ARCHIVES 2009 / Yo en el Futuro

The setting is given straight away: three people in their seventies – two women and a man – have hired three 10-year-old children and three 30-year-old adults, on the explicit criterion of their physical resemblance to themselves so that they can replay, all of them together, the different ages of their life. A life that they took care to record on short super-8 films, 60 and 40 years ago. At the back of the stage, a large movie screen on which images of the past go by; on stage, nine actors who take on gestures, poses, who put on costumes, manners, who make music, readings, dreams come to life again. Here we are brought into a large mirrored box where the reflections, sometimes multiplied to infinity, help transmit the life of one generation to another, in which the stories of yesterday and today, like in a time machine, are used to mix past, present and future. A Proustian theatre of sensitive remembrance, a Borgesian labyrinth of what remains and what changes, of what is transmitted and what is forgotten, Federico León's research aims at sharing the experience of times. Where are we in the history and memory of these three characters? What do we learn about their life, their secrets, their relationships? How can we enter their mental universe through the daily life of their gestures and habits? All these questions jointly asked by the images and the acting, which unfold simultaneously, gradually recompose, through a hypnotic phenomenon and collective work, a sort of sculpture of time in which everyone is both included and distinct. These coincidences, these correspondences and these differences offer the supreme and mysterious theatrical feeling of attending a unique performance in which nothing can ever be reproduced exactly as it was on this occasion. What Federico León wants to grasp fully in Me in the Future is not only the image, the acting or time, but the very essence of theatre. ADB