If there is a story in which imagination takes over reality and makes it its own, it is Alice in Wonderland, the story of a girl who enters a surreal universe to somehow approach adolescence and maturity. This is the story that Onírica Mecánica has focused on to build a poetic-mechanical-imaginary world, elaborated thinking of everyone who loves the extraordinary and magnificent.
'Alice and the Invisible Cities' is, in this sense, a free version of Alice in Wonderland with a multidisciplinary staging (projections, sound space, light effects, masks) that delves into the imaginaries created by Lewis Carroll from a contemporary perspective.
'Alice and the Invisible Cities' is, in a way, a journey. A journey devised by Jesús Nieto and his company Onírica Mecánica to lead the viewer, whatever their age, on a journey towards their own innocence, a route that teaches them to see the universe with different eyes, much less malicious.
The universe of dreams
Onírica Mecánica was born in 2007 in Murcia with the purpose of creating shows in which the actors are not the only engine that produces the emotion of the viewer. "The company is called Onírica Mecánica because the first works started from notes that we collected from dreams, from our own dreams and we took them to the stage using light and other procedures related to technology that created illusions and served to put these rare and even surreal dreams on their feet," explains Jesús Nieto. "These are works that have creation and invention as their main engine. The idea was always to create different things."
The company transforms and adapts to each project. In this case, there will be seven people who will travel to Lanzarote to give shape and body to this peculiar work. "'Alice and the Invisible Cities' is a review of Lewis Carroll's work, a reinterpretation of all the imaginaries that the work creates. Alice is an almost surreal work in which nothing is what it seems. We generate imaginary texts, through resources and scenic illusions, from the work itself, or rather from what the reader recreates when reading the novel," explains Jesús. "The viewer discovers the characters that populate Alice's world. In fact, their appearance is a nod to the viewer who must discover them since they will not appear as they are used to seeing them in the Disney or Tim Burton Universe."
Italo Calvino and his Invisible Cities
A separate issue is that of the 'Invisible Cities'. "With the invisible cities we make a nod to Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. We like to imagine that we review Alice's imaginary by touring Calvino's invisible cities, each of them very particular and creative... these cities are a journey through herself, her own personality," he explains.
Nieto assures that Alice is a journey from childhood to adolescence. "This work speaks of transformation, of the passage of time, of the changes that occur in the body and all the changes that we go through in our lives and change us," he explains. "It is a family work, enjoyed by both adults and children and anyone in love with the extraordinary. It is a search for innocence, since when curiosity, typical of children, is exhausted, innocence ends. When we stop being surprised by everything, and we lose the ability to play, we grow up. We recover that capacity for surprise in a world where it is increasingly difficult to be able to do so."