Invisible Cities is one of the 2019 Brisbane Festival’s most anticipated works: a big, bold, ambitious undertaking of risky creativity.

Invisible Cities. Photo © Justin Nicholas

The exclusive five-night season presents precisely the type of production festivals exist for and which wouldn’t be possible outside the festival ambit. Premiering at Manchester International Festival in July, its scale and audacity recruited a team of conceptual and cutting-edge multimedia artists enlisting the gamut of theatrical tools, including projection-mapping video design, natural elements, adaptive set pieces and transformative props supporting two actors and 21 dancers. It aims to frame a nexus of humanity between performers and technology, in taking audiences on a contemplative philosophical journey through fantastical metaphoric worlds.

The name is a clue as to why this project is such a challenge, but more specifically it is the task of translating a novel of ideas founded firmly in the imagination into a live physical form for an audience. Since its 1972 release, Italo Calvino’s book has been largely considered impossible to stage, but Invisible Cities‘ director Leo Warner was determined to find a way.

He declares in his program notes that it...