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.
Stand Up (and Try to Stay Standing) is a theatrical essay; a six-voice piece about theatre, everydayness, remembering, and forgetting. It brings the audience personal, dreamlike, lived, imagined, real, and fictional stories that come together to form a piece reminiscent of a cabaret of human life. The performance explores how a life lived is imprinted into the gestures, postures, and movements of the body. It emerged from material created by the performers during rehearsals, when together with the Continuo team they searched for moments in which memory resonates in the body and becomes a physical presence. However, this is not a nostalgic look back, but a lively, dynamic mosaic of reality and fiction, humor, and raw honesty.
Stand Up (and Try to Stay Standing) is the result of a long-term collaboration between the company and a group of seniors that began in 2024. For Continuo’s creative team, this collaboration represents a broadening of the possibilities of its own distinctive theatrical language, as well as a challenge to the established notion that physical theater is the domain only of young and trained performers.
