The newest Continuo’s production Stand Up (and Try to Stay Standing) is something between storytelling, stand-up comedy, physical theater, and postmodern cabaret. The main role is played by the stories of a group of senior actors who prepared the production together with the theater’s creative team. The stories told during the performance are personal, dreamt, lived, imagined, real, and fictional.
At the beginning of the rehearsals, the question arose: How do we actually tell our personal stories? Elliot George Mishler says that „we are the stories we tell about ourselves,“ pointing out that the story we tell about ourselves usually does not correspond to the reality we have experienced and that it often changes and evolves significantly during our lives. This idea became the initial inspiration for the creation of the production.
Its stage form is based on original material created by the performers during rehearsals. This focused on searching for and rediscovering personal stories that are not only preserved in memories, but also resonate in the body, in its physical form and movement.
For the creative work of the company, this collaboration with the group of seniors means expanding the possibilities of their own unique theatrical language, as well as overcoming the established premise that physical theater is the domain of only young and trained performers.
