I believe in finding the visual essence of any given specific opera, play, dance or musical. My aim is to discover and articulate a “place” that can only exist in performance-time, suggestive and non-imitative. Poetic rather than specific. An interesting contradiction: Not a “set,” but as Strindberg already said: a space “Where anything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist.” A space where text becomes alive and is not hindered by illustration. A space that creates its own logic, and lets us dream. A space that allows us to transcend our daily routines, and where the stage is an infinite place of possibility, specially today when our lives are so encumbered by an ailing economic system and a political cynicism that burdens us all with deep mistrust.

Today’s great theater artists keep luring us back to this seminal performance/audience connection with barely nothing at their disposal: Ariane Mnouchkine, Romeo Castelluci, Angelica Liddell, Robert Woodruff, Arthur Nauzyciel… Or in film, who can ever forget the blank stares of Joan of Arc in Dreyer’s masterpiece, or Erland Josephson’s prayer looking straight into the camera in Andrei Tarkovky’s The Sacrifice, and Bresson’s enigmatic Au Hasard Balthazar… Theatrical space allows you/audience to surrender and to embrace another kind of reality, and because of this phenomenon, I believe the ”set” cannot be a lie/gimmick or illustrative illusion, a fake, but a bridge to your imagination. This is where theater’s magic trance exists, and only in live performance. I deeply believe that removing all that’s not necessary is key. Trust in simplicity. As I get older and no longer feel the need to blow people away with “theatrical” trickery and a plethora of moving scenic elements that I find clunky and predictable, I always return to the fact that less is more. But it is how you articulate this simplicity that is so hard and so elusive… At the end of the day it is what keeps me going, what keeps me searching, it is what gives meaning to my craft and with what I can hopefully touch and move the audience. I am baffled when today’s theater critics say they are confused because the “set-designer” has not been “specific” enough about portraying “location.” The theater of Shakespeare relied on NO scenery; Ingmar Bergman’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night dispensed with O’Neil’s iconic home and turned it into a ritualistic platform, no walls. In a beautiful passage of The Dramatic Imagination, Robert Edmond Jones quotes Walt Whitman: “I seek less, to display any theme or thought and more to bring you into the atmosphere of the theme or thought—there to pursue your own flight.”