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Cart Macabre

Cart Macabre explores the potential of Performer/Audience/Spatial relationships in performance. Idea and stage design is by Kruse who also directed the show, wrote the lyrics for the music and composed the original themes on which the final musical composition is based. This praxis based research uses ‘the changing of spatial reality’ as a tool to engage audiences in unusual ways. Performers push carts, in which the audience is seated in complete darkness, through a multi-media environment; peephole holes can be opened and curtains can be raised to reveal a set of different installations. A key concern is how the spaces can be used as a tool for storytelling or how this is applied in the ‘making of meaning’ in the theatre experience. The research follows a historical tradition in experimentation with new forms for staging theatre that emerged within the European and Russian avant-garde of the early twentieth century.

Cart Macabre has been supported by Arts Council England and the company received residencies at Battersea Arts Centre, Shunt Lounge and The Old Vic Tunnels. The piece was performed at the Old Vic Tunnels in London and at the Niemeyer Centre in Aviles Spain. The work received significant critical attention in the media including printed reviews in both UK and Spanish newspapers, including four-star reviews in The Times, The Daily Telegraph and Time Out. Kruse was a panelist on BBC Radio 4's Midweek representing the work, and there was a full feature on BBC2's The Review Show hosted by Kirsty Wark. A review by Ruth Rach was also aired on the German Radio Station Deutschlandfunk. A review of Cart Macabre's research and development at Shunt Volts London has been published in Total Theatre Volume 21 issue 02 Summer 2009 and Animations Online From the Frontline (2009) published an article, '"In at the deep end" -The making of Cart Macabre'. Kruse was invited to present papers on this research at Prague Quadrennial 2011 and at The Iceland Academy of the Arts, Reykjavik.