Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
Meanwhile Elsewhere is not an adaptation of Invisible Cities—it is a conversation with it, a response to its poetic inquiry into place, memory, and the act of storytelling. While Calvino’s novel serves as a point of departure, this performance ventures beyond its pages, drawing from lived experiences, contemporary realities, and the deeply personal landscapes we all carry within us.
At its core, Meanwhile Elsewhere is not about cities at all—it is about the people who build them, who dream of them, who leave them behind. The imagined spaces in this performance are not fixed geographies but shifting terrains of longing, exile, love, and loss.
Kublai and Marco are not bound to their historical roles as emperor and explorer. Here, they become something more—two souls locked in an ever-evolving conversation about power and impermanence, about what is seen and what is felt, about how we attempt to make sense of a world always on the verge of slipping away. Their exchanges are filled with miscommunication and revelation, resistance and surrender, the tension between ruling and wandering, knowing and imagining.
Through light, movement, and sound, Meanwhile Elsewhere invites the audience into this dialogue—not just as spectators, but as travelers themselves. It asks: What do we take with us when we go? What do we leave behind? And in the end, are we the ones shaping the cities, or do the cities shape us?
