Five crew members – a musician, a visual artist, an actor, and two stage operators – guide you on an imaginary journey on the Danube, the river that crosses Europe from Germany and flows into the Black Sea after traveling 2888 km.
With Danubia - Mirror in the Waters, the performance takes place in a space equipped with special multimedia tools and objects, where the audience interactively contributes to the performance. They guide them on this participatory journey which is written without text, but with sounds, images, bodies in movement, objects, and water.
Each stage of the show is a tableau inspired by Danubian history and culture and the real experience of traveling on the river: Germanic river mythology, Viennese dance, and painting, Danubian music and languages, Balkan border wars, storms and floods, architecture, and memory. The subjects and places, the past and the present cross and intermingle and take the audience on a journey of the discovery of Danubia.
Hosted by Bethlen Téri Színház.
Ramona Poenaru, visual artist, performer and Gaël Chaillat, actor, director, gathered in 2013 in Strasbourg under the name Des châteaux en l'air - Castles in the Air, after a quote from H.D. Thoreau, the company's guiding author.
They propose hybridizations between their practices as shows, installations, participatory devices, performances. They develop projects in theaters, art galleries, public space, schools, gardens, woods and other natural places. They open up areas of exploration towards philosophy, pedagogy, anthropology, science and architecture.
The different proposals are always built with the participation of the public. Two major projects - Cabins and Public Body - were born and continue to develop within the company, each with its own aesthetic vocabulary and issues, through about twenty pieces or variations showed in France, Germany, Romania, Slovakia, Iran, India.