Performance & Design

Pete Brooks / Academic practice / 26 Jan 2011

Contemporary theatre and performance tend to be more about form, while Pete Brooks is more interested in exploring the stories. Once the illusion of the theatre is broken nowadays, in his opinion, this is a way of giving the audience the same involvement that cinema does, but with a narrative on stage.

Furthermore it’s also important for Pete to play with the scenography in order to produce “scenographic methaphors”. As dramaturge, he defines the idea, the content of the piece, that is complemented by the scenography. Playing with different components of scenography (lights, actors,…) changes and creates different stories. Pete Brooks sees digital technology and motion graphics as a tool with great potential to tell stories in a different and engaging way, using visual tricks. So he talks about his later work as a mixture that is part performance, part cinema which tries give the audience an “emotional engaging experience”.

I was quite impressed by his later projects. Mainly by the beautiful composition of plans, photography, colours, interaction between back projections and actors. So I decided to include some pictures of Kellerman, one of his latest projects, with some notes from his comments that I found interesting.

He concluded with the advice: “if you are in an area that is fully occupied you have to find a niche that should be engaging in some way”.