Las apariciones

Expecting the theatre to reveal the future may be unrealistic. This belief reflects a childlike faith, a blind belief in the stage’s ability to generate mysteries.

Despite this, the effort is sincere. We stand before the audience and strive with all our might, to make the impossible seem real. This process raises difficult questions: Why do I often imagine bleak futures for myself? Why does misfortune seem more compelling? The line between fiction and biography blurs, making them nearly indistinguishable. How far am I willing to go, and what am I prepared to sacrifice for theatre?

Yet within this process, there is hope. Laughter has the ritual power to restore and renew. Since our childhood, my friendship with Pablo has been rooted in our ability to laugh, even at our shadows and ourselves.

Another central theme of the play is friendship as a witness to one’s life, serving as a constant mirror when we lose sight of ourselves.

Here we will try to laugh together, once again, even at our own death.

Fernando Delgado-Hierro

Six years after Los Remedios and the founding of this adventure, La_Compañía exlímite, we continue to explore identity through the perspectives of Fernando and Pablo, now focusing on the self that lies ahead.

Throughout the research process for this show, we have discovered the subtle yet profound difference between remembering the past—where the exercise of fiction about one’s own life awakens nostalgia and affection linked to one’s roots—and imagining what we are going to experience. Thinking about the future awakens in us a projective, imaginary action of what could be, of what is beating within me and, perhaps, could happen. The future is terra incognita, it is the place of desires and longings, of dreams to be fulfilled, but above all, of the unknown. And when we are faced with not knowing, anxiety, ghosts and fears appear. We find it easier to imagine what we do not want to be, where we do not want to go, where we do not want to end up. The backdrop to this ghostly projection is our own disappearance, the unsettling presence of the mystery of death. And this makes me think of a quote that my good friend Gérard Imbert recently shared with me from the British painter David Hockney: ‘The sun and death are the only things we cannot look at directly’.

The body and theatre serve as a time machine. Heiner Müller noted that processes or transitions are unnecessary because we have bodies. On stage, the body functions like a tesseract in geometry, a four-dimensional object that can move in three spatial dimensions and time. Las Apariciones is a journey that seeks answers from the theatre, allowing us to anticipate what is to come and to connect with a future reality through fiction.

Juan Ceacero