Francisco Daporta Gonzalez

In my artistic practice I use theatre itself as an inspiration tool to create new analogic mechanism of attention. I’m inspired by how social media, video games and cinema are creating new ways of how we empathise and relate to each other. Through understanding the effect of technology I create performances that question the social encounter that theatre brings and create new ways to experience theatre in the XXI century. I found myself talking and working like this after my four years of studies, SNDO felt the only place in Europe to offer the freedom to discover my personal interests.

The study programme opened the door for me to the profesional field. BlastTheory has invited me to work with them during three months in Brighton; a city in Spain has booked two of my performances in November, Het Veem Theatre has invited me and Esther Arribas to create a house event in January, I got a production programme at Frascati theatre... and a lot to come.

Flat, not apartment

When the audience enters they find the fourth wall replaced by a cinema screen. The stage/dancefloor is hidden behind it, but in the screen it is projected in natural size. The space is as invisible as a ghost and the new fourth wall is the machine to make it visible.

The audience is placed where the camera man was when he shot the “live” performance. And even if it is offered to us on video, the closeness of the screen amplifies this feeling of being there. At the same time, the intimate relation that we develop towards the virtual time of the screen gets disrupted by real sounds that encompass the image. The un-proportional sizes of the bodies sometimes take.

This work augments the expressive range of possibilities for performers and stretches the grammar of the traditional theatre event suggesting the space as a never ending container of spaces, the PVC fourth wall expands the event to not one, but any; acknowledging all that could be perform instead of all what it was perform in the space. Theatre can bring a forest and the sky in. Hence we call it “Augmented Performance” by analogy with the term “Augmented Reality,” which contrasts “Virtual Reality”, because at the end, once the screen falls, the real space feels like a lame copy of what the space that was projected.

Overige projecten

I have been working with a very big variety of concepts: philosophy and sex in "WorkingMaking out", social encounters in "entremes", video games in "The audience is Betatester, social science fiction in "Documentary Theatre perfomance"... but there are three topics present in each piece:

- training the audience to be audience while being so - exercising the presence on the piece;
- using gamification to break conventions and routines in an inviting way;
- exploring technology, as it could be cinema, to inspire different ways to think theatre.