The show must go on, but you need to go home

Theatre company: Baro d’Evel
Performance: Qui som?

After the applause, we leave the theatre. Yet the performance does not seem to be over.
The entire company, instruments in hand, comes out with us (the public) and, with the bass drum leading the way, lets music, colour and voices overflow beyond the doors.
Within the disorderly genius of this ensemble, one voice makes itself heard, recolling a message from the performance inside :
“We must not stop, the show goes on, we must keep searching…”
Then, with eyes wide open in surprise , almost scared at the audience’s jubilation:
“But now you have to go home, you have to sleep — we’re finished here.”
A wave of laughter rises from the crowd.
We — an audience of young people, adults and elderly alike, some elegantly dressed, others simply so — a diversity that had struck me upon entering — understand perfectly well the difference between the transcendent message of the performance and the contingent necessity of life: going to bed. And yet we happily accept to misunderstand it, continuing to sing and move along with the overwhelming wave of those characters.
Those surprised eyes turn back to us again, like those of a teacher bewildered by students who simply do not understand, despite the obviousness of the explanation.
There were many messages in the performance, surely there are still many I have yet to grasp. Messages not written, not declared — meanings interwoven in the expressive plurality of voices, gestures, images, and in the absurd world into which we were thrown.
Between hilarity, madness and vital energy, each of us, in our own way, will have found our personal meanings.
Here some of mine: we must not give up , even when everything is lost; the difference among people, make the richness of a group ; what matters is to set out on the journey, the direction will reveal itself later,
I was reminded of the performances of the Dutch company Dogtroep and of the theatre of Eugène Ionesco. Likewise they gave me the feeling of understanding nothing and, at the same time, ignited curiosity, the desire to know, to start searching.
An imposed message will never be truly received, except by lazy minds who prefer to be seduced by the cries of propaganda.
This performance states nothing openly. On the contrary, it conveys doubt, uncertainty, absurdity — a madness of fragments that leaves us stunned.
But these fragments are pieces of a puzzle that each of us reworks in our own thoughts, intertwining them with fragments of our own lives, constructing meaning, rediscovering emotions.
The message is no longer an imposed law: it is ours.
And each of us will have a different one, yet probably a similar one. Because there, outside the theatre, we all find ourselves agreeing in this role of fools — remaining, carrying on the performance, even when we are told that it is time to go home.