“When people feel that there is enough space without the responsibility, they’re very happy to play. People want to play, but unfortunately, I feel that often there isn’t enough knowledge of how to really engage and bring people to a particular space so that they can play.” Experimental experience creator Silvia Mercurali is an expert at moving audiences into that playful space. Silvia joins us in the voidspace to talk to us about her unique brand of instruction-led theatre, by way of audio adventures, genuine community engagement, and alcoholic clowns
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voidspace:
Welcome to the voidspace, Silvia. Please tell me who you are and what you do in this space.
Silvia Mercurali:
My name is Silvia Mercuriali. I’m an Italian artist living in London since 2000.
I came to London to join Ant Hampton with whom I worked for 10 years making experimental theatre under the name of rotozaza.
Now a day I don’t fully recognize myself in the label of theatre maker…. I find it limiting and not particularly useful to the kind of work I make. I create experiences for the public constantly experimenting with the form.
I like to play with different mediums, whether it’s photography, film, sound, clowning.
I like not to put myself in a box. Rather, I like exploring different boxes. Constantly moving. If I were to choose one box it would be a massive one… a huge box with lots of different tools where I can roll around freely. I guess that is my favourite state to be in when I’m creating: open to possibilities.
voidspace:
A giant box. More like the kind of thing a child would make a fort out of. You say that you started in theatre, but what you make maybe is or maybe isn’t theatre. Can you tell me a bit more about that?
Silvia Mercuriali:
The kind of work i make often doesn’t involve any actors. The Audience, following a set of precise re-recorded instruction become the performer. The kind of work I make is often without performers, or rather the audience become performers. I use a strategy I developed in 2003 with Ant for the show etiquette, called AUTOTEATRO.
Through a series of pre-recorded instructions audience members, sometimes on their own, sometimes as a pair and sometimes as a big group, become part of an event as the main characters. They play the main role in a fictional story, that uses the environment as ‘Film set’ and pre-recorded sound to suggest a reading of their surroundings seen through a poetic lens.
It’s a mix of reality and fiction, where reality and the over-imposed sound world, inform each other to create a fully immersive and intimate experience, which, even though following a set script, becomes different and personal to each audience member, each time it is performed.
As the participant, you discover your role within the story, as you act on the instructions you are given. The instructions that are given to you don’t require you to be an actor. You don’t have to have any skills whatsoever, of any kind. You don’t have to act, you don’t have to invent anything, you don’t have to write anything. The responsibility is fully in the hand of the author. This lack of responsibility creates a sense of great freedom, allowing you to fully immerse yourself in the experience without judging it.
In exchange for your availability, for saying “yes” to the instructions, I promise not only, not ask you to do anything that it’s going to cause distress or discomfort – well, maybe a little bit! – but also and most importantly, to create a story in which you can find yourself directly implicated. It’s a way to look at the outside world, at reality, at public spaces, putting a new kind of lens between your eyes and the world. A lens that lets you see a world that is more poetic, a little bit more filmic in which you sit at the very centre.
voidspace:
You say you do that using audio. I guess normally headphones and things are involved, so it’s a personal experience. It almost sounds like you invented augmented reality, before augmented reality was a thing.
Silvia Mercurali:
I love saying that the first virtual reality show I ever made was in 2003.
It was Pinocchio, a show I created and performed with Gemma Brockis. Pinocchio was a piece for three audience members, which were driven around their city in a car.
Looking through the windshield and windows as if looking at a screen, the participants observed reality as if it was a film, allowing them to change their perspective on familiar landscapes.
We would meet them in car park, in the middle of nowhere. All they had was a card with a phone number, that said “When you’re there, call me”. Soon after calling the mysterious number, the headlights of a car would appear. A vehicle would enter the car park with screeching tyres, doing doughnuts. It would come to an abrupt halt. The car boot would open a body would tumble out.
A woman carrying a tape recorder, playing her own personal music score, would approach the audience and invite them to step into the car. The floor covered in stale popcorn like the floor of a popular cinema, accompanied by the opening titles from an old MGM intro music.
Then the journey would start.
The familiar surroundings of their own city transformed and informed by fake radio playing in the car, which, mixed in with real radio, blurred the distinction of reality and fiction. The sound of a car chase played through extra speakers dotted around the car to create a surround sound system, gave the illusion of speed, fake expert talk-shows on specific themes, reinforced the fiction of the show, and LIVE news brought their story at the very centre of the city’s concern.
