Quarto Escuro de Goethe | Goethe’s Dark Room performance-installation takes place inside a purpose-built octagonal device designed to explore and make visible the light phenomena as it moves through space. This geometric structure serves as a controlled environment where light interacts with surfaces, moving bodies, and areas of shadow, enabling to reenact the empirical experiences described by Goethe in his Theory of Colours and placing them in dialogue with Newton’s prism experiment.
Within this device, light is treated as active material: its intensity shifts, its direction changes, it disperses, is blocked, or filtered. These transformations generate visual effects that alter how audiences perceive the performers’ bodies, the geometry of the space, and the thresholds between the visible and the invisible. The performance plot emerges directly from this interplay of light, shadow, and movement—a continuously shifting optical choreography.
The performance unfolds in continuous cycles of approximately 20 minutes, with audiences entering in small groups of 3. This format encourages a mode of observation similar to a laboratory setting: each viewer can follow how subtle changes in the angle of light, in the performers’ movements, or in their own position within the space produce significant variations in perceptual experience.
The sound environment developed by Nick Rothwell in collaboration with the performers Beatriz Boleto and Gonçalo Silva, acts as an extension of the device, reinforcing the experimental nature of the work and enhancing the sensory perception of the space. Together, these elements form an immersive environment for observation, where art functions as a tool to question how we see, what we see, and how objects transform right before our eyes.
Quarto Escuro de Goethe premiered October, the 22nd at Sala b – TAGV (Teatro Académico Gil Vicente) in Coimbra, Portugal