Music, movement and nostalgia shape a journey through a nomadic childhood.
BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA — June 2026. The theatrical production “El brillo nómade” transforms the lights, music and vertigo of traveling amusement parks into a collective exploration of memory, identity and the desire to keep moving. Written by Argentine playwright Fabián Díaz and directed by Lucie Bach, the work follows one woman through different stages of her life as she searches for the traces left by a childhood spent traveling with her family.
The play originated in the personal history of actress and producer Patricia Rivero, whose family has operated traveling amusement parks across Argentina for decades. Until the age of seven, Rivero lived as one of the children who moved from town to town alongside rides, trucks, workers and temporary homes. Her memories became the foundation for a fictional journey shaped by photographs, music and hours of shared stories.
When Rivero invited Díaz to write the production, the playwright immediately connected her experiences with images from his own childhood in Villa Ángela, a city in Argentina’s Chaco Province. Traveling fairs periodically arrived on an open site opposite the railway station, which had been converted into a music school where he studied trumpet. From there, he watched workers unload and assemble the mechanical structures that would soon become bumper cars, roller-style attractions and a Ferris wheel.
The transformation fascinated him. Trucks filled with iron, steel, cables and bolts gradually became a carefully organized landscape of machines, lights and sound. Once the installations opened, the temporary fair seemed like a luminous island surrounded by the darkness of the Chaco countryside, offering children and adults a few intense minutes of speed, falls, collisions and fear.
Music was an essential part of that environment. Songs played through loudspeakers mounted on posts, attracting visitors before they could even see the rides. Díaz remembers the sound as an invisible invitation, although the exact songs have blurred with time, merging popular music, children’s themes and the emotional atmosphere created by the illuminated attractions.
The presence of children belonging to the traveling families also left a lasting impression. They occasionally visited local schools while the fair remained in town, appearing briefly in classrooms before disappearing again when the park moved to its next destination. To children who lived permanently in Villa Ángela, their existence seemed mysterious and almost supernatural.
Rivero’s recollections revealed both the enchantment and complexity of that nomadic life. She described the excitement of opening the fair, welcoming residents and becoming part of the entertainment of each community. At the same time, her memories carried a feeling comparable to “saudade,” the Portuguese term commonly associated with a bittersweet mixture of affection, joy and sadness for something that belongs to the past.
Those two emotional forces—euphoria and saudade—became central to the writing. The production does not present Rivero’s biography as a conventional documentary or one-person performance. Instead, it multiplies its central character across four stages of life: Girl, Young Woman, Woman and Old Woman.
These versions coexist onstage, speaking to one another and reconstructing their shared identity from different positions in time. Their stories create a map that expands in several directions while remaining connected to the same central impulse: a woman’s decision to follow the nomadic trace that continues moving within her.
The cast includes Patricia Rivero, Stella Maris Isoldi, Camila Ohlobiak and Ana Julia Torre. Under Bach’s direction, the performers recreate the emotional and sensory universe of the traveling fair rather than attempting a literal historical reconstruction. Music, movement and changing rhythms evoke the simultaneous presence of children, adults, machines and fleeting communities.
Bach’s own connection to circus culture added another layer to the production. The director, who lives in Argentina, comes from a French family with circus roots. That background allowed her to approach Rivero’s story not simply as an external observer, but with an understanding of the family traditions, mobility and collective labor associated with itinerant entertainment.
For Díaz, the structure of a theatrical work resembles an amusement park. Both guide participants through a sequence of experiences in which intensity and rhythm continuously change. Some moments accelerate, others suspend movement, and each stage contributes to a larger emotional journey that only becomes complete through the physical presence of an audience.
The playwright had previously incorporated amusement parks into other works, including “La Yoli Mindolacio” and the still-unproduced “El descanso.” Their repeated appearance revealed that these landscapes were not merely childhood memories but a persistent part of his creative imagination. “El brillo nómade” allowed him to examine that fascination more directly through Rivero’s family history.
Rivero requested that the play avoid the format of a solo performance and move away from a purely documentary register. That decision opened the work toward choral storytelling, enabling an individual memory to become a collective experience. Fiction allows the production to move beyond one person’s biography and connect the nomadic journey with broader desires for change, freedom and escape from routine.
The work suggests that many people retain an impulse to abandon fixed conventions and follow an uncertain route. Cities, towns and repetitive cycles offer stability, but they can also produce immobility. The traveling fair becomes a metaphor for a life in which structures are repeatedly assembled, illuminated, dismantled and transported elsewhere.
“El brillo nómade” is presented on Sundays in June at the Teatro Los Pompas Club de Arte in Buenos Aires. Through its combination of performance, memory and music, the production invites audiences to recover the sense of wonder associated with temporary spaces that arrive unexpectedly and disappear just as quickly.
The fairground at the center of the play is therefore more than a setting. It represents childhood, family inheritance, bodily experience and the tension between belonging somewhere and continuing to move. Its lights illuminate a personal history, but the emotions they reveal belong to anyone who has felt nostalgia for a place that no longer exists.
At Phoenix24, culture preserves the journeys that memory refuses to abandon.