La Distance | Tiago Rodrigues

Tiago Rodrigues, one of the great storytellers of contemporary theater, delivers a love letter to family in his latest work. A bond that stretches across planets, environmental collapse, and lifetimes. A voice message sent into infinity. Then another, and another. Each transmission more powerful than memory, vaster than distance. Two lives orbit on a rotating stage, far apart yet closer than ever.

Half a century from now, humanity teeters on the edge of survival. As life on Earth becomes increasingly fragile, a part of the population has relocated to Mars, striving to build new systems of living and coexisting. Tiago Rodrigues tells the story of a father who chooses to stay behind, on Earth, unwilling to let go of a disappearing world, and a daughter who chooses Mars, embracing a future yet to be conceived. Though 225 million kilometers apart, as Rodrigues puts it, “talking about distance, we also discover proximity […] The disharmony between collective ambition and the reality of political and economic power is one of our era’s great paradoxes. How will we explain this to future generations? Perhaps it’s a symptom of who we are as a species: a fundamental contradiction between our extraordinary capacity to create and our tendency to destroy. “La Distance” reflects on the monumental task awaiting us over the next fifty years. But I feel like someone who, after reading an encyclopedia, ends up writing a sonnet. It’s a magnification through miniaturization.”

Rodrigues’ “La Distance” is an interplanetary stage in motion. Two relatives in parallel orbit. An unseen thread connecting generations. A moving elegy about memory, existential tension, parenthood, and the emancipation of children. A profoundly human performance celebrating the vastness of the universe and of love. Two worlds that, ultimately, become one.

Departure point

I begin every project with an attempt to answer two questions at once. The first question is, ‘Who do I want to work with?’ But it isn’t only about work. Knowing that life is short, that time is precious, and making theater is an intensely social activity in which the professional and the personal spheres overlap, the question takes a different form: ‘With whom do I want to spend a significant part of my life, working and sharing an experience that might prove to be transformative?’

The second question is, ‘What issues do I feel an urgent need to grapple with on stage?’ Here, too, the question can have other layers of meaning because I’ve tended in the past to translate a kind of distillation of my concerns as a citizen with my own private anxieties into a sense of artistic urgency. The question then becomes, ‘What matters of intimate and political urgency do I feel the need to translate into theatre?’ Thus, the first challenge I set myself in the genesis of each project is to attempt to reconcile the answers to these two questions.

The first answer is Adama Diop. I worked with Adama for the first time in 2021 on the only production of a play from the repertoire that I’ve done thus far, Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard.” His Lopakhin, so complex, authentic, and filled with humanity, was entirely deserving of his Best Actor prize from the Critics Association in France and moved audiences in many countries. My desire to work with Adama again corresponds to a wish to extend that collaboration we began three years ago and to deepen an artistic complicity based on a shared understanding of the responsibility and freedom of an actor on stage. Assembling a team of regular artistic collaborators in lighting, sound, set design, and costumes around the artistic presence of Adama is a fundamental departure point for this project.

The second answer is made up of various fragmentary answers, coming together in a labyrinth of thematic and poetic coincidences. I’m interested in exploring the distance that can develop between a father and a daughter as a concrete subject but also as a metaphor for a generational conflict, which, in the context of today’s climate crisis, can sometimes translate into an existential conflict. I want to talk about the idea that humanity has reached a point in its history where we can no longer expect future generations to have better lives than recent ones, an aspiration that has been the basis for social and political organizations for centuries. I need to ask how big the divide between generations will be in a future that’s dystopian but ever more realistic, a time of struggles for resources and environmental catastrophe. I want to understand whether the young people of today and of the future will see the world (or worlds) so differently from us and from our ancestors that they will find it hard to understand us.

I’m also interested in projecting a narrative into a relatively distant future, fifty years hence, in an attempt to interrogate which path humanity would need to take if we were to colonize Mars. How will the settlers be selected? What will life be like on Mars and on Earth? What does it mean to belong to a species that lives on two planets? How will familial, social, and private behaviors be changed by this space diaspora project?

One of the recurring topics of conversation that I’ve shared with Adama ever since we first met is theatrical training, based on our common concern about the paths taken by young artists. We are also both fathers, with an interest in how our daughters and sons see the world. The fact that we both live and work in a country that is not the place of our birth is another shared circumstance that steers our conversations toward the subject of distance. When we started meeting to discuss this project, it was immediately clear to me that the terrain of our collaboration would be a fertile one for us to invent a show that tackles the distance between a father and a daughter, an intimate, microscopic allegory for matters of monumental global urgency.

This was followed by a powerful and inspiring encounter with young actress Alison Dechamps, which confirmed the double dimension of this project. By talking about the distance between two characters on two different planets, we are also dealing with the distance between generations in society and in the theater. Finally, by talking about distance, we also discover proximity.

-Tiago Rodrigues