Obviously, we never broke the speed limit, nor did we forcefully kidnapped the participants, but it’s amazing how our minds find justifications for the illusion created, if it is reinforced with sound and other sensorial suggestions.
So, I love the idea that we’re talking about virtual or augmented reality even though the worlds I create are not synthetic. They are virtual reality in the original sense of the world: potential, almost real.
My work is about anything that is daily, that is somewhat mundane, that is somewhat invisible now to our eyes, because we’re so used to it. It’s in the details of the mundane that you find poetry, in the everyday, in the people that pass by, in the cat that just crosses a square just as you’re looking at it or the pigeons flying overhead as you point your gaze to the sky.
I mainly use headphones in my work. Participants access my shows through my app Mercurious-NET, National Ear Theatare, or through an mp3 player and headphones. Shows often take place in public spaces, and the headphones give a series of instructions to allow you to interact with the world with a specific point of view. The headphones also deliver sounds that sometimes mimic reality, and
sounds that are more about the fictional world you’re in. What you hear changes how you see everything that’s around you and, like a camera would do in a film, changes the focus.
Since developing the strategy of AUTOTEATRO I have experimented with it thought different form and mediums, from video goggles to a simple piece of paper. From solo experiences to shows for 100 people, creating for intimate spaces like your own bathroom to huge parks.
I’ve worked with video goggles a lot, before any of the standard commercial headsets became available. In 2010 with film maker Simon Wilkinson under the project name of il pixel rosso. We used the goggles that people normally used to fly model aeroplanes. You can put a little camera on a model aeroplane, like a drone, with a transmitter, and this transmitter transmits the image from the aeroplane so that you see it in your video goggles. Obviously, I didn’t do any of that. What I did, I used these goggles to create 360 interactive film. Now a day there are amazing cameras that can reconrd directly in 360 so that is you move your head the world moves with you.
We cheated a little bit.
We created a film shot from first person perspective knowing what the instructions to the audience were going to be. We created the illusion of interactivity.
voidspace:
I love hearing about when people manage to find solutions that don’t technically exist yet. When you find a solution that’s a few years ahead of the technology that was actually the solution. Tell me a little bit more about the concept of automatic theatre.
Silvia Mercurali:
AUTOTEATRO. It’s a theatrical experience that happens automatically, on the pressing of a button. There are no interventions from the outside. Once it starts, it’s just your (the participant’s) experience. It is always different, depending on who is listening. Not because the script changes, which is always the same and pre-recorded, but because the way that you (the participant) do it and everything that what you bring to the show informs the show and how you perceive it. I
voidspace:
Tell me a little bit about where the concept came from.
Silvia Mercurali:
I move to London to form a company with Ant Hampton. Together we pushed the idea of Theatre of Command and response: an unrehearsed performer would follow instructions in front of an audience. We were interested in the tension between what you tell yourself, and how you then manage to do the things you told yourself to do. The schism we all experience daily, between your mind and your body.
We all have a voice in our head that says, “Today I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do that, and I’m going to be seen as this, and I’m going to be perceived as that, and I’m going to wear this, because I want people to think this of me.”
And then, of course, when you go out and actually meet people, all of the brilliant plans that you had made go out of the window, because the world has an impact on the story that you told yourself, which sometimes changes everything.
These three ‘characters’: the voice in your head, the world and your body seem to reflect very easily the world of theatre and its players: the director, the audience and the actor.
The director tells the performer what to do, the performer’s specific skills and personality informs the result, and the gaze of audience influences the way that the performer is performing the action given by the director.
voidspace:
There are all these different feedback loops going on all around the room, in that scenario you’ve just described.
Silvia Mercurali:
Completely. We’ve always been interested in this sort of thing, and also very much in anything that is really live. And by live, I mean that it can always change. It could always be disrupted; it could always allow for something else to come in which you haven’t predicted. By making that space for the unexpected, you create something that becomes more real, more live, because everything becomes part of it, even the accidents, even the things that you hadn’t planned, all of the unknown, the unrehearsed.
I love working in this unpredictable way, where anything is possible withing a precisely choreographed script.
I’m so not interested in a mask. By saying that, I don’t mean that theatre isn’t brilliant. Theatre is brilliant, and there’s great people doing it. But I, personally, am not so interested in a mask. I am interested in people.
I also like to discover people. So, we worked with people who were very much not performers. They were guest performers, as we called them. They would arrive half an hour before the show, without any previous knowledge of what the show was about. And there were a series of pre-recorded or pre-written instructions – sometimes there were performers giving instructions live on stage – and the show would happen following these instructions, just with different people every night.
