...not for the rich or the chosen but for the entirety of humankind!
The Shape of Things to Come season continues this week with THIS MUSEUM IS A SPACESHIP, in which a nameless curator offers an energetic, unnerving introduction to the dusty artefacts of an almost-forgotten museum.
A box of tapes is found, a basic projector… antiquated pieces speaking of unbelievable technologies. Part lecture, part audiobook, part excursion into leaps of collective imagination, this performance sets the ideas of the 19th century Russian avant-garde against the context of our current global and personal anxieties. Whilst the current crop of billionaire ‘futurists’, the Silicon Valley tech-bros, speak in terms of profit and interplanetary imperialism, The Russian Cosmists spoke of immortality, resurrection for all, complete freedom of travel in universal space! The final exhibit? The museum itself, as our curator attempts to harness an excess of solar energy to set us free to explore more radical orbits throughout the universe.
The piece is created and performed by CHRISTOPHER ELSON, a Welsh actor who trained at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama. He has worked in theatre, television and film. He has previously studied the natural sciences and is currently spending his time reading eccentric Russians.
THIS MUSEUM IS A SPACESHIP is the third performance in The Shape of Things to Come 2024, a programme of brand new original short performances commissioned by Volcano from freelance theatre makers and performers in Wales and beyond. All of the performances are about 30 minutes long.
The shows in this series are all very different. What connects these diverse works is that they all look towards the future – imagining new possibilities and exploring other ways of being. Next week LUKE HEREFORD performs Perfect Places, a theatrical poem about the search for queer belonging in queer spaces.