The Story of a Show That Went On: Theater and Resilience

Looking back at the past year and a half it is hard to know where to begin this story. Ever since restarting my life in a different country, eight years ago I have been wanting to devise a theater piece around the theme of leaving. Immigration is a very complicated process to go through and theater has always been an ideal way for me to express and explore things that intrigue me. For a couple of years, I had been trying to reinvent myself in a new place and rediscover my identity after grief. I instinctively knew that theater was the way to do that. If there ever was anything that made me get up and carry on was working on a play. They don′t say the show goes on for nothing.

Resilience is the first word that comes to mind when I think of “The Show must go on.” Theater practice is famous for withstanding the test of time and anyone who has ever worked in production knows to be always prepared for the unexpected. The actor knows that there is an unavoidable reality to be faced on the stage and like in life, they must step forward to meet it. In this article , Dr. Shahram Heshmat breaks down the essential components of resilience to reveal that most of these elements are tightly linked with the pursuit of a meaningful goal that fuels the journey through adaptation, flexibility, constant actualization, and social support. Like many artists during the Covid-19 pandemic, our little emerging theater company learned to embody all of these processes.

The Journey of Irse

I think it started on a lazy morning whilst visiting my Dad in Ireland during Christmas 2018. The concept of portable doors came to my head and I saw them on a stage made with ribbons: imagine drawing a portal on thin air through which different spaces could be summoned. To those who have experienced different homes, sometimes all the familiar spaces can overlap each other in memories, triggered by meaningful events. The famous line from Romeo and Juliet came to mind: “Parting is such sweet sorrow.”I wrote a poem and let some loose ideas find their way onto a piece of paper. Among my scribbles, two sentences lingered: “Home is Now. Home is People.” There was something there about our mysterious relationship with distances, objects, and memories. What was this “sweet sorrow” made of? I perceived an invisible string attached to my past self that did not exactly need to be cut but rather used to weave the present, even the future.

I went back to Barcelona and started talking about it. The more I told people the more real it seemed. Eventually, I made a plan: it would be a collective creation to explore stories and experiences around the concept of Leaving. I wanted to reconcile my grieving homesickness with the gift of the present moment. I reached out to friends in the arts who had left their homes: “Do you want to play?” They did.

After a few meetings, Teatro del Sótano was born, I had an ensemble, a wonderful AD (Assistant Director), and thanks to a great friend, a space to rehearse: a basement. I have always loved basements: liminal rooms that hold all the things that have no place to be but won't be thrown away. The home of hidden treasures guarded by walls titillating with memory and life, waiting to get out. Stories to be told.

Every week I would meet with Nastascha Contreras Pérez , my AD to design each session, looking for themes, archetypes, and images, mixing different theater techniques and exercises. Stories started to emerge. The generosity of the actors with their memories, their availability, and their joy, supported and lit the way. It was exhausting but exhilarating, devising was bringing us back to ourselves: our new home was our multilingual theater tribe, and the process that was beginning to unfold.

We started workshopping in October 2019 and by the beginning of 2020 we had a first draft of the play, simply titled Irse (Leaving)We were ready to start on the actual production phase. The parts were cast, the design was in motion, and we were excited. Then everything changed.

Entering the Virtual Space

The Covid-19 Global Pandemic hit us with seemingly no warning. Everything stopped and of course, rehearsing was out of the question. At first, we thought it'd be only for a couple of weeks. Little did we know. I decided to keep our rehearsal times to continue to provide some sort of structure to our weeks so we started to meet online.

Even though the objective was to continue with character building and script analysis, it became evident that the meetings were turning into a kind of support group. We would check in, listen and see how we were doing. It started to seem silly to carry on as if the world was “going back to normal” anytime soon. We knew we needed to establish a dialogue with what was happening all around us. One of the actresses who works with 360 Video introduced this idea to us. We began thinking about the “real” and the “virtual”, and the role that distances play in that dynamic. Our current isolation was an abstract metaphor for the play we had devised – the play that we were still devising. Could our theatrical experiment still exist in other forms, through other media, at different times?

The notion of a virtual space presented new questions and ideas about interactivity. An isolated audience member sitting at home, viewing through a computer screen needed to be engaged. How do we create a theatrical environment when there are no lights to dim down or curtains to raise? Principles of immersive theater started to weave themselves into the strategy. How can we do “virtual immersive”?

One of the wonderful things about Teatro del Sótano was that it was conceived as a multidisciplinary collective. We had the human power to design, write, film, and program something that could resemble a simple interactive virtual experience. A parallel product on its own that could create a dialogue with the eventual “live-action” play. Our efforts now had a new focus. We started calling it Irse: The Game.

