Stores
Beauty, Equity, Happiness

A clothing department store, unmistakably reminiscent of the retail chains of our time. Inside it, a chorus of people tries on garments, shops, queues, engages in small talk, rests, collides, undresses, begins again. They sing and deliver monologues. They dream of the future.

Starting from this recognisable, realistic setting, the episodes, songs, and monologues fracture the linearity of realism, unfolding a mosaic of destinies – a contemporary choric tapestry of lives trapped within the limits of their own desires. A world caught in repetition, recycling gestures and behaviours, enclosed within a climate-controlled space/time whose exits gradually disappear.

The characters find themselves confronted with the immovable emptiness of their days: minor practical dead ends, major existential questions, the strain of living in the twenty-first century. Their dreams cling to the products they hold in their hands, to the lost poetic charge of a life now tethered to consumption. Each garment becomes a possible version of the self – a promise of transformation, a future held in the conditional, sometimes fulfilled, more often deferred.

Within this ostensibly realistic framework, the songs act as fissures, giving voice to both the expectations and the disappointments of these consumer-subjects who shop in order to exist, composing a wide-angle portrait of life in which a secret melancholy lurks beneath the gleam of the twenty-first century.

The staging, drawing on Charlie Chaplin’s notion that comedy is tragedy seen in long shot, makes use of the full depth of the stage, generating parallel zones of action. Characters frequently distance themselves from one another and address the audience directly, heightening the absurdity of the situations. Reality and the imaginary intermingle in a world where the ordinary appears extraordinary, and the irrationality of human behaviour is revealed through humour.

The music, rooted in an ambient sonic landscape, emerges from the performers’ actions – like sample-like fragments – while the performance traverses forms that extend even into the pop aesthetics of advertising. As the text gradually transforms into a libretto, an uncanny normality takes shape – one that contains opera within it, a reality sung into being by its characters.

A department store becomes a stage where consumption reveals – with humour and tenderness – the hidden drama of contemporary life.