Billennium is a theatrical guided tour, not of historic sites, but of a city’s futures, on which you walk through time to the locations of utopian and dystopian science fictions.
Ticket purchase HERE
Future architecture appears before your eyes, and you hear what different worlds might sound like. Accompanied by archaeologists of the future, you carry mobile devices that interpret and visualise traces of what’s to come. The tour concludes with an opportunity to design tomorrow’s city together and see the buildings you imagine layered onto the architecture of today using AR (augmented reality). Livestreamed, multichannel audio immerses you in sci-fi location sounds and speculative architecture is drawn in real-time over the existing buildings.
Billennium is different every time it is performed, re-made uniquely for specific places. It continues Uninvited Guests exploration of how technologies can facilitate the cocreation of performance with participating audiences, who are invited to share in the work’s authorship, shape its outcome, and do some social dreaming together. Utopian and dystopian thinking are used as critical tools, enabling participants to reflect on local changes or plans for redevelopment and to imagine preferred futures.
Created by Uninvited Guests and Duncan Speakman
Creative technologists: Michele Pannegrossi, Luca Biada
Animator: Sam Steer
Performed by Lili Bajor, Vince Zrínyi Gál
Date and time: 3 PM, 5 PM and 7 PM daily on 2nd, 3rd and 4th June 2022
Meeting point: 1152 Budapest, Epres sor 1.
At 5 PM on the 3rd of June the show will be performed in English.
Billennium is part of Performing Futures project. The artistic works in this Perform Europe project, Billennium and To Those Born Later, both reflect on the present through the future and use technologies to enable participation. Billennium is an Augmented Reality tour of the future of a place. To Those Born Later is an online show in which people from different countries discuss what should go into a time capsule to be opened in 150 years.
To Those Born Later (International Collection) is an interactive online event, which brings together groups from different countries to discuss what should go into a time capsule to be opened in 150 years. What do you want to save for our children’s children’s children’s children? What do you want to pass down to future inhabitants of the world?
Join Uninvited Guests in preserving something of you, your community and culture, for those who are yet to be born. Every show will be different, made with and for its audience. The content of the time capsule is chosen by those in each meeting and added to a growing online archive. Covid and the climate crisis have made us more conscious of how we live in one world and how our problems and our dreams for the future need to be looked at on an international basis. In response to this unique moment in history, To Those Born Later (International Collection) will bring geographically distant people together for live connection and debate, about our legacy and what matters. The aim is to enable exchanges between people in different cities and countries, around what personal objects should be passed down and what from our cultures we should take care of.
Dates of To Those Born Later and ticket purchase:
23 April 2022, hosted by: IKUSEEARTE (Bilbao, Spain)
tickets here
11 May 2022, hosted by: PLACCC Festival (Budapest, Hungary)
tickets here
20 June 2022, hosted by: Students’ City Cultural Center (Belgrade, Serbia)
tickets here
About Performing Futures
Billennium will tour 3 cities, with new versions adapted for BBK OFF Festival, Bilbao, International Theater Days in Belgrade, and PLACCC Festival, Budapest. To Those Born Later will be performed online 3 times, hosted once by each festival and promoted locally. This will test 2 new approaches to international touring: Billennium explores deeper engagement with communities, leading to a work that is re-made with and for specific neighbourhoods and shown outside in public spaces; To Those Born Later engages local audiences without travelling, facilitating meaningful exchanges across these European contexts.
With the presentation partners of this project, IKUSEEARTE and BBK OFF in Spain, Students’ City Cultural Center in Serbia, and Hungary’s Artopolis Association, producers Uninvited Guests, Duncan Speakman and Fuel Theatre aim to establish strong connections between people and places, both locally and internationally.
At a time when we are emerging from a pandemic and into a state of climate emergency, the partners will bring people together in local neighbourhoods and inspire them to imagine preferred futures, and also meet remotely, through interactive, online performance, to consider what should be passed down from our cities, times and cultures to future generations.
Partners: Uninvited Guests (UK), IKUSEEARTE (Spain), Artopolis Association / PLACCC Festival (Hungary), Students’ City Cultural Center (Serbia)
About Uninvited Guests
Uninvited Guests was formed in Bristol, England in 1998 by Paul Clarke, Jessica Hoffmann and Richard Dufty. Over 24 years as collaborators, we have created entertaining and provocative theatrical experiences that explore urgent social, cultural and political ideas. Our work is often characterised by the way it asks audiences to get involved. It puts their stories, dreams, memories, loves or frustrations at its heart. It asks them to be co-authors with us of the experience in really direct ways, like providing us with text that forms part of the script for that night’s performance or having conversations with each other as part our shows. Other features of our work are our use of new technologies to tell stories and re-imagine the world, and the way we reflect on our past to think about the future. We create work in various contexts. We have made work in theatres, on city streets, in libraries, supermarkets, in royal palaces, in galleries, bars and in parks. We focus mainly on performance, but also make theatrical guided tours and installations.
The project has been realized as par of Perform Europe program.
Spacial thanks: Csokonai Nonprofit Kft., XV. district Municipality, Rákospalota, Pestújhely and Újpalota Local History Museum, Association of Rákospalota Traditions , Ujlaki Major Cheese Shop
Ticket purchase HERE