MORE ABOUT THE STORY: This production takes as its starting point the Nazi concentration camps, and in particular the day of their liberation. We stage the long and exhausting journey which the survivors had to take in order to return home. And to assess whether, once they were home, the nightmare had come to an end. And whether if even today, that nightmare is really over. ‘The camp will stay within us, until the day we die.’ Marceline Lorindan-Ivens
In the production there is a metaphorical staging of life in the Nazi camps and the experience of the moment of liberation. At the beginning, we see the farewells to friends and relatives in front of the train that will take them to the camp. The actors will live out the arrival at the camp in a state of increasing desperation at the fear of not knowing what’s going to happen to them, and the forced removal of all their possessions as well as their very status as people (their names are taken from them). From then on we see their day-to-day lives: how they work, eat, sleep, dream…Until the day arrives when they are set free. But what can they do with this new-found freedom? Leave? Stay?…a thousand questions are put before the audience, as the actors test different ways of returning home. With a leap forward to the present, the actors find themselves on a similar path, acting out the same situations they lived through in the past.
ABOUT TRÀFEC-TEATRE: Tràfec-Teatre caught the theatre ‘bug’ back in 1989 and has never looked back. It wasn’t, however, formally established as a theatre group until 1992. Since then we have experimented and taken risks in theatrical arts. For us, any space and any excuse is good for carrying out happenings or theatrical performance pieces, always with a view to using corporeal language. Eventually this led to the group looking for a more continuous model, and became more and more demanding, getting into techniques such as Ducroux or Biomechanics (Meyerhold), as well as looking at classical pantomime, without forgetting other theoreticians or masters of the theatre such as Grotowsky, Kantor, Brook or Craig.