It doesn’t matter (we’ll do worse next time)

The worst thing would be for nothing to happen. To unfold, to turn the catastrophe on its head as if to say ‘it doesn’t matter’ – taking ‘it doesn’t matter’ to a whole new level – to unearth the fierce pleasure of excess, of collapse, of tragedy, of the critical moment. Life is so wild that it devours the ordinary human condition through its cataclysmic outbursts, a mixture of low and high notes, of joy and suffering alike. In the eye of the storm, to exploit the trivial to circumvent the irony of fate, to create an absurd moment of suspension and humour, to stumble right on the brink of disaster. Never mind, we’ll do worse next time. The triumphant and tragic brilliance of three victims of the worst, who extricate themselves with humour from absurd situations; who could have escaped fate but prefer to throw themselves into the thick of the fray, simply because living is never about staying on the sidelines of what might happen. A show structured like a cataclysm, or rather a series of catastrophes, of events spiralling out of control, of lost balance, of objects and people collapsing. Three performers with very different physical qualities, gripped by panic and the struggle for survival, who learn to extricate themselves from difficult situations, escape, or face disastrous consequences. A stage design centred on the pleasure of constructing traps, pitfalls, dangers of varying degrees of imminence, and irreversible mechanisms. From the sword of Damocles to a sudden earthquake, the aim is to evoke that deep inhalation that precedes the accident and that deep exhalation that follows having narrowly escaped it. A wild and intuitive approach, which escapes the worst through instinct, luck or utopia. A pronounced taste for the absurd revealed by situations of difficulty and distress; humour overcomes inevitability to offer the audience a deconstructed and radiant vision of drama and tragedy. If there is one certainty in the world, it is the absolute necessity, for a world aware of its own end, to dream, to look to the future, to break free from solastalgia – the anguish of a foretold collapse. Our craft, like our desire, is to offer that element of dream that builds a confident present, to sow at least a few seeds of it.