Des Châteaux en l’air: Danubia – Mirror in the Waters + discussion and screening

Friday / 19.00 / immersive performance

Multimedia immersive experience to wet your feet in!

In 2013, visual and performance artist Ramona Poenaru, and actor and director Gaël Chaillat create the company Les Châteaux en l’air in order to develop hybrid projects involving multiple art forms such as theatrical performances, immersive displays and art installations. They have set up an exploratory research that experiments with philosophy, learning, anthropology, science, poetry and architecture. Their various artistic proposals always involve the participation of the public in part of the creative process.
From May to August 2021, visual and performance artist Ramona Poenaru and actor and director Gaël
Chaillat go with the Amorados boat to discover Danube, the river that crosses Europe from Germany and flows into the Black Sea after a travel of 2888 km.
During their geopoetic journey, they are attentive to light, colours, sounds, immaterial perceptions and
emotions. They observe the relationships between living organisms, geological forces, climatic elements and the passage of time.

They dialogue with the inhabitants of the river : historians, geographers, naturalists, architects, artists,
boatmen, fishermen, workers. They collect the «stories» of this particular country called Danubia.
On their return, they create the show Danubia – Mirror in the Waters.
With Danubia – Mirror of the Waters the public experiences an imaginary journey on the Danube from its source to its mouth. The spectators evolve through an interactive multimedia device where their participation is necessary for the performance to take place.
Five crew members – a musician, a visual artist, an actor and two stage operators – guide them on this
participatory journey which is written without text, but with sounds, images, bodies in movement, objects and water.
Each stage of the show is a picture frame inspired by Danubian history and culture and the real experience of the travelling: Germanic river mythology, Viennese dance and painting, Danubian music and languages, Balkan border wars, storms and floods, human constructions, traces and memory. The subjects and places, the landmarks of the past and the present cross, intermingle and take the public on a discovery journey to Danubia.

Supported by i-Portunus. The i-Portunus Houses pilot scheme is implemented, on behalf of the European Commission, by a consortium of organisations that have been pioneers of European cultural mobility programmes themselves. Coordinated by the European Cultural Foundation (Amsterdam), the i-Portunus Houses consortium involves MitOst (Berlin) as main mobility implementer and the Kultura Nova Foundation (Zagreb) as lead in evaluation and analysis.

Partners: Slovak Arts Council, Nadácia mesta Bratislavy, French Institut in Bratislava.