Vulcano

About the show

“When a house burns down, the essential structures are revealed”.
Kafka

“You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?” Nietzsche

Vulcano is the story of a family that tries to save itself from past trauma, the fire that took place in the building where they lived and whose real causes remain unknown.
The unexpected arrival of a documentary maker and her interest in the family’s story will substantially change the link between them. The prodding by this external character will alter the order of the household, causing the other characters to compete for prominence.

What happens when an intimate confession becomes a representation, a ploy? Do our experiences have more value when they are part of a story, when someone looks at us? Where is the boundary between a genuine interest for others’ pain and morbid curiosity? To what extent are we ready to instrumentalise our suffering to stop being invisible?

Director’s note

Vulcano is the result of a meeting between Victoria Szpunberg and myself. An artistic, personal and intellectual meeting that took place during the creation of Mal de Coraçon with the Cia Solitaria at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya in 2023.

Back then, we already shared a desire to explore the boundaries between writing and directing, to find a work methodology that would allow for a real encounter between our two perspectives on theatre. The result is a hybrid process that combines text writing and creative theatre that seeks to generate a radically alive and entertaining play fuelled by a dynamic interplay between text and performance.

Victoria and I are passionate talkers and our enthusiastic chatter always ends up taking us to the place of the unnameable, the incomprehensible, the unspeakable. And that’s where our shared need for theatre is born, to give rise to wonder, mystery, poetry and, of course, humour.

In this work, we analyse our relationship with pain and its story. In a world saturated with reality shows, true-crime documentaries, biopics, autofiction, and countless other stories, saturated with constant editing and manipulation of authenticity, truth, and reality, we ask ourselves: To what extent do narratives build experience? To what extent does do tales save us and to what extent do they condemn us? Do we need to tell stories to heal? Does the disproportionate consumption of real stories help us to be more empathetic, or does it anesthetise us to the possibility of catastrophe?

  Andrea Jiménez