Utopia Ltd. Laboratory
Utopia Ltd. Laboratory was a pop-up space and creative laboratory as part of the Cork Midsummer Festival 2015, a public installation that invited audience input. It was the beginning of the development of a new theatre project and we invited Cork city to join our conversations and over ten days map our individual and collective relationships to ideals, Roger Casement, history, failure, the Olympics and our place in the world.
Can we write a collective history with space for everyone’s point of view?
Are heroes necessarily flawed?
Can I change the world?
What would you give your life for?
Over the course of the residency the audiences had the opportunity to engage, collaborate or join the conversation in different ways. On one level Utopia Ltd. was e a research residency with the aim to collect material that can serve as the basis of a play script to be developed for 2016. But also, in what could be described as an open-source process, the audiences were able to actively participate by talking to the artists one on one, creating their own timeline of the 20th century, reimagining the world map, take part in mini-workshops or in a more passive manner by reading and rearranging the research, building sand castles, having tea, watching films, listening to curated talks or joining debates with historians, activists, sociologists, sport people.
Lead Artist Eszter Nemethi
Artistic Collaborator Meadhbh Haiceid
Production Assistants Grainne McCarthy, Rachel West
Developed with support from Cork Midsummer Festival