In search of Neverland

Last May, I have turned 50 years of professional life, a piece of history that is almost all of my adult life. And even if I don't think there's anything transcendental to celebrate, besides being still standing, thoughts overlap, flashes of memories; the persistence of a journey that, I see it again now, embraces four compact moments that I don't want to be overlooked by memory.

From that precocious and crazy youth at Libre Teatro Libre surrounded by violence and terror, to the solitary transhumance of an exile full of questions and absences. From the mist of an almost green lake where you can invent the Roots of a house and another theater, to the dignity of a Magdalena Project, which I embrace as if it were the proudest of women, with a lot of crosses and little redemption.

Because I feel that it is the same journey, the same movement, the same identity.

These are the bridges that still bind me to an idea of theatre, because they were the only resources that, wanting to go beyond principles, theories, systems, have managed to humanize a craft.

No performance, even if it is beautiful and extraordinary, will ever be able to compete with the intensity of defending an unattainable dream.

Many of us have been builders of illusions, the kind that make us believe that life can be better than what it is if we keep our small things at bay or if we do a theater permeated by fatigue and tenacity, or if we do our best not to give in. We have clung to the illusions and scattered them even knowing that they are nothing more than a broken horizon or a mirage.

But it may be that wealth and essence reside precisely in this faithful chimera, in this perennial consistency of the ephemeral, in this need to meet even if it´s just to exchange lost compasses.

Because I can assure you, there is no worse thing for lovers of reason, of prudence, of objective reality than seeing us go, over and over again, in search of Neverland.

Cristina Castrillo
Teatro delle Radici
http://teatrodelleradici.net/