Commissioned by the Goethe-Institut and presented at the Shanghai World Expo 2010, City explores scenography as a spatial and relational practice. Space, bodies, light, moving images, spectators and technical apparatus all become materials of performance.

The audience is positioned around the edges of the environment, facing different directions and occupying places that might usually remain unnoticed. Each position produces a different experience: where you are determines what you see. Space therefore becomes part of the dramaturgy, shaping perception through proximity, obstruction, light and movement.
 

The work also asks how the human body exists within an environment composed of architecture, images, technologies and other material presences. The body is gradually displaced from the centre and absorbed into a larger spatial ecology. City reflects the metropolitan Shanghai: within an increasingly spectacular and technologically mediated city, the individual body can become profoundly solitary.
 

Credits: Producted by Goethe-Institut, Scenography by Jing Wang Thomas.