The project draws inspiration from Italo Calvino’s book “The Invisible Cities” to create an interdisciplinary performance of music and theatre that aims to take the audience on a journey through hidden threads of cities we live in and forgotten spaces that live inside us.

The performance is built around musical scenes. Three musicians will create a “musical architecture”, translating essence of cities into music. An adventurous Marco Polo, in a metaphorical dialogue with the musicians, will guide the audience through the message of these cities.

The novel "The Invisible Cities" is an imaginary account that the famous Venetian traveler Marco Polo makes to the emperor of the Tartars, Kublai Kahn, about the cities spread over the immense territory of his Empire. At the boundary between reality and imagination, these accounts become a representation of life experiences, human emotions, desires, fears memories and relationships hidden under the appearance of cities.

In the dialogue with emperor Kublai Kahn, Marco Polo uses often a chessboard, symbols and gestures to describe the cities that he visited. We also aim to create a metaphoric dialogue between musical and theatrical signs and languages, exploring the intersections between the two performing arts.

Join the famous Venetian explorer in an audacious journey through musical lines and thin sculptures discovering hidden signs, desires, feelings and memories of the cities we live in and the cities that live within us.

19th December 2019 - 19.30
Glasgow, Centre for Contemporary Arts
Book tickets

Past Performances
5th April 2019, 7pm
Galleries of the Fausto Melotti Exhibition Estorick Collection of Italian Modern Art, London.

December 2016
An earlier version of the project had its first performance at "Das kurze festival" in Zurich in . The performers included Georgia Knower (singer), Lucas Jordan (flutist, composer and project director) and Elena Cappelletti (cellist, choreographer and project director).