Reminiscencia is a performance piece created during lockdown by Chilean playwright Malicho Vaca Valenzuela.  Valanzuela is the sole live performer and from his desk on stage he taskes us through series of scenes and themes using AV material on his laptop projected onto a giant screen.  It’s ultimately about memory.  How we create a footprint in history and how that does and doesn’t endure.  His examples are all taken from his home town of Santiago de Chile.

So, we get a 3D exploration of the now (eventually demolished) hospital where he was born contrasted with his grandparents’ home; where they still live, where his grandmother was born.  We see how the visual traces of the unrest in Chile in the 1990s and 2000s appear and disappear in the visual record.  We see his grandfather’s attempts to keep his Alzheimer’s affected grandmother in the present by playing her music from their youth.  And then there are  the enigmatic fragments of poetry on metal panels scattered around the city by someone called JCR.  And quite a lot more.

It’s thought provoking, clever and sometimes very funny.  Valenzuela is very engaging and his grandparents who appear in the video are a hoot.  Maybe some of the references meant more to the largely (and noisily) Chilean audience than they did to me but there was still plenty to think about.  It’s only 55 minutes long and, although it’s in Spanish, it comes with English surtitles.

Reminiscencia is playing at Theatre Passe Muraille as part of the RUTAS festival and there are two more performances; tonight and tomorrow at 7pm.