The
         Unknown
      Ocean

             by Cristoforo Colombo



Performance  for puppets and actors.

Technical Requirements

Images
Work in progress

In Barcelona the Spanish queen Isabelle prepares to receive the news from In Colombus’ own lips and to hear the story of great adventure; and as she waits she brings back before her eyes – for what is memory if not this ?

Columbus ‘ words which, a year earlier, had summoned up for her a fantastic new world.

This is the genesis of the show. An unknown world seen through the eyes and sensibilities of the queen of Castille.

Her voice – nearly always off stage – bodies forth mysterious and grotesque images that owe much to the enormous influence that the Flemish painting of the period had on Spanish art.

And thus the show’s aesthetic - puppets, costumes, sets and colours - faithfully evokes the work of Hieronymus Bosch : a hallucinatory dance accompanied by an original score of music, voices and sounds created by the composer and musician Daniele Guidazzi.

The four actors share the stage with the puppets in a constant interchange of leading roles.

Against an horizon that lifts and vanishes into a swathe of ligtht filled hues, the stage is split into three platforms which, in the first part of the play, form the Spanish court, accomodating Isabelle, Columbus and the commission of " wise men ". In the second part of the play these three ramps become the caravels crewed by multicoloured galley slaves – the Old World reduced to a babble of agitated, incomprehensible Spanis voices lost in an unknow ocean.

The journey through Isabelle’s imagination ends with the ship of the crazed, when the shores of the New World have been reached and all eyes are turned towards a new and alien humanity.