On Friday 22 May, Compass Presents Co-Founder Tara Sachdeva, Movement Director Matt Mulligan and Alex Wright from Limbic Cinema joined us to talk about film, circus, live music, projection mapping and their creative process. Here are five things you might like to know about The Caligari Experience:

1. Compass Presents was set up through a desire to present mainstream and marginal film cultures on the same platform, and to develop new audiences. Inspiration came from the artwork of Frida Kahlo, and the way her paintings over spilled their frames, to move beyond the context that traditionally they would be confined by. In Compass Presents’ first film festivals, live performance was involved, but limited to community venues on the fringes of the cinema programme.

2. The Caligari Experience is an on-going project several years in the making. The stimulus came from (I think it’s fair to say) an obsession with a 1920s silent German film, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. The beautiful expressionist aesthetic and motifs of endless pathways and hand drawn sets captured the imagination of Compass Presents and became a pivotal project in the company’s development. 

3. Tara and Matt were driven by the desire to create an event where film, live music and circus performance merged, and could be absorbed by an audience concurrently from the same stage. They adopted an ethos of allowing the idea to grow as big as their ambition afforded, and then scaling back to what was achievable within the given time, capacity and budgetary constraints. 

4. Limbic Cinema took on the tricky challenge of creating an immersive environment for the performers and audience to inhabit simultaneously whilst giving space for the narrative-driven film to be showcased in a compelling way. Limbic designed and built a textural backdrop on which to projection map scenes from the film that spilled out of the three screens and onto the set.

5. The next phase of the project is to invest more time into developing elements of interactivity between the circus performers, the live music (provided by Minima), and the presentation of the film. Compass Presents will be touring The Caligari Experience in 2016.

The Caligari Experience Teaser Trailer from Compass Presents on Vimeo.