synopsis

An old man who once was prosperous. A house that used to be splendid. A daughter. Runes of memories to unearth. Vestiges of a certain past? Fabulations to avoid forgetting? The last great Shakespeare’s work, “The Tempest” provides a starting point for Projecte Ingenu for an exploration of the nature of the human senescence. 

We are such stuff as memories are made on.

About the show

Theater people often ask ourselves if what we stage is true, believable, verisimilar… We are afraid to use the word “lie”, we think it distances us from an essence that should be preserved… However, everyone assumes that theater is a lie, nothing more than a possible construction of reality that allows us to access a feeling of verisimilitude, of plausibility. In a more or less comfortable chair, we let our brain work and perceive as real the actors performing in front of scenery. And our brain starts working in a very accurate way organizing partial indications to interpret it as a complete reality. 

But … What happens outside the theater? What happens with what we consider “reality”? Does the brain work in the same way? Is “pure reality” as pure and real as we think, or just a set of partial clues that our brain insists on thinking that are coherent? And, what happens when the brain is no longer able to know when it is inside or outside the theater …? What happens when it is no longer able to control what it perceives, how it perceives it and what is the meaning of what it reconstructs? Where then does reality reside? Where does the truth reside? 

I was Prospero is a game that proposes to the spectator to take part to the deliriums of an elder mind, perhaps senile, perhaps too lucid… Of an “Animal of Memories”, in the words of the Catalan poet Vicent Andrés Estellés. An old man, isolated from the world, locked in a house, within walls that are his own memories… The oblivion, the tempest that comes and goes and returns to purify everything… We are made of the same matter of dreams. But what shape do dreams have? 

Marc Chornet Artells