Imagine you’re reading this text, and it asks you to imagine that you’re reading it. Imagine that, for some reason, you became curious about ATRESBANDES’ latest show, and perhaps you still are. Imagine your curiosity growing as you read, or perhaps not growing exactly, but gradually taking on a clearer shape, becoming easier to imagine. Imagine being able to picture the next word you’re about to read, then the one after that, and the next, and so on, perhaps for two whole days. Now imagine you’re sitting in the audience at Teatre Alegria, when silence falls just before the start of Impossible imaginar res, a show whose name in Catalan would appear to describe the impossibility of imagining. Impossible to imagine anything.

Now imagine the opposite. Imagine that the impossible thing is not imagining. Impossible to imagine nothing. The title still works, and somehow it’s easier to imagine it that way. Imagine you’re inside a cave, in some distant past, before Egara was even founded, shrouded in darkness. In the dark, someone lights a flame and starts telling a story. In the dark, there is always someone telling stories. And while you’re imagining all this, the person sitting next to you nudges you because you’re falling asleep.

Impossible imaginar res is a highly visual, speculative performance that takes us on a journey through a series of theatrical tableaux built around the following question: can we imagine the future without pessimism?

The piece walks a tightrope between imagination and reality, creating a constant back-and-forth between the most immediate, tangible experience and the wildest flights of the imagination. All this with the simplicity, punch and humour that define ATRESBANDES’ work: an imaginative economy of means that turns theatre into a game played out in the present, an approach that we also find in the work of Elena Carvajal, Quim Bigas and María García Vera.