Sister and brother Luanda Casella (house artist at NTGent) and Pablo Casella, who have worked closely together for many years, delve into an old family scandal, a web of fragmented criminal stories they have been trying to unravel for more than 20 years. Only to uncover an impossible plot in which a child's innocence collides with the distorted reality of trauma.
Trauma leaves scars, lasting imprints that stem from the need for security and belonging. In Trouble Score, brother and sister explore the unreliable memories of victims, witnesses and perpetrators, and the deceptive stories and daily rituals we create to survive.
On stage, the duo embarks on an aesthetic journey with the narrative symbolism typical of the format of a ritual (song, evocation, prayer, spell...) in the form of a pop concert.
In this self-prescribed ceremony, the makers dismantle their own psychological space, pushing the boundaries of their personal stories to the universal themes of segregation, betrayal, exile, justification, death and mourning. With great humour and complicity, they explore the meaning of the ‘strangely familiar’ to capture the fantastical, mysterious and often hallucinatory nature of family dynamics.
Trouble Score uses magical realism and speculative fiction to transform negative events into pop songs, coping mechanisms into hyperbolic analogies, and unhealthy patterns into healing mantras. To turn scores of suffering into scores of healing.
The stage, dominated by a laser light design within a minimalist set, creates illusions of vast distances or immense structures. A sense of infinite space and an alien and distorted atmosphere reflect the show's fragmented narrative. Tight laser lines are the visual metaphor for the constraints faced by the characters. A third character consists of fragments of text that appear on screen in a whimsical choreography.
