Then

During the last month of February it was held in London the second edition of the Waterloo Vaults Festival. For six weeks the labyrinth of tunnels under Waterloo station were filled up with concerts, art and alternative theater. We enjoyed so much Then, the new show written by and starring Yve Blake supported by the Young National Theatre Studio.

Entrance to the Waterloo Vaults Festival

The stage is almost empty: a microphone stand, a computer, a projector and a curtain for the few but effective costume changes. But as soon as the show begins Yve Blake takes care of covering the entire stage with monologues, interacting with the projections, singing, dancing... and she even dares to go with rap!

The show begins with three questions: Who are you? Who you'll be? And, most important, who you used to be? It is from this last question that the the full show is developed. We are always the same throughout our lives? Or the situations we live make us change gradually while we grow up? Then talks about the past we used to live in, but also invites us to reflect on what this implies about changes and about life .

The project started well before staging with the creation of the website Who Were We where people around the world was invited to anonymously submit their stories, pictures or memories about the people who they used to be in the past. From there the artist created a speech including more than a hundred of the stories received to make us think about ourselves, as most of them are stories which anyone can feel identified with, putting aside a comedy look that turns the reflection in a fun and entertaining show.

Promotional image for the show

Many of the stories are read by the interpreter from behind her computer, some of them accompanied with images from the projector, while others are put together into songs linked by themes and tidying up the speech by age of this past persons. So throughout the show we see our thoughs when we were infants, how we saw the world when we went to school and the problems of becoming a teenager. The last part of the show, however, brings together the reflections of older people who also collaborated on the website and give us an idea of how they see it was their life when they were 20, 30 or 40 years old.

One of the positive parts of this structure is the increase in the intensity of emotions. Leaving the reflections of older people for the end of the show allows it to start in a much lighter and fun way, including the preference for sandwiches without crust, to gradually pass to the typical adolescence body concerns and self-acceptance. Getting to the end of the show one of the most tender and sweet songs is “You grow me up, now I'll grow you down” where, without leacing completely aside the bold and fun touch of the show, we can reflect about elderness and how generation after generation some help us to make the road to success in life while in exchange, sooner or later, we will have to help them rid the road of life.

Finally, the show concludes with a final song bringing the most interesting responses to this particular question from the site : If you had five minutes with your past you, what would you say? We invite you to answer it yourselfs.

Ricard Gispert
@ricardgispert