Through Invisible Cities
Theater of the Mind

Debuted Center for the Arts Forum
San Francisco, June 14, 1997

Sound-text work on audio CD written by Belén García-Alvarado and music composed by Randall Packer

Through Invisible Cities is a mental journey: a voice talks from a world of inner pictures that were once inspired by our world. It is a trip through nostalgia and the anguish of time lost. A trip for those who travel by foot and on their own. A trip for those who like to stare. For those who struggle to exist. And if we consider the ghosts of our thoughts, the regrets we all discover at some point, it is a trip for all of us.

Through Invisible Cities was born in the wake of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, which I read several times throughout the years. The book is highly poetic, and visual, and imaginative. But as time went by after my first reading, as I struggled to figure out how to turn this book into theater, my own thoughts started wandering off into other landscapes as if cutting loose from me. And so little by little, these cities built themselves in me and asked to be visited.

So the voice speaks. As if dripping off of somebody we cannot see. But does this dripping eventually make a pool? No. Like the passing of time, the cities in this voice dissolve in the dark. We can only recognize them in the echoes that make up our identities. They exist only through sound and have therefore a presence in the flow of time, not in space.

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Through Invisible Cities

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