Stenou Aliki & Triantafyllidis Theoklitos

TEMPEST, A THEATRE FOR THE AEGEAN ARCHIPELAGO

We rely on the belief that the Aegean Sea is a dispersed city to which we offer a communication channel, a cultural bridge, a ship - theater. The sea becomes our site, the waves and the iron our environment. The superstructure, the decks and the holds our alternative spaces. We take the structure of the hull as starting point, we translate it into architectural space and manage to offer to the director a flexible theatrical tool.

Our central design procedure is the removal of all decks and walls from the superstructure which was previously fragmented. Thus, we create a huge void in the ‘body’ of the vessel in which we introduce the theater. We keep only the outer plates of the superstructure and support them with a dense system of metal frames, keeping the rhythm of the ship’s hold frames and extending it to the whole theater. Then we focus on the light and by further perforating the shell we let the light enter dynamically. We now put the public under the starry sky, followed by the escort of the summer chill, the saltiness, the motion of the sea and the metal sounds. And even inside a shell full of memories which are silently revealed by the traces on the walls and the exposed smokestacks.