The value of a proper name

Transformation, the very core of theatrical play, is almost always an act of usurpation. Taking fragments of reality in order to create another reality. Imagining how a scene might have unfolded in the past, based on who we are and on the references that have reached us today. We often say it: in theatre everything is feigned, yet nothing is false. An actor transforms into many characters through a single gesture; one character usurps another in order to make the transition. That gesture, too, has been borrowed from somewhere in reality, and each one becomes a small portrait of who we are beyond the stage, or of who we might have been had we been someone else.

In L’Albada, eleven actors play almost forty characters. The game of metamorphosis lies at the heart of the production more than ever. The scenes are short and direct. The changes must be constant. The audience will travel through the actors into a multitude of characters who meet and meet again at different moments in our recent history. The young Natàlia and the older Natàlia, played by two different actresses, who then encounter one another again in another scene as entirely different characters. Time layered upon time in order to tell the passage of lives. To break open silence, we must dig through the many pasts that coexist within us at once. To feign life, to usurp its present moment in order to create another, imagined one that allows us to see beyond.

Beyond chronology and narrative, history appears here as layer upon layer of overlapping panes of glass. Each bears a photograph that we can look at separately. But L’Albada invites us to place them one upon another and look at them all, one through the next. Layer upon layer, characters becoming others, actors reappearing like ghosts of those they are not currently playing, scenes that echo one another and intersect, inviting us to look through history and understand the history that runs through us. Usurped, silenced, flattened into a timeline... A play of transforming characters and scenes experienced as decisions. Real or imagined. We feign them in order to honour the world that has lived beneath every name that came before us, every name that made us possible. And so, the value of our own name. After all, it is the most theatrical of questions: Who am I? Who are we?