STATION HOUSE OPERA: DISSOLVED

A brand new installation for performance

6-22 March 2014

Beaconsfield, 22 Newport St, Vauxhall, London, SE11 6AY

Installation open Wednesday-Saturday 11am-5pm

Performances on Thursday, Friday, Saturday at 7.30pm

Masters of reconstructed reality, Station House Opera have expanded their reach and created a truly international work that gives visitors the chance to (almost) be in two places at once.

Walk into the installation and you find yourself in a unique space, hovering uncannily between two different countries, where things are both tangible and unreal.

Beaconsfield’s stunning London gallery space in a converted Victorian Ragged School and Sophiensæle, former centre of the revolutionary left in Berlin, are merged and overlaid to create a new space that is half there, half not there, caught in a perpetual cross-fade. A door opens wide in one space and slams shut in another.  A wall exists and doesn’t, setting up an invisible barrier. 

This is Station House Opera’s first new production since the city scale site-specific project Dominoes in 2009 and follows earlier intercontinental performances developed as far back as 2004.  Their distinctive engagement with audiences crosses new boundaries with an installation and performance that uses telematics and live video streaming to dissolve creative public spaces in London and Berlin, bringing people from both cities into dynamic connection. People and objects find they are both one thing and another, sometimes dissolving together to make a third, in a disconcerting, arresting and occasionally hilarious meditation on the instability of culture and identity.

Dissolved is presented for three weeks during March. By day the installation is open for visitors in London and Berlin (Wednesday – Saturday, 11am-5pm) to explore the transformed spaces with their international counterparts.  Each evening the installation is brought to life again at 7.30pm when visitors find their place, merging with the audience gathering in Berlin to watch a group of three performers in both locations create a parable for our globalised times - in turns paranoid, humorous, beautiful, and banal.

Dissolved is a collaboration between Station House Opera, Berlin-based artists Florian Feigl and Christopher Hewitt, with Beaconsfield and Sophiensæle, produced by Artsadmin.

Developed through an AHRC Fellowship at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and British Council and by Haupstadtkulturfonds/HKF.