The City and the City
(The Only Animal Co-Production)
Year: 2017
Creative team
- Directed by Kendra Fanconi
- Adapted by Jason Patrick Rothery from the novel by China Miéville
- Movement Directed by Nita Bowerman
- Performed by Trish Collins, Daniel Martin, Dave Mott, Darren Buquist & Steven Atkins
- Presented with PuSh International Performing Arts Festival
- Co-produced by The Only Animal and Upintheair
- Designed by Nancy Tam, Jonathan Kim, Florence Barrett, Emma Hendrix, & Jerguš Opršal
- Stage Managed by Stephanie Elgersma
- Dramaturgy by Brian Quirt, Playwrights Colony at Banff Centre for the Arts
About
Presented with PuSh International Performing Arts Festival (this link will open in a new window)”. A new co-production from two Jessie award-winning companies, Upintheair Theatre, The City and The City is an immersive, interactive theatrical experience. Like a matrushka doll, the mystery hides another mystery of who you really are, and the city in which you live. When a young woman is murdered, Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Besael Extreme Crime Squad is plunged into a perilous investigation that risks kindling long-simmering tensions between the two cities, and provoking the panoptic agents that oversee their now corroding boundaries.
Adapted from author China Mielville’s multi-award winning novel, The City and The City is a highly participatory theatrical experience; equal parts dystopic science fiction, film noir, and murder mystery. Using emergent audio technology, the audience receives clues for actions, text and characterization to bring the story to life in real time.
The City and The City unfurls across Ul Qoma and Bezel, two “split” cities which occupy the same geographical space, but operates distinct social, cultural, and political entities. Conditioned from birth, the citizens in these overlapping cities must unsee one another, and transgressors are disappeared by an invisible police force known only as Breach.