Lighting & Visuals Design
Planetarium by Clara Diesen
Poetic story about relationships between people and between people and the world.
Idea, text, direction: Clara Diesen
Participants: Clara Diesen, Hanna Åhs and Lou Diesen
AliasTeater
Stockholm, Sweden
November 2021
Project description: How do you explain the strong love that existed - for the universe? How?
We're giving it a try.
Planetarium - a stage performance that can be both living poetry, and a sketch of the world, and a stage performance that asks questions about love in the anthropocene. As celestial bodies, we orbit, we humans, and how do you describe the world as it weathers?
A poet, a child and a dancer in a performance performance; it is a living sculpture - and a reading. Because we are alternately satellites, comets, superheroes - or small grains in the universe. You and I are Uranus' moons, a mother is a universe, a sound still echoes from the Big Bang, and images flicker past of memories of who we were while we were here: and space sees them.
Planetarium is a stage performance that plays with concepts and mixes phenomena such as sci-fi, dance, rituals, and creates a poetic and suggestive encounter between genres.
Work description: All the visual material that was worked on the project was the result of several talks I had with Clara. The idea was that everything that was seen in the scene had an important meaning in the lives of all of us who participated in the project. Each one of us contributed family photos, of places we had been, places where nature was present, thus creating parallel universes united by the poems that Clara wrote.
The lighting design was simple and made a reference to theatrical lighting designs of 50 years ago, where the performance zones on the stage were marked and the theatrical convention was created that they corresponded to different spaces within the presentation. And so it was that there was a special area from where Clara recited the poems while Lou and Hanna developed the performance that illustrated the meaning of the poems.
Trailer Planetarium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TORx2Cq70Qw