Autoreverse

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30 January 2020 · Follow on Stagedoor

“The first show in Tarek Iskander’s first season as Artistic Director of BAC, this collaboration brings together Omar Elerian, the director of Misty, and Argentinian performer Florencia Cordeu. Cordeu was just one when she and her family fled the dictatorship – leaving behind other family members with whom they communicated via audio letters on cassettes. Some of those family members were amongst the thousands of those who disappeared during the military dictatorship. Cordeu pieces together her family and country’s past through childhood memories, songs and, of course, those cassette tapes. Battersea Arts Centre is now a fully relaxed venue so, like all the work in the season, it is available to all.”

Overview

Florencia has an old box full of cassette tapes from her family home in Chile. As she starts listening to them in her room in London, she travels back in time and space, to when her family fled Argentina’s dictatorship and started recording audio letters to stay in touch with their loved ones.

Spanning four decades, Florencia Cordeu and director Omar Elerian (Misty, Going Through, NASSIM, One Cold Dark Night, Islands) create a moving and uplifting audio-visual experience that asks what it means to remember: as an individual, as a family, and as a country.

Age Recommendation: 12+

Critic reviews

BAC’s new season kicks off with Florencia Cordeu’s intriguing autobiographical show, based on tape-recordings of her Argentinian family’s exile in Chile

⋅ Time Out

Exploration of personal and political history that is both intriguing and frustrating

⋅ The Stage

Every night in this beautiful, textured, unassuming show Cordeu remakes the past and in that very act secures her future

Lyn Gardner for Stagedoor

Autoreverse is overstuffed with ideas to convey and covet the past, trying to weave it into a narrative that examines identity in a slowly shrinking world

⋅ WhatsOnStage

An emotional family story about memory and time

⋅ Everything Theatre

The past constantly interacts with the present in Autoreverse and provides its most moving moments

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