Talking to the audience after these shows really changed everything for us, because the audience was super interested in this somewhat privileged position that we were in, of being able to see the show done by so many different people.
voidspace:
Do any memories stick out of particular ways people responded in that environment?
Silvia Mercurali:
The audience is always really amazing. People always do pretty much what they were told to do. The kinds of instructions that I write, even though really precise, allow a huge amount of freedom to do the actions however feels more natural, instinctual.
Sometimes people are very cheerful and upbeat, and sometimes they take things very seriously. Suddenly, a show which was quite light the night before, would become quite intense and profound the night after.
You (the participant) can never do anything wrong. Even when you don’t understand an instruction, the result is always what was supposed to be for anyone watching who doesn’t hear the instructions.
One of the first shows that we made using this strategy was Doublethink. It had two people (guest performers different every night) divided by a screen, so they couldn’t see each other. They were told there was someone there, but they didn’t know who, and they couldn’t be sure that there was actually somebody there. It would start off as a very formal exercise. Two people doing exactly the same thing, responding to exactly the same instructions.
And then, we orchestrated an electrical failure. This was part of the fiction, though at the time people thought it was really happening. With no electricity, we couldn’t use the pre-recorded instructions, so the two performers would step on stage and start to whisper the instructions to the guest performers.
Before the ‘electrical failure’ The audience is always very aware of what was happening. In fact, the audience was a little bit ahead of the guest performers, because from the comfort of your seat, you could imagine yourself doing exactly the things the guest performers were doing, without making any mistakes. As a member of the audience, you could spot when somebody did something weird. And, of course, you could see the differences between the two people on stage, and how humanity brings very different things to the performance.
Post ‘electrical failure’ Suddenly there was a shift. We start to give instructions directly in the participants ears. So now the audience doesn’t know what to expect anymore. This allowed us to choreograph what looked like a rebellion, a revolution. It looks like the people in charge have got no grip on the show anymore, and it’s the two guest performers who have taken over.
In a way this is also what happens in Macondo, my AUTOTEATRO show for 100 people. The premise of the show is that the audience is there to watch a piece inspired by 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but the performers have not arrived. Through a glitch in the headphones that the audience is wearing we hear the technicians backstage. The doors are locked, the keys are missing and, in a celebration of failure and community the audience find themselves following the technicians in their headphones to try and recreate as much as they can of the show.
The truth of the situation is constantly doubted and re-assessed.
It is talking to the audience after the show that is so inspiring. When do they feel duped, what impact the realisation of having been lied to has in the way that they relate to the situation.
The performers that are always so happy not to have the responsibility of having to come up with anything, or having to learn lines, that they can just be themselves, but still be on stage, in a show that has a beginning, a development and an end, and in which all, somehow, make sense.
The audience, on the one hand, is sometimes horrified by the idea of telling people what to do without questioning. It often sounds on the surface, like a totalitarian regime. But as soon as an instruction comes their way, they cherish the freedom that the lack of responsibility for their actions allows. Just for a little while and for purely artistic and poetic purposes.
Etiquette, the first AUTOTEATRO show was born from the desire to create something that was a gift that you would share with someone else: that they could be part of a show without having to be an actor, without having to learn lines, without even having to be looked by an audience. A really intimate experience, that allows you to have the feeling of being within a fictional narrative where you are the main character.
voidspace:
Let’s talk about the interplay between the internal and the external. Have you played with that in different ways as your work has developed?
Silvia Mercurali:
Yes, I have. How extreme a story can be, depends very much on how safe you feel as a participant. For example, whenever I used the strategy of AUTOTEATRO with video goggles, because the participants are always in a confined space, in a room with ushers looking after them, I can push the uncomfortable side harder.
In the first show that we did, And The Birds Fell From the Sky in 2010, which was a collaboration with Simon Wilkinson, we could really put the audience in a situation that was not comfortable at all. There is a little echo of Pinocchio in that. The audience members this time, too, were seemingly in a car with people they didn’t know, who spoke a language they didn’t know. They were weird, deranged, completely drunk, disgusting and unpredictable clowns speaking this language that we wrote. And it was quite dangerous in the car. There were dangerous meetings, there was some shooting.
If the experience takes place in public spaces, it is more delicate as I don’t believe in disrupting the reality for the people inhabiting these spaces, but I like to play with the participants’ perception of reality when surrounded by the public.
voidspace:
One of the big conversations that people in these interactive spaces keep coming back to at the moment is that tension between discomfort and care.
