Commuters - Mind The Gap

Every year on average in Ireland each commuter spend 28.2 minutes in public transport each way. Which is 56.4 minutes a day, 282 minutes a week 12972 minutes a year. All that time is usually spent in a limbo between presence on the public transport and alienation from the place itself and from the people around.

If you commute for an average of 40 years of your life you would have spent with us 360 days. Mind The Gap.

Imagine totally forgetting a whole year of your adult life. What did I miss?

This performance experience is set on public transport, how many little comedies and small dramas do we miss when we avoid being present? How many incredible things have happened around us, when we were to busy disappearing inside Technology and Social media? Or when we were just lost in our own thoughts, shielded by our own music in our own head-phones.

On one hand we can reach countless people with a tiny movement of our thumbs, on the other we are losing the ability to look around while in a confined moving box. We are able to be in a small enclosed space with only a few people and lack the interest or ability to talk to them, stand up for them or for ourselves.

On public transport we find people of all walks of life, any age, gender, nationality. Can it be a Russian Doll-Like representation of the bigger spherical transport carrying us around the sun? How are we treating it? How are we treating ourselves and others?

Commuters - Mind The Gap is an interactive experience where performers and audiences are able to interact with each other as they would be able to do on public transport.

All the sketches presented are dramatisations of real life events.

This is a theatre piece adapted for New Voices Of Ireland to a gallery performance.

It counts on enormous support by the Rather Gather team, Set maker and Lighting Designer Conor McCague and incredible musician Ewa Gigon. The Director Romi Cruañas is the lyricist of the original song composed and arranged for it by Ewa: “Remember to live”. The performers collaborating on this project are from various backgrounds and levels of performing experience both in Ireland and abroad. Without their commitment and dedication this piece would not have been possible. A special thanks to Maria Monteleone, GIannino Montacuto, Marie Petitgenet.

Commuters-Mind The Gap is developing slowly, the initial part of the script was put on the page last August during the residency in Eleven Kunstort Germany. Now it can still grow, become a full length theatre play or musical… the possibilities are endless.

If you are interested in supporting the project, seeing it grow and move or you would like us to try to add your incredible public transport experience dramatisation in the future feel free to get in touch during the exhibition or via your technological device… maybe while on public transport. What are you missing right now that is happening around you?