Creative technologist, video & production designer
a boldly experimental piece that meditates on home, on belonging and on the way both theatre and technology can seemingly bend time and shrink the space between people
Financial Times
A new performer takes to the stage at every show without having a clue of what is going to be asked of them. Unrehearsed and unprepared, the script becomes their guide as they journey through the story of the playwright, connected live from his flat in Berlin? Or is he? Can we really know where or when we are?
ECHO asks us to confront what it feels like to be an immigrant in time, as much as in space. Fusing technology with the oldest tricks in the book, ECHO is an experiment in concept touring for the age of climate crisis: an ambitious, magical and uncompromising production where no one travels yet everybody can be present.
Performing the multiple roles of creative technologist, video & projection designer and scenographer on a single show isn’t something I would do often. It’s hugely demanding, but felt necessary on this show. This was a rare beast of interdependency where almost every decision during set design, film shoot, video post-production, technical system design and rehearsals & workshops, impacted each other.
Co-commissioning partner the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) was particular interested in ECHO as an experiment in what their 2021 reseach project called Concept Touring. This investigation is central to the production design of ECHO. Only two people (a technican and a stage manager) will travel with the show, carrying with them two cases. In one case is the digital technology, consisting of the computer that dirves everything, the actors’ laptop, an iPhone and camera accessories and networking hardware and audio/video interfaces. The other case contains the Persian rug and the three folded projection surfaces without frames. The frames for the screens and all other set is built quickly from standard reusable stock materials/hardware held by the receiving venues. The cast, requiring no rehearsal, is recruited locally.
I’ve spoken and written about my interest in working with telepresence to explore the fluidity of our relationship with and location in space and time, but I rarely get to apply these concepts in such a textually embedded way as I did on ECHO. The technology is genuinely part of the material of this work and always in service of the text, which evolved through genuine collaboration and workshopping with the writer and director.
ECHO is a real feat of modern stagecraft and technology. In the clever work of director Omar Elerian and designer/technologist Derek Richards, screens, videos, and projections create a series of illusions, stranding the actor in outer space and layering different memories over one another. In a theatrical climate over-saturated with camera work, ECHO offers some exciting originality.
Broadway World
ECHO premiered at London’s Royal Court Theatre in July 2024 as part of LIFT 2024. Its world tour begins in Australia in 2025 at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre.
Writer: Nassim Soleimanpour
Director: Omar Elerian
Creative technologist, video & production designer: Derek Richards
Lighting designer: Jackie Shemesh
Cinematographer: Katja Rivas Pinzon
Composer & sound designer: Anna Clock
Production Manager & AV production engineer: Ethan Hudson