The speed of light

May 2024. A group of older people meet at GAM with a foreign director to begin a creative journey. They talk, share experiences and discuss what it means to be an "older adult" in Chile. Memories, childhood wounds, difficulties in accessing health, the precariousness of pensions and sexuality in the final stage of life are some of the themes that appear.

With these ingredients, Marco Canale, screenwriter and theater and film director, known for creating projects with non-professional actors in different countries around the world, elaborates the elements to create The speed of light.

The protagonists, from the Olympic Village, Villa Francia, Yungay, Quinta Normal and Ñuñoa, among other sectors, co-created a documentary text that speaks of the fears of age, but also of hope, as “a project to cry and laugh that has love as its guiding axis,” as its director says.

Subjected to a strict regime of rehearsals, conversations and role-playing games, they visited places in Santiago and also in their memories, finding moments that opened the way to some wounds. "For me this is like a personal development. We tell our own, intimate experiences. (Marco) made us tell a lived experience where I went back 70 years and that has healed me, it has made me grow. We sometimes remember the past, but not yesterday," confides Luisa Labarca, participant.

On the other hand, Canale, settled in Chile since he met this group, has developed an artistic residency, meeting and listening work. The director carried out the same exercise in Argentina (FIBA), Germany (Theaterformen Festival), Switzerland (FAR – Festival des Arts Vivants), Japan (Tokyo TOKYO Festival), Spain (FIT de Cádiz) and Brazil (Mirada Festival, 2024), touring favelas, slums and other territories. The common denominator is looking for stories and their protagonists.

"The speed of light is due to the need that exists today for meeting spaces with older people. (This project) promotes the meeting that we need in this society that is sick and afraid of dying," says Marco Canale about this transformative contemporary and popular experience at the same time.

A journey through time

The speed of light is designed in an attractive format, which allows the public to experience it as a journey through time that takes place in Villa Olímpica and GAM. Those who attend the functions may be part of the complete tour or participate in only one of them.

In the first of its locations, attendees will enter the homes of five of its protagonists, becoming accomplices of their memories through reading some fragments of written testimonies. Already in GAM, they will witness a fiction, a journey through time inspired by love, their city, death and life afterward.

This second part will have as its natural setting the esplanade of the Villavicencio Tower, a place that was chosen by Canale for its historical significance. Teresa, the main character of the work, will appear there, an older woman who loves plants and who decides, sick with cancer, to look for the friends of her life to ask them to make a garden over her grave when she dies.

Dramaturgy and direction: Marco Canale | Cast: Alma Herrera, Cristina Villanueva, Enriqueta Leyton, Estela Riveros Aros, Gustavo Carrasco, Lindor Jeraldo, Luisa Labarca, Maria Adriana Gebauer, Maria Eugenia Herrera, Macarena Alvarez, Maria Angélica Concha, Marta Acuña, Martin Miranda, Oriana Canales, Óscar Collao, Patricia Rodríguez, Pola Ytier, Rosa Lizama, Verónica Muñoz and Ximena Velozo | Music: Vicente Larroulet | Scenography: Mariana Tirantte | Choreography: Macarena Álvarez | Assistant director: Michelle Rideau | Artistic advice: Paula Aros Gho | Territorial link: Fabrisiana Cruz.

GAM Production | Finance: Iberescena.