ARIA DA CAPO

If adolescence were a music style, what would it be? The answer depends on many facts... They’ll tell me. The show, composed by the French director and playwright from the CDN Orléans / Centre-Val de Loire, Séverine Chavrier, juggles the demands of young musicians at an age when it is very difficult to combine constancy and discipline with the hormonal tsunami. Thomas Bernhard stated: "Music in its sensuality and abstraction is above all else.” Chevrier carries the words of Thomas Bernhard with him. He bought Bernhard’s The Lime Worksto life at Barcelona’s Teatre Nacional de Catalunyaperformed under the title La calera. Now, he is coming to Madrid to showcase his passions in Spain. The four cast members that make up Aria da Capo are between 16 and 18 years old. Chevrier declares: “The raw material that I want to preserve are their words, their concerns, their confidences, their laughter, their complicity, their lucidity, their intransigence".

The play is presented as if it were a piece torn from the day to day of their lives and reproduced on stage. Their longings and failures are put on display with poetic moments filled with desire and ambition for the extreme. Everything is born and dies with extraordinary vehemence. And that outburst, as much as the world remains adult centric and adolescence is understood as a complicated time that will pass, is a rehearsal of the future. The three boys and the girl recount the demands of learning with the ambiguities of love and friendship, a continuous party where each one must face their loneliness through the group.

Musicians and teenagers. Music and teenagehood. Raise your hand if you have taken solace in a song during those tumultuous years. The young protagonists of Aria da Capo (a title that winks at Bach's Goldberg Variations) live between musical scores of classical compositions and mp3 files of songs from today. The days follow one another like variations on the same theme on the emotional roller-coaster where they strive to find refuge in the lyrical loops sung with euphoria and rage in between piano and bassoon exams. The show is not a simple musical piece. It reflects young people’s (and society, potentially) relationships with screens. Painfully aware of how these devices are robbing us of time and, despite our awareness, there doesn’t seem to be an alternative. But is there one?

Text, image, song, and different scenarios are a transcript for the different environments in which the protagonists' lives take place. The stage hosts two cages with mirrors, some touches of colour, and a piano. And, in the background, you can see chairs ready to perform a concert or to listen to it. They lie down, move, dance, sing, jump, use foul language, talk about flirting and drugs, music, their studies. They are recorded. They are shown. They are built. They are not actors, but friends in real life, students at the Orléans conservatory. Throughout the performance, they call each other by their first names, their real ones. The reality on stage suddenly becomes terribly moving. And as spectators, we enter that strange and contemporary spiral of seeing real people playing at fictionalising themselves by imitating the life they lead. The critics in France are saying there is a lot of excitement felt about this performance. Get ready for your hair to stand on end.