We developed this concept throughout the first lockdown. We had a new script and a newly devised interaction. We developed the “scenes” as different video-art pieces that would pop up depending on the “users” decisions. It was a very simplified version of Choose Your Own Adventure. Learning to navigate a new medium transformed the work and our relationship with it. We didn’t know for how long we would be locked up. And who are we if we cannot do what we love? This created new challenges and a disposition to dive into the unknown. It was not easy. Like most people around the globe, we were all suffering from anxiety and depression. We had to listen to our bodies and minds to create space for flexibility and slow down. We truly embraced the principle of only doing what we genuinely could. But still, we kept moving. So, resilience was not just blind, unstoppable passion that could break down all walls. It sometimes looked like a kind, compassionate whisper, an invitation for honesty and vulnerability.

As we continued to explore the possibilities of The Game, we had the opportunity to participate in an online theater festival. We worked on yet another version of the script and started exploring the language of Live Zoom Theater, an intriguing hybrid of camera work and real-time performance. The resourcefulness of the artists was outstanding: actors wore many production hats while blending the personal space and the performance space. To the creative mind, obstacles have a way of looking like puzzles to be solved so this new territory was a fascinating invitation to play.

Creating the Circle

After that experience, lockdown restrictions were fluctuating: we could start thinking about rehearsing in person again but we could be called back to our homes at any minute. No plan could be sustained in this atmosphere of uncertainty. At this point, Irse felt more like a trans-media universe than a play and all the lessons learned whilst continuing to work on the script during the year organically started to manifest. The 360 video element gave us the clue. We would stage the play in the round: in a theater, the audience would frame the circle and be able to see the ever-present ensemble weave all their narratives together. Additionally, we would film the whole play from the center of the circle using a 360 camera. That way, if we were locked up again we could still create an experience where the audience could enjoy the play and actually decide what character to follow through their device. Same play, a different experience: live-action and virtually immersive. In this way, our learnings from the virtual playground were informing the theatrical play. Our creativity was thriving even amongst the uncertainty.

After a short residency in the outskirts of Barcelona, we put it all together and booked a theater. In the summer of 2021, we managed to produce a short run of the live show. We put in place all Covid-19 safety strategies that we could think of and finally managed to share our journey with an audience. The show inspired deep conversations about immigration and the overall response warmed us in a meaningful way. Getting to finally perform was a triumph of the imagination. The Show had gone on.

Theater and Resilience

It had taken us a year and a half to accomplish what we had set out to do. But the thing that we set out to do evolved with us as the journey continued. The narrative, the search, and the circumstances kept mixing in a way that constantly re-signified the play and the process. So it continued to be alive and full of meaning. In the beginning, we wanted to talk about distances and all that is contained in them, and paradoxically during the isolation of the lockdown, these distances were somewhat dissolved through the connections that were rekindled in the virtual space. We wanted to talk about hope and resilience in immigration and those are the very things that made us carry on in the face of all the challenges the Pandemic represented. We wanted to release ourselves from the past and create a new dialogue with our memories, and the one-day-at-a-time nature of life during the Pandemic left us no choice but to engage with the present.

Reflecting on this past year I realize that amid my personal crusade, I needed to say something, to get something done; and I knew the best way to do that was to commit myself to a theater journey with others. Resilience is fueled by hope and as Chan Hellman says in his moving TED Talk , hope is a social gift.

This brings me back to why and how “the show goes on.” What is this spell that theater casts on its participants that continues to inspire a curtain to rise day in and day out, against most odds? Looking back on my theater journey, I think it′s to do with showing up for people. The audience and the players show up as if they had summoned each other, forever bound in this symbiosis: the event of the play. Resilience is not just an individual quality, it manifests through a dynamic environment of trust and belief; it grows in a team. There is a goal bigger than all of us that calls us forward and we go, because we believe in ourselves, but also because we believe in each other. Theater makes us ingenious, resourceful, and supportive.

In the end, the idea of the ribbons as portable doors did not find a space in the staging. But those doors were alive and present, not just through the zoom windows, but in the constant evolution of the narrative, in the exploration of the different media, and in the combination of multiple timelines in the story. The portable ribbon doors meant transformation, connection, and fluidity. And these are the gifts we found along the way. The show looked very different from what I first imagined but it was so much more. The journey was challenging, but I don′t know what my year in lockdown would have looked like without Irse. The show went on but most importantly, the show made us go on.