Matthew Gawryk & Dan Kerr-Hobert:
Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: A Toy Theater Atlas

Seeing the Invisible: Matthew Gawryk and Dan Kerr-Hobert’s Toy Theater Adaptation of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities

An Essay by Yiwen Wu

Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: A Toy Theater Atlas is an intricate labyrinth of form that seems to unfold endlessly. Created and performed by Matthew Gawryk and Dan Kerr-Hobert, this hour-long performance is visual poetry that renders the wonders of Calvino’s Invisible Cities visible. As its subtitle suggests, the wonder of this performance lies in its power to encapsulate massive worlds in a single view, much like an atlas spread out on a table. The stories of the cities are contained in a series of boxes, most of which are merely the size of a small Altoids tin. On the outside of these boxes, the names of the cities are carefully printed over images of maps. Drawing items from a black-and-white cubby shelf, the two aproned performers continually open up new views of the cities from out of the boxes, making a gateway for us into a world where space is experienced in alternate ways. 

Visually, Invisible Cities provides us with two points of entry: a full view as well as a close-up. As we observe the two performers carefully handling the miniature objects, their movements are simultaneously captured by a top-down camera and then magnified and projected onto the big screen in the back. The camera lens that is documenting the live performance seems to be slightly vintage, transforming what we experience live into slightly pixelated shots that move at shutter speed. The two views are at once complementary and contradictory, continuously reorienting us in time and recalibrating our sight.

The dual nature of the performance matches well with the dual structure of Calvino’s postmodernist novel: Framed as a conversation between the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan and the merchant Marco Polo, the invisible cities are only visible through the explorer’s recounted memories and the ruler’s imagined understanding of his empire. The book is simultaneously about “what cities look like when you see both the obvious forms and their hidden structures, a blended image that reveals something new,” as the two creators further remind us in their notes in the program.¹ This double nature of the invisible cities is cleverly captured by the dual setting of the stage. While the intricate performance of toy theater is always present, like the invisible cities, its visual details can only be seen when it is selected, processed, and reproduced. The performance calls our attention to the process of visibility and invisibility, as well as the remediation that entails. 

In the novel, Calvino imagines the conversations happening when Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. A sense of sentiment and loss undoubtedly lingers in the air. In the performance, it is the scale of things that directs the audience members to visualize the preciousness and fragility of these cities. After all, the act of presenting the view of these invisible cities in the tiniest of sizes is a delicate labor that also tasks the audience members to see more in less.

Accompanied by lines recited from Calvino’s novel––sometimes prerecorded, other times spoken live––the performance leads us through a collective act of reading. The self-contained boxes, like curious cabinets, surprise us with all kinds of hermeneutic surfaces: A pop-up mechanism opens to become the visual representation of buildings from the cities; when a tiny tin box is opened, a blank page suddenly reveals itself to be a digital screen by turning itself on; one box turns out to be a music box, where the hole-punched paper strip, decorated with city skylines, cranks to produce a melody; one box, like an artist book, is installed with pull tabs that release new perspectives of the place depicted; another box is filled with sinking kinetic sand, continuously burying miniature things and human figurines underneath it. The forms and structures of the cities also find their way to all kinds of surfaces, such as on the faces of a couple of poker cards as well as chess boards, wine bottles, and even tattoos on the performer’s arms, hands, and feet! One of the most marvelous moments of the show is the reveal of a Kleenex box within the box, in which each tissue is finely decorated with a printed image: Before one image can be pulled out of the box, the previous one must be tossed aside first. In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: A Toy Theater Atlas, the sight of the cities continues to appear and disappear, again and again, stimulating a sense of discovery and loss at the same time.