Virtual environment performance that disrupts our everyday experience of dialogue and offers a one of a kind visual conversation.

How does virtual communication affect what can be expressed or shared? What role do virtual means play in the nature of our dialogues?

Interruptor is a visual device designed to create a temporary suspension in the ways we normally perceive space, time and the boundaries between „You” and „I“. The User is offered an environment to disrupt our everyday use of communication and its protocols, and to find his/her own way of having a dialogue by only using objects and images.

“When you are ready to activate this device put your hand inside the illuminated area.”

Medium: performance for one audience member

Duration: 50 min
Year: 2013 -
Version: No language barrier 
Performed in: Theatre Alfred ve Dvoře, Prague
Festival Weltecho, Chemnitz, Germany
Art Gallery of Ekaterinburg Academy of Contemporary Art, Russia
DOX Gallery, Prague
Art-Research Bridge cooperation project, Faculty of Arts, Brno, Czech Republic
Prague Quadrennial 2015, Performance Program
The Small Inventory Festival, Trade Fair Palace, National Gallery in Prague
Coordinación Nacional de Danza, Foro la Caja, Mexico City
New London Little Theatre, Minnesota, USA

Keywords: telematic communication, visual conversation, one to one

Concept / Direction: Cristina Maldonado
Performer: Cristina Maldonado
Support: Creadores Escénicos con Trayectoria 2013-14 FONCA,
Motus o.s., production of Alfred ve dvoře, residence programme 2013,
Jedefrau.org,
Ministry of Culture of Czech Republic,
Embajada de México en la República Checa,
Programa de Apoyo a las Artes Escénicas México - Unión Europea (FONCA - Unión Europea),
Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes,
Research residency: STANDING, AND_Lab, Atelier Real Lisabon; Joao Fiadeiro a Fernanda Eugenio

Press:

gob.mex: Cristina Maldonado crea Interruptor, video performance para un espectador [ES] / Cristina 
Maldonado creates Interruptor, a video-performance for one audience member 

sub25.ro: Now is new, said the mermaid [RO]

"In this new experience you have a self placed next to a self, which can co-create. At the
place. Something that only exists in those moments."

agosto-foundation.org: Theatre of Communication, Cristina Maldonado's Blurred Genres [ENG]

"The interaction between the artist and her rotating collaborators is personal and intimate; there 
is no audience but the other person. Three or four “cycles” elapse over the course of a performance, 
Maldonado explains, each typically longer than the last. 'There is the beginning of something that 
starts to develop, and you find the conclusion. And then there is an emptiness, where we don’t 
know what to do, because something evolved and concluded. So then there is a pausa, and then another 
cycle starts.'"