<> is the very first premiere of the year at Reactor! We invited Alexandra Budianu, the show's wonderful set designer, to share a few insights about her artistic journey on this project. Here is what she shared with us:

Part 1. Love is the third show I have the joy of working on at Reactor, all with different, amazing teams of performers and directors. In each one, the creative process, my contribution, and the aesthetic proposals have come together in beautifully unique ways every time! I absolutely love this, because the environment allows me to experiment, try out new images and materials based on my artistic interests at the moment, and playfully transform ideas and intentions from the team I'm working with.

For Part 1. Love, the journey was long, deep, and beautifully complex. As we debated the show's theme, our ideas became almost delightfully contradictory and a wonderful challenge to synthesize! Love is such a complex thing—something that shows up in so many different ways, full of incredible warmth but also raw intensity. It makes us beautifully vulnerable, creates illusions, and yet sometimes reveals itself in the most concrete, everyday gestures. My creative instinct was to explore the flip side: to think about its absence, our inability to see it in subtle ways, or how it gets lost in simulated, cliché-filled expressions. I thought a lot about the artificial, things hard to digest, plastic materials, and industrially manufactured objects. For some time now, I've been fascinated by working with the natural properties of industrial materials and objects without altering them aesthetically, but rather playfully reimagining their functions and recontextualizing them—or even using a strictly utilitarian object as pure decoration!

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