Brisbane Festival transforms an old warehouse for its big show, Invisible Cities

An old suburban Brisbane warehouse is quickly being transformed into a 1050-seat bespoke venue where an audacious multi-platform, multimedia spectacle is set to dazzle anyone lucky enough to get inside.

SOMETHING amazing is happening in a nondescript warehouse at Yeerongpilly. Who knew? In fact from the outside 880 Fairfield Road is a bleak industrial site, an old Queensland Rail facility that is, well, kind of unattractive.

But now, inside, it is in the process of being transformed into a bespoke theatre for Brisbane Festival’s centrepiece, Invisible Cities, which opens on Wednesday night with a preview Tuesday night and runs until Saturday.

A free day of entertainment for the whole family to enjoy

Invisible Cities is an extraordinary multimedia theatrical work, an audacious multi-platform spectacle based on Italo Calvino’s classic 1972 novel of the same name in which he writes of an encounter between the Venetian explorer Marco Polo and the ruler of China at the time, Kublai Khan.

This massive production recently premiered at the Manchester International Arts Festival in the UK and Brisbane Festival artistic director David Berthold flew there to see if he had made the right decision booking it.

He reckons he did.

“But we had to take a punt,” Berthold says. “That’s what festivals do.”

It’s a collaboration between cutting edge company 59 Productions and is directed by Leo Warner, co-directed by famed Belgian-Moroccan choreographer Sidi Larbi with multi award-winning writer Lola Chakrabarti and dancers from Rambert, one of the world’s great dance companies.

Rambert dancers Salome Pressac, Guillaume QuŽau, Soojin Choi and Joaquim de Santana strut their stuff in a warehouse at Yeerongpilly during a tech run of Invisible Cities. Picture: NIGEL HALLETT

Leo Warner has just arrived and gave the venue his blessing.

“What the team will be doing in this space is creating a world, another world and already it feels quite magical,” Warner says.

Set designer Jenny Melville says the Yeerongpilly warehouse is easier than the venue in Manchester.

“That was a much more hostile environment,” Melville says. “ It was an old Victorian railway depot and basically it was raining inside and everything was rusty. This place is really exciting.”

Wandering around the cavernous space Marco Polo looked at home. Polo traversed the legendary Silk Road from 1271 and 1295 and in Calvino’s book he spends quite a bit of time describing the cities of the great Kublai Khan’s realm to the Khan himself.

Danny Sapani (Kublai Khan) and Matthew Leonhart (Marco Polo) in Invisible Cities.

Hong Kong raised actor Matthew Leonhart is Marco Polo ( Danny Sapani is the Mongol conqueror Kublai Khan) and he says he’s thrilled to be in Brisbane playing this role for the second time.

“I’m still pinching myself that from all the actors who auditioned they chose me,” Leonhart says. “It’s an amazing character to play and I found that character within the text.”

Leonhart says it is demanding work but fun “and the dancers are amazing”.

Rambert is a multicultural outfit and dancer Salome Pressac, from London, says the company is chuffed to be here.

“It is hard work because we have to follow the actors lines and take our cues from them,” Pressac says. “You have to really engage. I love it here so far. I’ve only been here two days and I want to move here.”

But first they have a show to do and the set is still being built. It took 17 semi-trailers to get almost a kilometre of truss and 60 state of the art projectors into place.

The man who is taking a punt on Invisible Cities, Brisbane Festival artistic director David Berthold

“Now we wait for the artists to breath life into it,” David Berthold says.

What could go wrong?

“Almost anything really,” Leo Warner says. “It’s live performance. What couldn’t go wrong?” Touch wood.

Invisible Cities, 880 Fairfield Road, Yeerongpilly, September 24 to 28; brisbanefestival.com.au