Actos de juventud – La Tristura

“If we don’t work when we are twenty, nobody will love us when we are thirty.”

—Gertrude Stein

Actos de Juventud: loving, shouting, running, stealing, losing, dancing, falling, lying, burning.

What wishful thinking leads us to believe in our youth that we can live with others, that we can understand each other, that we can judge each other? Where does this hope come from? Youth is the time of communication, of finding a path to others; when we’re young, motion requires no argument, it is physical, natural. Is it possible to think together? Can I suffer with you?

Actos de Juventud is a love song to a generation that is still fighting to unite, to get to know itself, to believe in itself, to come to life. What we are striving for is a landscape about the energy of youth: youth as we understand it, the loss and appropriation of happiness from one instant to the next. A poem about the states of mind of human beings. Is there any other way to live? Is it true what we have been told about love? Can we keep, day and night, our heart lit up, alive, young?

These are the desperate acts of those who once thought they would be loved just for being young, just because they asked for everything possible.

Guía del Ocio

“They turn into poetry the euphoria of youth going up in flames as it is lived, thought and expressed, in the same way that their own childhood memories, their loves, their confusion and their hopes burn away.”

–Pepe Henríquez

Artez

“La tristura, a model of comprehensive scene creation from which to inhabit the world in a different way; the stage as the ultimate space for creation where we can stop to look at each other and listen closely again, where we can imagine and say how we want to live, and do it in a collective way.”

UBU European Stages

“The lucidity of their vision causes an inescapable pain and a commitment they accept in all its intensity. One of the most relevant companies of the new European scene.”

Opened Jaunary the 21st, 2010 at Escena Contemporánea Festival from Madrid.

Creation, text and performance: Itsaso Arana, Pablo Fidalgo, Violeta Gil and Celso Giménez
Light design and technical coordination: David Benito
Sound and Musical composition: Merran Laginestra
Wardrobe design: Pedro y el Lobo

Drawings: Itsaso Arana
Tech team on tour: Tirso Izuzquiza and Eduardo Vizuete
Photo and documentation: Gerardo Sanz
With the support by: Artistas en Residencia Bilbaoeszena Program, Escena Contemporánea, La Cuarta Pared, Teatro de los Manantiales, INAEM