The Spanish Fool is conceived as an innovative hybrid performance, in which only one actress is physically present on stage, while the other performers appear via live video feed from a separate space. In this way, the onstage environment and the offstage realm merge into a single performative continuum, offering the audience a simultaneous experience of presence and absence.
Instead of relying on pre-recorded projections, the work employs generative visual algorithms created and transformed in real time. The visual textures are developed through a real-time generative engine in TouchDesigner, while specific system behaviors are programmed in Python, ensuring a high level of adaptability and live responsiveness throughout the performance.
A particularly innovative aspect is the live keying of the offstage performers, through which their presence is directly translated into the digital scenography and becomes its integral layer. Their digital avatars are continuously re-shaped by a spectrum of effects—from subtle modulations to radical transformations—always in service of amplifying the dramaturgical tension. In this way, the performers acquire an augmented body, at once their own and belonging to the stage, dissolving the boundaries between physical and virtual identity.
Because the generative system ensures that no performance is ever repeated in the same way, each iteration produces new nuances, making the event a living, unrepeatable process. Here, the digital layer is not a passive backdrop but an active dramaturgical agent, functioning as a live interface between the actress on stage and the expanded virtual space.
Such an approach requires a complex real-time infrastructure capable of processing and directing multichannel video signals. Through an optimized software-hardware setup, the integration of physical and digital strata becomes seamless, transforming theatrical architecture into an expanded performative environment.
As a result, the stage event emerges as a singular, continuous, and fully immersive performative experience—pushing the boundaries of contemporary theatre and intermedia practice.
Sanjin Ćorović
Interactive Visuals Designer