Director and dramaturgy: Pau Bachero
Upon entering the Dissection Room at Summerhall, the audience is divided into five generational groups: Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, and Generation Z. We are asked to download an app and answer five questions about our personalities, the things we like, and the person we want to be, a gesture meant to reveal something of who we are beyond the labels of age. Guided by La Fura dels Baus’ Kalliópê app, A Teen Odyssey by La Mecànica unfolds as a hybrid of performance, technology, and audience participation, seeking to explore intergenerational differences, and, perhaps more importantly, connections.
The experience blends app interaction, live performance, and exchanges with fellow spectators. Colours, sounds, images, and shifting light draw us into instinctive groupings, testing how quickly strangers can connect. The app plays a series of recorded voices, weaving together fears, desires, hopes, and dreams that echo across generations in their own coming-of-age stories. These moments aim to persuade us to see past labels, to recognise a common coming-of-age story that unites rather than divides.
Yet the most resonant connections arrive not through the phone, but through the body. Vila and Pascual embody a father and daughter in a series of carefully choreographed sequences, tracing the fragile movement from distance to recognition, from silence to listening, from estrangement to care. Their choreography is precise yet tender, and when, near the end, Vila sings Sparklehorse’s It’s a Wonderful Life while gazing at Pascual, the exchange between them carries a force that stays with the audience after the performance ends.
The work seeks intimacy, but within forty-five minutes that intimacy is hard to achieve. The generational categories lean toward a Western framing, and the cultural touchstones—Nintendo 64 as shorthand for childhood, for instance—reflect a narrow, middle-class memory. The five personality questions that promise to reveal who we are feel both pragmatic and reductive, too quick to capture the complexity beneath the labels.
La Mecànica’s A Teen Odyssey is inventive in form and at times moving in performance, but its reach sometimes exceeds its grasp. For all its ambition, the performance shows that connection is not created through algorithms or categories, but through the live encounter between two people willing to listen, to see, and to understand beyond the labels imposed upon them.
Runs until 25 September 2025
The Reviews Hub Star Rating
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7
