Estar vivo antes de morrer is a multidisciplinary project that takes Ray Bradbury’s science-fiction stories as its starting point to question the condition of old age in contemporary capitalist societies. Through a dramaturgy by Gabriel Pessoa that moves between the speculative and the documentary, the piece draws on the thinking of Andreas Urban, who analyses how capitalist society treats older people as superfluous because they produce no value. From this it builds a reflection on the place – or the lack of one – reserved for the old in our time.
Bradbury’s science fiction, with its singular ability to project dystopian futures that mirror the present, serves here as a dramaturgical device for exposing the systematic dehumanisation of older people. Stories such as ‘The Last Night of the World’ and ‘The Million-Year Picnic’ offer landscapes of ending and new beginning that speak directly to the experience of old age as a zone of exclusion and social invisibility.
The piece is performed by a young actor (Jade Cambournac), a deliberate choice that puts on stage the urgency of thinking about old age before we reach it – to be alive before dying is not only an appeal to the old, but an invitation to younger generations to recognise their own future condition. This performative paradox – a young body reframing the exclusion of old age – embodies the distance and refusal with which society meets ageing.
Multidisciplinary by nature, the project brings together video, sound and installation to create an environment that evokes both the alienating landscapes of Bradburian science fiction and the spaces of confinement to which society relegates its old, thereby interrogating the mechanisms that turn people into the waste products of a system that values nothing but productivity.
