Ziming Guo

Hekabe is a grim tragedy with a strong plot that expresses the ugly side of human nature and a set of complex emotions. The spatial design visualization responds to Anna Carson’s adaptation of Euripides’s classical Greek drama Hecuba to a contemporary audience, utilises the unique space of 45 Downstair to submerge the viewers into the theatrical setting and create a more immersive and visceral experience. The main concept is to design a fictional in-war world that evokes a sense of extreme destruction and communicate the unmitigated anguish and hopelessness, emphasizing a more intimate actor-audience relationship. The flexible warehouse-style theatre space eliminates the clear boundary between the traditional stage and auditorium, which creates a relatively small performance environment obliterating any forced separation between performer and spectator. While the 45 Downstairs transform into an immersive theatre for the play Hekabe, the audience is no longer an impassive observer in the traditional sense but becomes a participant who shares the same space and feelings with the characters.