Swimming Home – online
Kristy Stott, Theatre Editor
With the doors of theatres and leisure centres firmly shut for now – here’s a show that brings performance and swimming to audiences at home. Grab your swimming costume, a pair of goggles and your headphones for Silva Mercuriali’s new show Swimming Home. Running at 35 minutes long, you can perform the piece in your bathroom, following the simple audio instructions.
Perform the piece in your bathroom, following the simple audio instructions.
Silvia Mercuriali is considered an innovator of Autoteatro – an instruction-based form of theatre that blurs boundaries between audiences and performers, leading the audience to perform the piece themselves. Her latest show, Swimming Home, brings a fully immersive experience into people’s homes, transforming their bathrooms into an engaging water-world.
Using a combination of instructions, binaural sound, underwater recordings, film extracts and interviews with swimmers, the audience are transported in and out of the pool, and on a journey to rediscover their relationship with water.
Grab your swimming costume, a pair of goggles and your headphones…
The performance juxtaposes the ordinary and familiar bathroom environment with a fictional world to playfully disrupt the audience’s perceptions of time and space, as well as placing the participant at the centre of the action.
Silvia Mercuriali is an internationally acclaimed theatre-maker and artist. Best known as one of the pioneers of Autoteatro, her work has been presented in cultural institutions around the world including: Tate, The Barbican, the Alexandrinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg and the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. One of her most recent shows, Macondo, featured in the Hush Hush event at The Lowry in 2018. A grand Autoteatro performance, the event took place on The Lowry’s traditional stage, without any actors and only the audience to create the performance.
