The origin of all our search that has taken us around the world in the last 38 years, has been driven by the certainty that there are stories that can heal. Theatre as medicine, as an investigation of magical architectures and structures where the evocation of real or imaginary events produces benefits, pleasure, emotion, catharsis. We have found shamans in Russia, Mexico, Canada, Peru, India, Bolivia, Nepal, Ethiopia, Chile and each time we try to collect fragments of ancestral wisdom.

The fear of darkness, the loss of a family member, the wounds of love produce painful sores that only certain stories can heal.

Throughout these years we have built shows with filigree paper on which elements of this search have been printed.

Using lightness and training ourselves in it, we create stories in which illness and healing have always been present; from “Ícaro” to “Así se tiraba el destino” passing through “Nebbia” or “Donka” until arriving at “Per Te”.

I met Pablo many years ago in Mexico and a deep friendship was born between us. I took him with me to Canada and then he joined the Company when I did the new version of Maldita Canalla la Soledad.

In Buenos Aires a few years ago he told me about a project of his and over the years I have seen it develop and grow, marvelling at the subtlety of the attempt and the poetry of the result.

This new creation will allow us to return to the roots of our way of thinking about theatre made of closeness to the public, of searching for empathy, lightness and charm. It will also be a way of reflecting on all the work done in these 38 years of continuous playful creation.

52 is the number of a street that does not exist on the map of two visionary urban planners. It is the reconstruction of a night in which a father, doctor, rugby player is murdered by a group of hitmen; it is also the description of a method that Pablo discovered in one way and that with the Company we invented in another to give rise to stories that heal.

This project will allow us to meet again with friends who are doctors and friends who are architects; with them we will reflect on beauty, anamnesis, cartography, x-rays and, finally, the construction of models and mock-ups that represent dreams and emotions hidden in secret corners.

Daniele Finzi Pasca,
December 2020

—-

“I wonder what it means to reconstruct a tragedy? Is it going back to the zero fragment of the nightmare to organize the splinters of that pain? Or is it telling the story again, kneading it, reinventing it and sharing it until the poison dissolves?

Absences, lack, lead and gunpowder, joy and life frozen by the green Falcons. A city on the dissection table. La Plata, 1975, is the setting for this journey in search of Mario, my father, of the story that links us forever as a misty and fragmented mirror of other stories, so many, indelibly marked by that time of bullets and wings.”

Pablo Gershanik

—-

In 2017, following a healing process, Pablo Gershanik, a long-time collaborator of the Compagnia Finzi Pasca, built a model of La Plata (Argentina), his hometown. There he builds in miniature various scenes that happen simultaneously on a specific date in order to question how art can heal a personal and collective drama and how, in general, the process of resilience occurs.

The result obtained has such great value that Pablo, together with the Company, decided to transform this research into a theatrical show.

We stage the contemporaneity of events, we seek to tell, with the lightness of a feather, complex themes.

Pablo’s original model depicts some events that take place in a neighborhood in the city of La Plata (Argentina) and simultaneously in the rest of the world, one night 45 years ago.

The numbers of an imaginary raffle will open chapters that evoke coincidences, the story of a doctor, the passion for rugby and the brutal execution of a young father.

At the end of the afternoon, at the beginning of the night, a wedding has just been celebrated in the cathedral; it is followed by a party during which two families talk, exchange stories and small anecdotes.

The groom is Argentine, the bride and the family that accompanies her, come from far away.

In the center of the stage there is a gigantic wedding cake and representing the different characters, a multifaceted and charismatic actor.