Silvia Mercurali:
I am very much interested in pushing people a little bit out of their comfort zone. It depends on what I’m doing, of course, as different shows have different focuses. But for me, it is interesting. Where would you go that the audience might not choose to?
voidspace:
My favourite thing is safe danger. So you feel you can be pushed and you can explore, maybe parts of yourself or your emotions or your responses that you wouldn’t normally get to access, in a safe way. You’re creating that safety, that physical safety, so that you can actually go there emotionally.
Silvia Mercurali:
That’s it for me. It’s all about the relationship between me and the audience. They need to trust me. What I try to do is to slowly create a real trust between the two of us, so that they can follow me, even to slightly weirder places, because they know they can trust me. They’ve felt it, they’ve seen it.
Wondermart is a good example of that.
voidspace:
Tell me a bit more about Wondermart.
Silvia Mercurali:
Wondermart is a tour of a supermarket. You’re wearing headphones, and I’m using the supermarket as my playground. There is a sort of unspoken agreement in a supermarket, whereby if you have the intention to buy, then you are allowed to enter the space.
I wanted to use the supermarket space for reasons that aren’t commercial. I’m not interested in consumerism, other than as a subject of reflection of what is wrong with our society, but I am interested in reclaiming spaces. Spaces that claim to be for you, but in reality, aim at controlling the way you interact with them for their own gain not yours.
I want to reclaim all sorts of environment and use them as potential stage for a more lyrical reading of the world.
voidspace:
The psychology of selling is fascinating. The way things are placed on the shelves, the way they use lighting, the way they use smell. It’s a lot of the techniques that you use, but not for artistic ends.
Silvia Mercurali:
It’s exactly that. So much about the smell of the bread that gets pumped through the space, so you smell it when you enter. Yet the bread is always at the back, on the other side of the shop, so you need to cross the whole shop to reach it. And as you cross the shop, first of all, there is this beautiful nature, right? The fruit and veg, the flowers, the plants, and it feels good and gorgeous and really good for you. But then there’s a bombardment of “Buy me, buy me, buy me, buy me, buy me!”
Now, within that, what I have noticed as a shopper is how much I hated everything and everyone, and I just wanted to get out as quickly as possible.
I decided, as an artist, that I wanted people to stop for a minute and take a breath, and remember that everyone around you is beautiful, that everyone has their amazing story, sometimes sad, sometimes happy, sometimes unbelievable. And you don’t need to know them necessarily, you can just imagine them.
It’s all about observing the people around you, becoming aware both of the techniques that are put in place to make you buy stuff that you don’t need, but also to reclaim the space and the people. The people who are there, at the till working like crazy, and queuing up with all of their million problems, and the kid who is nagging and pulling at their parent’s bag. For me, that is interesting.
Wondermart is about humanity, and I love humanity, even though we are very screwed up. But there is also a little moment in it where I play with discomfort.
I want people to consider the possibility of maybe stealing something. What would it mean what repercussion would it have, what effect even just thinking about it has on the participant?
I get them to stop. They don’t know what is going to happen, they keep just following my instructions. I ask them to identify a small item and pick it up…. you’re looking at it, you’re really exploring it. And then … ‘where would you put it if you were to steal it? Would you put it in your pocket? Would you put it in your bag? Or just walk out with it in your hand?’
I also ask them to become aware of the people around them: the security guards, staff members, other shoppers, the security cameras, and think about the screens and the surveillance team….
That’s something else about these sorts of spaces: Don’t ever think that you’re not seen. You’re constantly monitored, you’re constantly followed. You need to get in, do the thing that they want you to do, and get out quite quickly, ideally, so that more people can come in and do the same again.
The moment at which I suggest the possibility of stealing something happens towards the end of the piece. People have had a good 20 minutes with me beforehand, and they know that they can trust me. But nevertheless, their heart does start beating a little faster and their hands do start getting a little sweaty.
voidspace:
Just thinking about it, I’m feeling that response myself.
Silvia Mercurali:
I love that. And people love that moment. Off course, after that, I say: “Put it back where you found it… actually put everything you have in your trolley back, because you’re not going to buy anything. You’re going to put everything back. Everything. I am not interested in telling you what you should think about our consumer culture, but by doing the experience, you can make your mind up.
You feel the anti-consumerist spirit.
