Psycharium™
liminal theatre | invisible actors
There’s a moment, before any performance begins, when the room is still dark and something, somewhere, is already getting ready to happen. That’s where Psycharium™ comes from: that suspended instant in which the audience doesn’t yet know what it’s about to see, and is, for exactly that reason, ready to see anything.
Picture walking into a room that exists in no physical place, and yet feels real down to the smallest detail: the lights dim, a glow sweeps across a digital curtain like a portal opening, an intro animates the screen before the title even appears. It is theatre, in every sense, except for one thing: you won’t find flesh-and-blood actors here, you won’t hear voices speaking lines. Words appear on screen instead, each assigned to a fixed presence, with its own colour, its own position, its own silent way of existing within the scene. This is a deliberate choice, not a limitation: in most Psycharium™ performances, not a single word is spoken aloud. Only text, light, dissolve, a music bed underneath, a murmur of the room rising together with the curtain, as if the audience itself, unseen, were already seated and waiting. Because when the real voice is missing, the mind of whoever is watching has no choice but to imagine one of its own, and that imagination always says more than any recorded voice ever could.
I imagine the scripts, I create them, and then I write them down. Notes scattered across countless files that, over time, take shape, grow, become stories. It’s a passion I’ve carried for as long as I can remember, the same one that pushed me to write novels, to invent worlds and walk through them page after page: writing, for me, has never been just a way to tell something that already exists, but a way to make something exist that wasn’t there before. With Psycharium™, that same passion finds a stage: every line, every pause timed with precision, every video that overtakes the screen for an instant and then slowly dissolves, starts life as a text I compose beforehand, with the same patience and the same care I bring to building a story hundreds of pages long.
There is no improvisation in Psycharium™. Nothing happens by chance in front of whoever is watching: every performance has a fixed script, written and rewritten until it finds its final shape, and only then staged through a complete digital theatrical apparatus, built to work equally well on a small handheld screen or on an enormous museum wall, without losing any of its intensity.
But before the word, in Psycharium™, there is almost always sound. Music remains my first language, the one thought is born in before it ever becomes a sentence: many of the performances carry soundtracks I compose myself, written not to accompany the scene from the outside but to breathe together with it, note by note, as though text and music grew from the same root instead of only meeting at the end. This isn’t a theatre that adds music to an already finished script: it’s a theatre in which, often, it’s the sound that decides where a word should stop, and where it should instead leave room for silence.
The presences that inhabit the Psycharium™ stage are never fixed. There is no set number of voices, no cast that repeats itself identically from one performance to the next. Each new script hosts presences never encountered before, in different numbers, with different tones and colours: the theatre stays the same theatre, the stage box stays the same stage box, but who inhabits it changes, the way characters change from one chapter to the next in a novel.
There is one more thing that sets Psycharium™ apart from any theatre you’ve known: every performance follows a fixed time, announced on the calendar, clear to anyone who wants to be there from the start. But from that exact moment on, time moves forward on its own, waiting for no one. Whoever arrives on time watches from the beginning. Whoever arrives later finds the performance already underway, exactly at the point it has reached by then, the way one tunes into a broadcast already in progress rather than walking into a traditional theatre that holds its curtain until the last seat is filled. Psycharium™ doesn’t wait: it begins, precisely, for whoever knows where and when to find it.
Psycharium™ grows out of the same instinct that guides everything else I make, the same instinct at work when I create my pieces in cement and plaster: build the system first, the structure, the invisible architecture that holds everything together, and only afterward let something happen inside it, without fully knowing what in advance. Not even me.
Like cement waiting on its own chemical reaction, its own drying time, its own unexpected texture, this invisible theatre too was born from months of quiet work, almost never visible from the outside: writing code, rehearsals, small corrections, tiny adjustments the audience will never see while watching the performance, but which are the reason that performance, when it arrives, feels simple and natural. It never was. But building it has been an incredible journey.
And like every journey, physical or not, it has changed me, enriched me, transformed me.
Soon, Psycharium™ will open its doors to a wider audience, with a calendar of fixed-time performances, accessible to anyone, wherever they are, across different times of day and different languages. Until then, the curtain stays half open. But behind it, inside the darkness of a room you don’t yet know, the lights are already on, and something, somewhere, is already waiting to begin.
Psycharium supports the non-profit Stichting Lovefrequencies Foundation.