Theatres of Archimagination
Five acts toward a renewed praxis of architecture in the wake of a troubled world

Theatres of Archimagination poster

Sonic Trails is an immersive multimedia polyphony, layering sights, sounds, echoes and rhythms of a city in lockdown. Though seemingly devoid of people, this world is not without pulse. This immersive installation awakens an ambient social imaginary within the persistent sensorium of music and architecture.

Sonic Trails: Lockdown live streams for 101 hours from September 7, 12:00 PM  to September 11, 5:00 PM EDT.

Online conversation with the artists and guests on September 11, 12:00pm EDT (11:00 AM CDT).

LIVESTREAM

ARTISTS COVERSATION

This creative work synthesizes a variety of performing arts, including shadow puppetry and oral storytelling, into an immersive digital animation dramatizing multicultural flood myths. In the spirit of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods, global stories from eight regions meet on a rising Turtle Island, to inspire, instruct and implore mortals to care for one another and preserve Mother Earth.

Bah starts screening September 24, 2021.

Online conversation with the artists and guests on September, 25, 11:00am EDT (10:00 AM CDT).

LIVESTREAM

ARTISTS COVERSATION

Where do the architecture of poetry and the poetry of architecture meet? This event offers a circus of experimental archi-poems and mini-theatre events in response to the Arc and Flood of SunShip questions. Collaboration, chance, collage and other seriously fun surprises will launch a lively exchange among sense-seeking participants and trouble-making sympaticos.

Archi-Poems “Deluge” and “If a Bubble” start screening on October 1, 2021.

Join the circus of archi-poetry and theatre on October 2, 12:00pm EDT (11:00am CDT) [ 6pm Venice ]

LIVESTREAM

ARTISTS COVERSATION

“Eureka! – I found it!” This famous exclamation of Archimedes as he discovered the law of buoyancy in a bathtub captures the joy of embodied knowledge and heuristic experience. How can dramatic arts infuse architectural pedagogy with Eureka potential, while fostering creative collaboration and ethical imagination? This dialogue among architectural educators reflects on recent theatrical experiments and dramatic approaches to design education. 

Live event: Saturday, November 6, 12:00pm EDT.

Coming soon

What if myth were not a lie but a story truer than truth? This powerfully intimate work enacts wonder, desire and denial across cosmic, cultural and artistic  thresholds, with puppets, masked dancers, and digital animation. A specially designed theatre for one heightens the drama of encounter with this elusive deity of doorways.

Encounter Janus live on Saturday, November 13, 2021 – followed by a discussion among the artists and spectators.

Coming soon

What is the arc and ‘archē’ of architectural imagination? To what ends does it bend? From what sources does it spring? Amid what circumstances does it thrive? And how is its vitality sustained amid floods of misfortune and global crises?

In its original Greek, archē (ἀρχή) conveys agencies of beginning and beginning again. It is a generative and regenerative force of the social body, initiating and renewing relationships, changing situations and the course of events. Profoundly dramatic, creative and transformative, this archē-imagination draws on foundational principles and originary narratives to open horizons, probe potentialities, and reveal viable and desirable conditions for life.SONIC TRAILS: LOCKDOWN

To the 2021 Biennale question – How will we live together? – we respond by beginning again, amid social strife, to recover the archē of architecture, collaboratively rehearsing foundational arts, metaphors, stories and practices of worldmaking.

Like architecture, theatre is a thoroughly integrative art and heuristic combinatorium. Engaging various performing arts, Theatres of Archimagination stages interactive experiments in revitalizing architecture’s sonic, poetic, mythic and dramatic agencies.