundings through a new poetic lens, allowing the bathroom to take on new guises. Sometimes anti-chamber of a municipal pool, other times an outdoor pool in the hills of Hollywood, the familiar shifts constantly through sound. The show mixes together instructions, binaural and underwater recordings, film extracts and interviews with swimmers to transport the audience, in and out of the pool, superimposing imagined realities onto that which they watch. LANGUAGES: English, French, Italian Download the app MERCURIOUS NET - National Ear Theatre, to access the show directly from your phone.
Audience Role
Wearing a swimsuit, swimming goggle and a towel, the audience members perform the piece themselves. Participants are given instruction via audio.
Ages: 13 +
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3
Events
6
Years on EI
About Silvia Mercuriali
Silvia Mercuriali has been working in theatre since 1998, creating events, site-specific installation, experimental theatre shows and immersive performances. Since 2007 she has been focusing on developing the strategy of Autoteatro which she pioneered with Ant Hampton for the show Etiquette. This strategy explores a new kind of performance whereby audience members perform the piece themselves, usually for each other. Participants are given instruction via audio, visual cues or text for what to do or say. By simply following these instructions an event begins to unfold. Audience members relinquish the responsibility for their action abandoning themselves to pre-recorded instructions. The roles which identify the experience of going to the theatre are subverted. The actor doesn't know more then the audience anymore; the distinction between audience and performer is totally obliterated and the fourth wall disappears as the world of the fictional experience and the real experience coexist in the same space. Silvia has experimented with this new strategy applying it, stretching it and moulding it to different technologies and in different contexts constantly inviting audiences to question what is real and what is not. In September 2020 with Giusi Di Gesaro and Michele Panegrossi Silvia Mercuriali launched the app Mercurious NET - National Ear Theatre: a sound-based interactive theatre App turning the everyday world into a stage. Directly from your own phone wherever you are, you have access to Silvia Mercuriali unique Autoteatro shows. Whether set in a public space or from the comfort of your own home, your surroundings become the backdrop of a fantastical parallel reality transforming the everyday into a new poetic world.