Interview – Material of Time, Material of Dreams

by Michelle Rodgers & Nathalie Holman, photographs by Tessa Allinson.

Material of Time, Material of Dreams was performed at the Scenofest Stage on 16th June by students from the Institute del Teatre, Barcelona Spain.

Ivan Oset (22) Isabel Velasco (23) Nadia Balada (26)

The Material of dreams, material of time performance in action.
These students have come to the Prague quadrennial with a performance that they produced at school with their fellow school friends. The brief for their project — set by their teachers, was to make a performance that started with nothing and ended with nothing.

What do you all study at university?
We all study Scenography, we have a few modules in costume, sound and lighting but we specialize in stage design.

The brainstorming was crazy but a lot of fun.

What inspired your performance?
It started like a Dadaist performance, we all had to write down an idea we had inspired by the title (material of dreams, material of time) all these ideas were brainstormed together which created the essence of our performance.

How did you begin the process of collecting your ideas together?
We started it as a joke, by writing a sentence each on a piece of paper; this was then folded over and passed on to the next student. The brainstorming was crazy but a lot of fun. The lecturers wanted us to use lots of materials and to completely transform the stage during the performance; all the things we used were real and were on the stage for a purpose. Everything we used started out as something and then during the performance revealed itself as something else  i.e. the boxes were transformed into pillars.

What was the idea behind the painting that you produced during the performance?
The painting we did during the performance was inspired by the Spanish painting “Las Meninas de Velazquez” by Diego Velazquez. We wanted our performance to be inspired by Spanish culture, from our research this painting was the most inspirational. The themes in the painting also reflect our process in that the painting covers the process of working  just like our performance.