«Hekinah Degul» (2013)
Created and directed by: David Espinosa
Collaboration: Africa Navarro, Diego Dorado
Sound and music: Santos Martinez / David Espinosa
Stage design: David Espinosa / Air Models and Architecture Projects.
Video: Diego Dorado / David Espinosa.
Production: El Local E.C. / Festival Escena Contemporanea 2013, in collaboration with the Department of Culture of the Generalitat de
Catalunya
Distribution: M.O.M.-El Vivero
The project is an interactive installation that derives from the performance “My Great Work”, in which we constructed a large-scale show H0 scale, using miniatures human figures. “Hekinah Degul” are the words that the inhabitants of Lilliput shouted at Gulliver when he woke up. We took Swift’s novel as the basis for raising various fictional scenes that take places in real spaces, using human figures from scale model trains as characters, and relating them to real people and objects at another scale, creating materials that explain the proposal, which complement it or that open new discourses, in order to boost further questioning of the spectacularity, and the boundaries of theater.
The viewer will attend an exhibition hall or real space (home, office, lobby of the theater…), and will receive instructions for the tour where they will find different scenes made with miniatures and real objects, in some of which they may be required to intervene activating mechanisms of motion, use a magnifying glass or microscope, interacting with a live recording…) They can stay in each scene as long as they like, without a predetermined order. The viewer will inhabit the space according to their need, within specific times and respecting the maximum of simultaneous visitors allowed.
Surely Gulliver’s Travels is one of the best satires of the history of literature, and especially utopian literature. It is taken as a somewhat childish work, but really it encloses an irreverent and modern speech, very appropriate for the times we are living. Obviously we do not want to do an adaptation of the book, we just want to use the journey of the main character through these four worlds as an inspiration to design the course that the audience takes, finding in some corners of the place these little beings who propose them different actions, which we hope will make them question some aspects of their values and behavior.