The City and Iris

Perhaps due to their eclectic backgrounds – bringing together the cultural backgrounds of seven nationalities – the Glass-Eye company are  mixture of fun with a considered vision of physical theatre that explicitly attempts to help the the audience “see the world transformed and presented in a fresh way”. At the heart of their debut  The City and Iris lies the company's belief that “one small or seemingly banal event can alter the way you see the world entirely.”

The show's setting is domestic enough – and shrewdly, designed to work for all ages. Iris breaks her glasses and goes to the opticians. But from this simple incident, Glass-Eye weave a comedy to make the familiar become strange and thrilling.

One of the exciting things about Glass-Eye is this sense of guiding artistic purpose. Amongst the light-heartedness is method – almost a manifesto. “To create a piece using nothing but the body, we have to stay playful or nothing will work. The show is above all about playfulness and a willingness on the part of the performers to work earnestly for their audience and enjoy themselves as they do.” They connect with their audience by drawing on experiences that everyone will recognise. “We can create the bare outline of something with our bodies and trust that the watcher will work to do the rest. It makes for a playful interaction with an audience where they’re not sitting back and intellectualising and we’re not giving purely theme or concept. It’s a truly interactive sort of theatre.”

A great advantage of basing their work on this shared sense of physical experience is that it loosens the ties with spoken language, allowing them to perform anywhere, with minimal adjustment. Escaping the restrictions of a single culture expands the playfulness and the depth that the group can bring to a piece. As one of the company wryly comments: "Having passionate Latinos, cerebral Americans, calm and collected Scandinavians and neurotic English in the same room makes for an interesting and pretty unique dynamic to the work."

What the group share is a schooling in the tradition of Jacques Lecoq, and a dedication to applying care and patience to developing the work from the 'inside out': "The challenge of being self-contained is a great one. By starting with the simple, we'll discover shades and textures that are inherent rather than imposed, and we'll understand an object or a person in a new way because of that."

It is easy to see why they're at ease with taking on the Festival: constructing a world from thin air, without words, balanced between what is seen and what is imagined, requires confidence and daring. “The show is really a very simple story told in an interesting way, using just the performers’ bodies, no set, no props (besides a pair of glasses and a length of rope).” And it's using these most fundamental elements – the body and the imagination - explored in an atmosphere of fun and vibrancy, that Glass-Eye hope will connect us to the "unexpected inner life"of the world around us.