Greetings from Luxembourg and Western Europe.

Multiplecities is a performance group that cultivates “creative free play”, in public and private settings, fusing mainly music, spoken and written texts, visual arts, including video and graphic art, as well as internet use into stagings of multimedia storytelling.

The central focus is to address audiences, given a theme or topic, with the possibility instead of the imperative of participation; and to achieve this end by managing and improvising a multimodal context that transmits theme-oriented information to as many levels of the human sensorium, given a venue’s possibilities.

The conception of free play tends towards Nachmanovitch’s idea of improvisation and creativity not as the territory of professional artists, scientists, or masters but as the foundation of all human spontaneous interaction. We temper this idea’s certainty of creative play’s “fruition” as “the homecoming to our true selves” with the the open direction of making the fun of its practice available to others.

To this, we add an amputated version of Derrida’s thoughts on the matter; that free play implies the loss of the presence or absence in being, as a tension between “getting lost” and “being here”.We couple these ideas with an orientation that our practices train a more effective, convincing, and eloquent means of expressing ourselves in multiple modes of interaction and life spontaneously.

The above ideas congeal into a poetic whole, with all its contradictions, in the fictional multiverse of Multiplecities. They are concretized in practicing and discussing interesting story exchanges between historical, real-life figures, fictional characters created by us and fictional characters from alternate literary universes, as Proust would perhaps have said. How would a real-life person, fictional character or historical person improvise a story, joke, music, make a video, or respond to a particular question? We discuss and practice these responses, honing them to be more convincing in their expression. Characters we construct or tinker with generally have limited access to  -and comment/perform on themes of- the world today.

Fundamentally however, its about a bunch of people meeting, sharing what interests them and having fun improvising, telling stories in spoken, written, musical or visual forms in various ways. It’s about public and private stagings of these stories and their reflection and discussion.

Multiplecities is the fictional phosphorescent book, luminous laptop, bittersweet song, and free play that frames these stories; be they visual, musical, perfumed, written, spoken, acted, or filmed stories.

More about us here.

“What is clear and concise can’t deal with reality, for to be real is to be surrounded by mystery.” James Joyce

“Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another’s view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which otherwise would remain unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists.”  Marcel Proust