Next time you go into the supermarket, it has changed forever. You know that at the frozen food, there’s people that possibly are trying to find a partner (often at the frozen food, there are people buying dinners for one, and that’s where they meet and exchange numbers). You know that smells lights labels are all designed to make you want to buy more. Suddenly, you know all of these things about the space and it’s never going to be the same.
voidspace:
That’s what I love about interactivity. These messages are baked into the mechanics of the show. I love interactive creators who approach that mindfully and who think about the dynamics that they’re creating, and the message that you come out with about your fellow human beings.
Silvia Mercurali:
I can only agree with you. This is definitely what I am interested in the most, because I really believe in that. You can’t tell people what to think, but you can create an interesting point for conversation, and that is the most interesting thing to do. Nowadays, there is so much polarity. Either you’re this or you’re that. We forget that the most important thing isn’t to get you to believe what I believe, but it is to converse and initiate a dialogue. And actually, we might find that neither was right and that there is something else in between that is so much more interesting than we could ever have thought of.
voidspace:
It’s our shared humanity, isn’t it? I remember doing Swimming Home in the middle of the pandemic. It’s something that you experience alone, literally, in your bath. You’re alone. You’re in your bathtub. But the stories that you were drawing on, and the experiences, were about our shared relationship with water. And it was a beautiful thing to feel that here I am alone in my bathroom, doing something that actually makes me feel connected to the rest of humanity through this shared experience.
Silvia Mercurali:
I really did love working on Swimming Home. In all of the work I do, it’s never necessarily a specific story that I’m telling you. I like to draw directly from the common experiences that we all have, whether it’s going to the supermarket or floating in water or looking at a mirror or drawing on a piece of paper. They’re not stories. They’re little doors you go through to then rediscover a little bit of yourself. The real world and real people are the things that interest me the most. I guess that’s how you create an experience that feels more universal, and that can speak to you. I also love to make work that can be translated in many different languages, and that can travel anywhere. My work needs to speak equally to a Japanese person and to someone in Brazil or South Africa. That is why I am mostly writing about universal human experience.
voidspace:
What does your play testing look like? A key part of the process, it seems in a lot of interactive experiences, is that you make an iteration, you get an audience in. You see how that plays out in reality, you iterate again. How does that work with what you do?
Silvia Mercurali:
First of all, I’ll write the instructions, the key element you need to test, really.
It’s about making sure, first of all, that people understand what they need to do and that it is doable, that the instructions are clear enough, so I would always test the written instruction with somebody who does not know the content of the piece.
For Swimming Home, which i wrote in 2020 when we were all stuck at home I worked with Gemma on testing. “Can you just get into the bath and do this?” …there are some funny pictures of Gemma Brockis in her bath on Skype with me. I got her to be in a bath: “If I tell you to do this, is this interesting? If you do this, what does that inspire you?” So it is literally a matter of testing the instructions with a human being that has no expectation or previous knowledge of the material.
When it came to making Swimming Home resonate with different cultures, I started interviewing people, because I didn’t want it to just be my perception of water. I interviewed lots of people and recorded them, and some of their words have been included in the show and form the fabric of the sound design.
What I wanted to create was a chorus of swimmers that came from everywhere. I didn’t want it to be my personal point of view. I wanted it to be a more general. There’s one person who hates water, and there’s one who loves water. The one who is a really good swimmer, and the one who is rubbish and just splashes about. All of those experiences are all absolutely right, all valid human experiences.
voidspace:
I think this is the kind of area where interactivity really has so much to add to the conversation, to bring together the multiplicity of experiences.
SIlvia Mercurali:
There is a lot of interest and focus on creating work that is not necessarily just for theatre goers, but that speaks to the community. And I think that is brilliant. Absolutely.
Lately I am very much interested in community forcused experiences.
It’s not that much that I’m making work for the community, but that I need the community to create the work with me and then I give back to them to experience.
One of my newest projects Breathe With Me, originally developed for a small village in Sardinia is a route through the village. It’s a sound piece that you listen to following instruction, going to certain places and, it’s interactive. It’s the usual thing that I do that I love, but this time it’s fully responsive to the interviews that I had with the people living there. What I’m bringing in is people’s voices. My voice is barely audible: it’s really just to tell you where to go. Everything else, the narration is narrated by the people, all the sounds came from the environment, the music from the local band and other musicians.
