Meanwhile Elsewhere exists in the space between reality and dream, between what is remembered and what is lost. It is a performance where cities emerge not from steel and stone but from bodies in motion, shifting light, and voices that echo across time.
The staging itself is fluid—a great scrim separates the audience from the world on stage, turning every image into something glimpsed through mist, through memory, through the veil of time. Smoke swirls, obscuring and revealing, as new cities take shape before dissolving again. Words appear on the scrim before each transformation—single, haunting lines that hint at what is to come:
“I left, but the city followed me.” (Trude)
“Somewhere, the streets are still waiting for me.” (Maurilia)
“Each day, we bury the past and call it progress.” (Leonia)
This is a world where nothing is fixed—every moment is fleeting, every place a threshold between past and future.
Through poetic dialogue and movement, the performance explores both the grand scale of empire and the small, human moments that define us. One of the most poignant of these is the story of a migrant truck driver and a young woman on a long journey—two strangers, divided by language, bound only by the quiet understanding of shared roads. It is in these moments that the piece finds its emotional core—not just in imagined cities, but in the fleeting connections between those who pass through them.
Movement and dance are integral to the storytelling, with performers tracing invisible maps with their bodies, their gestures embodying longing, resistance, and the weight of impermanence. Cities do not stand still—they rise and collapse within steps, within breaths, within the shifting interplay of light and shadow. In some cities, only silhouettes remain, flickering on the scrim like echoes of a forgotten world. Elsewhere, structures are erased and rewritten, their existence felt only in absence.
Sound and music form the undercurrent of the piece—a pulse, a whisper, the distant hum of a city that never fully sleeps. Silence, too, plays a role, creating a sense of vastness, of longing, of absence that cannot be filled.
Meanwhile Elsewhere is not just a performance—it is an experience, an illusion of place, a moment suspended between what was and what could have been. It is a world meant to be seen, felt, and surrendered to—where cities are not only built on stage but within the minds of those who witness them.
