En la mesura de l'impossible
By Tiago Rodrigues, Directed by Cristina Genebat
From February 25th at Teatre La Biblioteca
Where does the impulse to help without expecting anything in return come from? Why do some people want a better world even knowing it’s impossible to change it? What is it that makes us human? Four actors address us as if answering our own questions: How do you run a refugee camp? How do you face a life-or-death decision? How do you return home after horror? These are the voices of humanitarian workers from the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders. They recount the stories they’ve lived, the dilemmas they’ve faced, and the big questions that emerge daily from the smallest things in lives much closer to ours than we might imagine. Free from sentimentality or moralism, these voices speak out and share with us their direct experience of the impossible.
By
Tiago Rodrigues
Directed and translated by
Cristina Genebat
With
Joan Amargós
Màrcia Cisteró
Andrew Tarbet
Elena Tarrats
Live music and video
Mürfila
Stage design
Bibiana Puigdefàbregas
Lighting
Guillem Gelabert
Sound and video
Mürfila
A produccion by La Perla 29
I read En la mesura de l'impossible at a vital moment of great powerlessness regarding the hostile and bellicose nature, so lacking in compassion, that our 21st century is taking on. This century feels too big for us and seems, inevitably, to be slipping through our hands.
En la mesura de l'impossible reveals itself to me as a piercing text. Necessary. Tiago Rodrigues wrote it based on real testimonies from humanitarian workers of the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders, with the aim of putting their work front and center. The workers of “the impossible.” We want to do the same.
A character, at the very beginning of the performance, declares: “It should be a play in three acts. Act I: I will save the world. Act II: I will not save the world. Act III: The world cannot be saved.”
I am not sure whether the world can be saved or not, nor am I certain that asking the question is not sheer naivety. What I do believe is that the world can be explained, and that it must be explained, and that is the mission of culture in general and of theatre, in this case.
We are preparing to present a performance that, although it approaches documentary theatre, will aim to uphold the poetics of Tiago Rodrigues’ text, to accompany it, to defend it. En la mesura de l'impossible allows us to speak of the impossible. To reflect on the impossible. It recounts the horror of war without falling into sentimentality or morbid fascination. With care. With force. With respect. And, although it may seem “impossible,” with a certain dose of humor.
This text, which stole our hearts from the very first reading, brings us closer to specific characters, four humanitarian workers, to make us witnesses of first-hand experiences that will, undoubtedly, reach our souls. We hope that it does. Because these characters, like each of us, are tiny pieces of immense machinery, and because the impossible is innumerable, incomprehensible, intangible, and we will never fully grasp it, but, with luck, by facing the abyss, we may sense it a little—and that will already be much. In any case, today, excited, we do not want to stop trying.
Cristina Genebat
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