I talked to everyone, and I asked just two very simple questions: “What it is for you to breathe?” and “Where within your village do you breathe better?” What came out was a collective story of the village, told by the people. And it really felt like the breath of that place. That is work that I want to get involved with, for the community. I don’t want to go and tell the community: “Here is this amazing work that I’ve done. Deal with it”. What I want to do is meet the community. I want to meet people, I want to hear what they’ve got to say and to thank them for having given me the time. I will then put them together with some sounds and with a route that then they can listen to. And it’s theirs, it’s not mine,. That is work for the community, for everybody.
voidspace:
I just feel like that the only way you can expand, as an artist, as a person, is just to keep talking to people.
Silvia Mercurali:
Everybody – artists, theatres, the Arts Council and other arts organisations – complains that people don’t go to the theatre. We’re not reaching the audience we want to reach.
Well, probably that’s because we’re not giving them any space to feel represented, to feel cared for. Often theatre can be snobbish. It pretends to be open, but it still wants theatre goers that have a certain kind of education, that have a certain kind of way of expressing their feedback, that can get a literary quote.
I really don’t believe in that at all. If you want to reach an audience that is from a certain community, it is not enough to talk about a particular problem that that community is facing, if you then bring it back into the theatres where the people from the community don’t go.
The real impact comes involving people in the creation, in whatever way each artist chooses to engage and to reach them where they feel heard and comfortable.
voidspace:
Turning back to your work more specifically: What are the challenges that you’re proudest of overcoming?
Silvia Mercurali:
When people feel that there is enough space without the responsibility, they’re very happy to play. People want to play, but unfortunately, I feel that often there isn’t enough knowledge of how to really engage and bring people to a particular space so that they can play. When I say play, I really don’t mean a show that is gamey – I mean, as in, be engaged with something. Take Swimming Home. We were in an incredibly difficult situation, where people didn’t have access to anything. Swimming Home, originally, was going to be for an audience sitting in the viewing area of a real swimming pool, looking down at people swimming. That was my application to the Arts Council. I got a positive response to that application in March 2020, but then everything shut down.
I found, despite it being horrible and tragic, that the constraint that the pandemic brought, made me really grow as an artist. A lot of the focus of Swimming Home became interviews, which now play a pivotal role in the developent of the script and the sound design.
I also had the opportunity to develop an app, called Mercurious-NET, National Ear Theatre, which became the way that I reached my audience. I didn’t have theatres behind me, to begin with. It was me, my producer Giusi di Gesaro and the programmer of the app Michele Panegrossi. We launched it, and it went incerdibly well. The app allowed Swimming Home to be experienced in South Africa, in Brazil, in Mexico, in Denmark, everywhere in the world, without anybody negatively impacting on the environment, or having to risk their life by going out in person, and still feeling connected with each other.
It crested a sense of connection in a very disconnected world. Through the pipes under the floorboards, in the streets around the city. In every bathroom there is someone else staring into their mirror at the same time as you. Their eyes will look differently from yours, but they will be right there… you will all be there, opening and closing the tap, and floating in the water, at the same time.
So, lockdown allowed me to discover a new way to distribute theatre that is completely independent. Of course, there are still a lot of challenges, limited marketing budget and reach, but I think there is something really beautiful about having that work available for people to access through the App anywhere in the world.
It is closer to making a sculpture. The piece is there if you want to visit it, you can visit it anytime you want, at your own pace, in your own town, wherever you want. Another brilliant side effect of the pandemic was that it started me down the road of doing interviews. Now, I don’t start a piece of work until I’ve spoken to people. It’s wonderful, because people do feel that they are part of the creation, that they can really relate to the work without feeling judged or being taught things.
voidspace:
Beautiful. What advice would you give to aspiring creators in your field?
Silvia Mercurali:
Never be scared to making mistakes and throw ideas away. Keep trying, and don’t get stuck in one thing, unless you really love that thing. Even then, you don’t want to get stuck.
Keep digging.
It’s okay to create something and then throw it away. Because the more you create, the more you make mistakes. The more you throw away, the more you’re having to constantly challenge your brain to come up with new ideas.
Not that new is necessarily good in a universal sense.
But when you are trying to develop yourself as an artist, to keep challenging yourself is the most useful thing you can do.
In short: Be flexible. Throw things away.
Find out more about Silvia’s work here
Silvia brings cabaret with a conscience, HUMAN RIGHTS BINGO to Brighton, London and Crawley 16-19 May 2024
The voidspace is proudly presenting Silvia’s EYE at voidspace live (in association with Theatre Deli) in London on 9 June 2024. Join the waiting list for the sell-out festival here