L'Albada

The desire to bring this production to the stage arises from many different places, all converging here before you. Ideas and ideology meet theatrical form in order to create a story. Silences, pain, grandparents and great-grandparents, mothers and fathers, democracy, war and the post-war years, oblivion and forgiveness... and then it all begins again. To work through emotion, and to awaken in you the desire to embrace, to understand and to reconcile.

What lies within all those things we do not say to one another, all those stories we have never fully told? How do we confront the wounds we carry from events we never lived through, yet with which we coexist every day?

When Jaume first came to us with the earliest versions of L’Albada, I immediately recognised an ambitious text that sought to take us further. Beyond a story told in a linear way; across many places throughout the country; through possible and impossible identities, lost dreams and cruelties left unresolved. It revealed itself as a vast dialogue between generations striving to explain themselves to one another because they need one another. Added to this was the fascination of discovering the legacy of La Perla’s own productions woven into a new play that would take us from Barcelona in 1992 (when I was twenty-one years old) back to the Spanish Civil War, by way of the Transition and the post-war period.

If every play is a failed attempt to make an idea real, and if poetry emerges from the distance between that idea and reality, then L’Albada is an attempt at an epic about our most recent history. It is the writing of our own myths, drawing on the influence of what has already appeared on this very stage and transforming it in search of a new destination. The heroes do not battle supernatural forces but one another; the monsters do not dwell in caves or distant seas but within ourselves; and what is at stake is not the order of the universe but memory itself.

Together with the entire company, we have worked tirelessly to find a way of bringing nearly forty characters, different periods, shifting locations and contrasting moments to life. Like an old cinema, a ruined theatre where films from another age continue to flicker across the screen. We follow Alba, our heroine, a twenty-year-old woman searching for her place in the world while studying History and experiencing Olympic Barcelona with a certain scepticism. Torn between love and anger. Between the desire to understand and the need to rebel.

Oriol Broggi