Roland mon amour

About the show

Suppose I’m alone with my synth and I’m stuck. Actually, I play a very nervous woman who is about to face something very intense. There’s nothing intense in my musical selection, but I try to be a bit punk because that always gets applause in shows. When I think of punk, I only see the guy with the spikes who always stared at me in Maycar (a disco in Santiago). I’m on stage alone, without the spikes and wanting people to say: this girl is really into punk. The punks I’ve known didn’t recycle, threw their fags on the ground, and wore tight pants with chains.

Me, I like slouchy jeans and I even recycle my period products, so I’m giving up on being punk forever. Imagine I start to offer excuses, like when you’re going to speak English and say sorry for my English, because what I’m proposing is very difficult. So suppose I know andyouknow, but we are all very polite and we assume that the event could happen, and we hope that something will happen and that we won’t fall asleep.

Main objective: for my audience not to fall sleep. So I can choose to do something entertaining so my audience doesn’t fall asleep, or I can pump out a frenetic rhythm until I actually make them tense. The latter is not a very noble desire for an artist who considers herself a hedonist and only wants to make people feel good. The aim could be for the public to come out to see me because they want to dance, and that I like. Let them say: I came out of that Roland mon amour gig in the mood to shake it up and super aware.“ 

Note from the author and director

I started imagining Roland mon amour three years ago, when I turned on the Roland and lit up, realising I could play this instrument despite not knowing music. My late-found passion for raves began to spark dreams about a new kind of gathering, where I would summon my tribe through electronic music, where I would offer my body to invoke Mother Earth through chants of desperation. This work is about my love for music, desire, and partying, but above all, it’s about my quest for resilience on a creative path filled with frustrations and doubts. Yet, it’s also about an intuitive belief in connecting through sound. I strive to avoid theatricality in favour of being present, connected to what I do, to what disrupts and pushes us, transcending the textual and the dramatic.  

Roland is a monodrama of desire and music. Roland is an open wound, a conflict with life, a perpetual contradiction and a quest for infinite love. In this project, I want to be sincere, ironic, and down-to-earth, and share with you a sonic journey through emotion and pleasure, aiming to create connection and identification through my own vulnerability. The proposal is permeated by the contradictions with my identity, the search for hedonism and escape routes, the anger of the everyday, my ecological conversion, civic duty, recurrent depression, the desire for community and affection, the precariousness of art, the complicated relationship with guilt, influenced by a Catholic upbringing, and the love for my cat. It is a presentation of myself and my passions, where I share the same space as the public, with nothing between us, and I want us to be together in this. I hope I succeed and that you all enjoy it, because I want to share something beautiful. 

Cris Balboa