Cuando vuelva a casa voy a ser otro
1h 20min
ES > FR / NL
23/05 – 20:30
24/05 – 18:00
25/05 – 20:30
26/05 – 20:30
A leading light in Buenos Aires theatre, the writer and director Mariano Pensotti explores the tension between reality and fiction in shows in which major historical events are revealed through the small day-to-day stories of a handful of individuals. Introduced and regularly invited back by the festival, this year the Argentine director presents the world premiere of Cuando vuelva a casa voy a ser otro . The play is based on a true story but almost immediately diffracts in the dramatist’s imagination. Like an archaeologist, Pensotti attempts to reconstruct an extinguished life from the bits and pieces that have survived. How do truth and family myths intermingle to form the identity of a human being? Moving through the generations, characters and objects appear and disappear. Pensotti uses an inventive stage device to serve his clear narrative style, constructing a Borgesian labyrinth of personal stories to get lost in.
Text & direction
Mariano Pensotti
Cast
Agustín Rittano, Mauricio Minetti, Santiago Gobernori, Julieta Vallina, Andrea Nussembaum
Set design
Mariana Tirantte
Music
Diego Vainer
Lighting
Alejandro Le Roux
Production
Florencia Wasser
Stage assistance
Manuel Guirao, Carlos Etchevers
Presentation
Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Théâtre Varia
Production
Grupo Marea (Buenos Aires)
Co-production
Kunstenfestivaldesarts,
Theaterhaus Gessnerallee (Zürich), Künstlerhaus Mousonturm
(Frankfurt), Festival Theaterformen (Hannover), HAU Hebbel am Ufer
(Berlin), Festival d’Avignon, Maison des arts de Créteil, Théâtre
Nanterre-Amandiers, El Cultural San Martín (Buenos Aires), FIBA Festival
Internacional de Buenos Aires
Subtitling with the support of
ONDA
Cuando vuelva a casa voy a ser otro
1.
Over the years, one becomes one’s own double. A double who often reflects a person built on a myth that no longer exists. Cuando vuelva acasa voy a ser otro (When
I come home, I will be someone else) begins from a real event, a very
recent experience for my own father: at the end of the 1970s he was a
revolutionary militant, and when the dictatorship began in Argentina he
decided to conceal a collection of compromising items he owned (photos,
books, letters from comrades, etc.) in case the soldiers broke into the
house where we lived, which in fact they did. My father buried the items
in the garden of my grandparents’ house, and throughout the years of
dictatorship, he never forgot them. When military rule ended, in the
mid-1980s, he tried to recover them, but he could not remember the exact
place where they were buried, since the garden had changed a great deal
over that period, and he couldn’t find them. At the beginning of 2014,
my father received a call from the present owner of my grandparents’
house. While they were excavating the land for a swimming pool, they
found the bags containing his possessions. So almost 40 years later, he
was reunited with these mythic objects and found himself confronted with
a time capsule that held the traces of something that was, and no
longer is. For the first time I felt impelled to start from a real event
about something so near, to construct a fiction. In the story of this
play, a blatant mixture of the real and the fictional, the character who
lives this event recognises all the objects except for one mysterious
item, inexplicably included among the rest of his buried possessions.
The search for the source of this strange object is the thread linking a
series of stories divided into chapters in a way reminiscent of a novel
or of paintings displayed in a museum.
2.
Every
family has its founding myths, sometimes quite mundane events that
nonetheless cast their shadow over many subsequent generations. In my
recent work, I have been obsessed with the things that construct us as
persons, and make us into just what we are, and nothing else. Reflecting
on my earlier work, it could be said that in one piece the idea was
that we are what we narrate, we construct ourselves insofar as we change
our own past every time we recount it; while in another the notion was
that we are what the fictions have made us to be, since we all live and
react to experiences from the fictions we have consumed since the start
of our lives. In Cuando vuelva a casa voy a ser otro the idea
is that sometimes we are also formed by the family myths with which we
grew up and by the personal, mythic moments of a founding past that
defines us and at the same time causes our transformation into the
‘doppelganger’ of this mythic person over time. Identity is in a
permanent state of transformation and there is an exciting tension in
all of us between the impulse and the longing to be someone else, the
tragedy of being only one, contrasted with the anguish and fear of
ceasing to be what we are.
3.
The play takes
place in a stage set that uses devices from an old archaeological museum
formerly in Patagonia. This museum used to have a strange “educational
show” for exhibiting some of its collection. They used moving panoramas,
conveyor belts, projected texts and other outdated theatrical elements
to recount archaeological events. The conveyor belts also caused
unexpected items to appear, something to do with the objects that
reappear forming the cause of the story that runs through the whole
play. It also vaguely recalls a Moebius strip, on which an item placed
at a given point will inevitably pass through the same point sometime
later, as if in a time loop, an eternal return, making the characters
confront things that they had already experienced, but in a different
form. Archaeology preserves the material traces that endure through
time. Cuando vuelva a casa voy a ser otro is offered as an alternative museum of familiar myths that investigates what one was, what one is and what one aspires to be.
4.
The
changes experienced throughout life cause one to become many, like an
actor who embodies extreme variations in the resemblance of a character.
One builds a fundamental part of one’s identity through the familiar
and personal myths. What happens when one is faced with these myths?
What is it that occurs when one discovers one is someone else? Cuando vuelva a casa voy a ser otro is
centred on the possibility of change and of being someone else,
essentially in one’s most intimate and personal aspect, but also in a
broader, social and political context; at a time where social
transformations are ever more limited, how valid are certain
revolutionary ideas that seem buried?
Mariano Pensotti
Buenos Aires, May 2015
Translated to English by Joanna Waller
Mariano Pensotti (b. 1973, Buenos Aires) is an Argentine author and theatre director. He studied cinema, visual arts, and theatre in Buenos Aires, Spain, and Italy. In the theatre, as both writer and director, he created more than 15 performances over the past 10 years. Among his latest creations are Cineastas (2013), El pasado es un animal grotesco (2010), Sometimes I think I can see you (2010), Encyclopaedia of unlived lives (2010), and La Marea (2005). Pensotti’s work has been presented in theatres and festivals in Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere, including the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), Theaterformen (Hannover), Festival de Otoño (Madrid), Zürcher Theater Spektakel (Zürich), steirischer herbst (Graz), Tempo Festival (Rio de Janeiro), Under The Radar (New York), Push Festival (Vancouver), and On the Boards (Seattle). Mariano Pensotti has become one of the most noted experimental directors in the world, and is heralded as one of Latin America’s brightest theatre talents. Pensotti formed Grupo Marea together with set designer Mariana Tirantte and musician Diego Vainer; he and his company tour extensively throughout the year. Within his work, two different lines have developed, one composed of stage performances strongly based on working with the actors and for which he writes his own literary texts, and in parallel, site specific performances wherein the main intention is to create a particular contrast between fiction and reality, with fiction being performed in public places.
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