Teatro Nacional São João E.P.E. – Porto, Portugal
A Primeira Vez – Tiago Correia / The first time
A teenage couple hang out in a park, but the intimate encounter evolves into a dialogue on other fronts: she faces her first major bereavement, the death of her father.
He, a young activist, the first major climate demonstration as a result of his commitment. As the conversation unfolds, in a situation that is apparently held back by embarrassment, we discover that their intimacy, their relationship, is a refuge: both are facing something bigger, which they dare not confront.
Teatre Nacional de Catalunya SA – Barcelona, Spain
Dopamina – Daniela Freixas
Júlia is a 17-year-old girl who recognises that she has only had unsatisfactory sexual relationships so far because of her obligation to please her partners, trying to imitate porn videos, to the point of assuming that she was actually raped by her own boyfriend. Pau, on the other hand, reveals a completely unknown problem: erectile dysfunction among teenagers caused by pornography addiction. An addiction that leads teenagers to explore the limits of their bodies in a distorted view. The thesis is that due to biological dopamine mechanisms, online pornography is creating individuals with a chemical addiction to violence.
La Comèdie de Reims, France
Au Collège / al liceo – Cédric Orain
At School, moments of confrontation between the Hig School Principal and students, reprimanded for acts committed against the rules. A girl is grounded for threatening another, while the Principal is trying to prevent the spiral of revenge attacks between girls. In the background, a society where adolescents are victims and executioners at the same time, patterns of behaviour emerge that they reiterate, nevertheless suffering them. A small group meets after school for the rehearsal of a choreography, in a dialogue in which conflicts and alliances emerge. In the end, the dance frees everyone. Dancing, together. Without worrying about anything else. Little by little they relax, enjoy themselves and forget themselves. Their bodies can finally breathe.
KVS Brussels, Belgium
Het Grote Nablijven / The Great Detention
Rules of the game:
The text is written for non-adult players. Everyone can decide for themselves whether they belong to this category.
The script serves only as a guide and a toolbox for those who accept it. The story exists when it comes to life and therefore has an infinite number of forms.
The text is written for a chorus of voices, which may consist of three, twelve or any other number of actors. There are no characters, but the text can serve as a handle to create them. Detention is fixed in a library, unless someone has a better idea. Those with money and good hoovers can slowly fill the library with sand, as if it were the bottom of an hourglass. Everyone is free to delete or add to the text. Everyone is welcome to edit the text to include local, personal and contemporary context. Versions of the text or other relics of the process can be shared with future generations in this dropbox. Do not ask the question too much: what would the writer have wanted to say? Occasionally ask yourself the question: what do we gain from this text?
We exist in the present only to the degree that we put our faith in the future.
ERT Italy
Alessando Berti
Le Vacanze. Atto I / Holidays. Act I
A dialogue in the near future. Not as far off as we would like.
In a plain that rising temperatures have made desert, small oases survive in eroded hill valleys. In a bamboo grove that has resisted the fires there is a tiny pond, fed by one of the few still active water tables. Here, soaking in the clayey mud, two teenagers, Tom and Lao, seek refreshment on a scorching day. The two boys are students, on holiday after their exams. To combat the sultriness, they play visualisation games in which they imagine they are in cold places, reminisce about their childhood, talk about themselves, their loves, their now-dead parents. And they wait for the Performer, an old artist who tours the farms in the area as their only remaining attraction.
Le Vacanze is the account of a day of two bright teenagers, curious heirs in an extreme world: Lao, with his faith despite everything in life and the future, Tom, with his precocious disillusionment. In a now completely literal world, the fantasy of the boys and the dense, ritual presence of the Performer resonate in the void with the force of an extreme song, in a confrontation between different generations and upbringings, united in the emergency of having to make sense of the remnants of humanity left, poised, then and always, between intellectual despair and ethical voluntarism.
