ABSTRACT
Depending on each city’s history and architecture, elements of the performance can range from the most intimate hand gesture isolated in a small corner to a vast hydraulic platform that emerges from a lake, realizing a local legend of a submerged city. Although the theatre indeed became self-sustaining, Di Buduo continues to be an anthropologist by intuition. He travels weeks or months ahead of the rest of the group to conduct careful research, to try to glimpse the invisible city—the contours and associations residents may grow to ignore because they have become accustomed to them through daily repetition. Many of the embedded performances in Invisible Cities draw out historical layers or local myths, although obliquely, using video patterns or site-specific movement pieces that focus attention on spaces typically neglected or experienced in utilitarian ways. Teatro Potlach’s Invisible Cities, like certain Dada and Surrealist artists, implicitly questions the contexts that frame and authorize art.
