Ep. 73 - Mythmaking (Trouble Score)

PuSh Artistic Director Gabrielle Martin chats with Luanda Casella & Pablo Casella about Trouble Score, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival: February 7 at the Vancouver Playhouse.

Show Notes

Gabrielle, Luanda and Pablo discuss: 

• Discussion of Indigenous peoples and their struggles in North and South America
• Returning to the storytelling concert form, and how the project began
• The importance of experiencing everything that occurs on the stage
• Incorporating ritual into practice and performance
• Research threads of misleading discourse, cult of story, the unreliable narrator and how they evolved through Trouble Score
• Exploring trauma through ritual and archetype
• The fully-realized mythology built into the text
• The musical compositions in the piece and how music can carry narrative and organize elements
• Using sounds as triggers of memory
• Working with text, sound and light to construct a world
• How the character of the Healer evolved into a provocative voice
• The shadow self created via one's experience

About Trouble Score

Part ritual, part pop concert, Trouble Score is a hallucinatory portrait of family myth refracted through the lens of magic realism.

Weaving multi-layered text, vocals, sound samples, and live music within an otherworldly lighting composition that turns each scene into a luminous portal, this one-night-only performance is a storytelling séance that's as witty as it is disruptive.

Trouble Score revisits an old family scandal—a web of fragmented criminal stories that unravels into an impossible plot, where childhood innocence collides with the distorted reality of trauma, set against the backdrop of racial segregation and a military dictatorship.

Blending humour and complicity, Trouble Score captures the fantastic, mysterious, and often surreal nature of family dynamics. Luanda Casella, known for her incisive deconstruction of language and fascination with the unreliable narrator, crafts text that is both razor-sharp and darkly funny. Pablo Casella composes intricate landscapes of melodic intimacy and rhythmic resonance. Nick Verstand, whose work explores the edges of light, space, and human perception, sculpts immersive architectures that breathe with the performers.

Together, they turn family legend into a ritual of reinvention—a storytelling alchemy of music, language, and light.

About the Guests

Luanda Casella is a writer, performing artist, and theatre director from São Paulo, based in Ghent, Belgium. A resident artist at NTGent, her work is internationally acclaimed and known for its ingenious storytelling and incisive deconstruction of language. She is currently a teacher at the drama department at the KASK Conservatory, Ghent, and a PhD candidate examining "deceptive discourse" in communication processes and "unreliable narrators" in classic and contemporary works of fiction. Casella has also been a guest lecturer at leading institutions, including DAS Graduate School (Amsterdam), KABK (The Hague), P.A.R.T.S, School for Contemporary Dance (Brussels), Toneelacademie Maastricht Institute of Performative Arts, Universität der Künste Berlin, Cité Universitaire de Paris, and Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA.

Pablo Casella is a composer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. His ear for harmonies is unique in contemporary music. With his skills and virtuosity, he knows how to paint landscapes with sound, emotions with melody and power with rhythm. In the theatre world, he is active as a composer of soundtracks, producer and live musician; he has collaborated on Antigone in the Amazon (Milo Rau/NTGent/MST), Ferox Tempus, KillJoy Quiz and Elektra Unbound (Luanda Casella & NTGent), and BAM!, Saperlipopette and LOS (Ultima Thule). Casella is currently touring internationally with Antigone in the Amazon and has already performed the show in ten different countries and at renowned performing arts festivals such as Wiener Festwochen and Festival D'Avignon. Casella has has played at prestigious festivals such as Dour, Les Ardentes, Dranouter, Gent Jazz and Jazz Middelheim. With his own band, Little Dots, he has released two albums on V2 Records (2014 and 2018), for which he was responsible for the compositions, arrangements and co-production. Little Dots was artist in residence at the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels. The band toured as the opening act for Gabriel Rios and Hooverphonic in venues such as AB (Brussels), De Roma (Antwerp) and Paradiso (Amsterdam), and at festivals such as Gent Jazz and Eurosonic.

Land Acknowledgement

This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver.

Luanda joined the conversation from Belgium, and Pablo joined from the countryside of São Paulo, Brazil, home to the Tupinambás, Tupiniquins and Carijós, with Macro-Jê speakers in the interior.

It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.

Credits

PuSh Play is produced by Ben Charland and Tricia Knowles. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi.

Show Transcript