Using elements of pop music and magic realism, Trouble Score looks at how memory forms in childhood, how silence operates inside families, and how history continues to structure intimate relationships long after it’s gone unspoken.

The Casellas sat down with RANGE to discuss their collaborative process, their interest in unreliable narration and fragmented storytelling, and the role of music as an emotional and narrative force in their work. Whether they’re navigating making art together as siblings, resisting autobiography as an endpoint, or creating new rituals as a way to consciously engage with inherited patterns, Trouble Score asks what it means to stay with complexity—and how performance can open space for reflection, recognition, and change.

Where are you right now? What does an average day look like for you two these days? 

Pablo: Right now I’m in Brazil, in the countryside of São Paulo, in a valley. I’m surrounded by forested hills and wide open fields with just a few houses. There are cows, horses, dogs, birds, frogs, and spiders of all kinds around here.

An average day starts with exercise in the morning, mainly strength training and jumping rope, followed by working on music for multiple projects. At the moment, I’m finishing an original Brazilian music album with my niece and singer Helena Casella, developing a duo live set with the Belgian-Congolese artist Témé Tan, and researching for a new solo project based on mantric music.  At the end of the day, I like to listen to music while working in the garden or walking in nature, with my two dogs as my constant companions.

Luanda: My average day starts at 6am, preparing food and bringing kids to school. After that, I usually do physical exercises, go running or go to hot yoga. Then I sit behind my computer. I have been working on several projects; now mainly preparing a text intervention around the city of Ghent, part of the Ghent University Museum GUM’s exhibition on ‘Borders’, working on my PhD research on Unreliable Narrators, preparing for our visit to Canada for the presentation of Trouble Score, a masterclass on Unreliable Narrators within the frame of PUSH Festival in collaboration with Simon Fraser University, and a lecture on Storytelling and our current crisis of narration in collaboration with Vancouver Latin America Cultural Centre. All very exciting. 

Trouble Score begins with a real family scandal. Can you share how you first encountered that story, and why bringing it to the stage now felt important—especially for audiences encountering it for the first time here in Canada?

We were in our twenties when we discovered a major and deeply destabilizing scandal in our family. Only then did we begin to connect the many clues, shapes, and patterns that had surrounded us our entire lives. It felt like a complex puzzle we had avoided looking at for years. But that kind of presence doesn’t fade — you can’t really hide from it. It keeps resurfacing, whether you want it to or not.

With Trouble Score, we decided to go all the way in. To look directly at it from multiple perspectives, to create symbols for our traumas, and to ritualize our experiences into a kind of ceremony of healing.

We “exploded” our personal story into magical realism in order to give form to something that feels almost unspeakable. In the show, the scandal becomes a dead body on the table during a Sunday brunch. Tears accumulate into a gigantic flood that breaks the structures of the house. And the characters are named according to their archetypal roles within family dynamics.

What we hope resonates with audiences — especially those encountering this work for the first time in Canada — is less our specific family story and more the universal experience of growing up with trauma. The recognition that we all develop survival patterns, creating “doubles” of ourselves — what we call our “shadow selves” in the show. And that, by daring to look into those shadows, we can begin to transform inherited trauma into conscious rituals of healing.

We understand the production blends ritual with the electricity of a pop concert. How do you navigate that balance between ceremony and spectacle, and what do you hope that duality offers to Vancouver audiences?

 I don’t actually experience that as a strong duality. For me, concerts are already deeply ritualistic — both when I’m performing and when I’m in the audience. There’s a shared energy, repetition, and collective focus that feels very close to ceremony.

What we’re really interested in is stretching the idea of what “ritual” can mean. We also see the everyday repetitions of habits and behaviors that come from trauma as a kind of ritual — a daily ceremony we unconsciously perform throughout our lives. So part of the work is asking: if we already live inside these rituals, why not consciously create new ones for ourselves?

That’s what we did with Trouble Score. We wrote songs and prayers that we can hold onto, and we perform them as our own personal ritual in every single show.

Within the piece, we construct a fictional ritual involving multiple voice-characters and a kind of shamanic figure we call the “Healer.” Through surround sound and immersive lighting and laser design, we invite the audience into that space, so the ritual can be experienced on multiple sensory and emotional levels. We hope that creates not just a spectacle, but a shared, embodied experience of transformation.

Luanda, much of your work explores unreliable narrators and the instability of language. How does that come into play in Trouble Score, and how much of the story is meant to feel fragmented or intentionally slippery to a Canadian audience unfamiliar with this history?

The figure of the Unreliable Narrator and the use of deceptive discourse is the main pillar of my work. In Trouble Score, this figure appears in the discourse of the ‘traumatised child’, and the text, which is deeply rooted in Magic Realism, tries to translate the emotional efforts of a child trying to make sense of any sort of violence. The story is also framed within a fictitious ritual, so the use of hyperbole, and the specific strategy of ‘making something fantastical or phantasmagoric’ appear within a familiar situation, also appear in the hallucinations of those going through the ritual. Magic Realism frames Trouble Score in its duo-narrative and helps us deal with trauma from a fictitious perspective. 

I guess many of us can recognise the feeling of fragmentation associated with trauma, or a deep emotional crisis associated with loss. The audience doesn’t need to be familiar with the specific context within which we grew up, mainly the military dictatorship nor racial segregation, in order to relate to those feelings of fragmented emotions and the idea that families do not exist in a vacuum but within specific historic and political contexts, which influence how people relate to one another. 

Pablo, the musical landscape in Trouble Score is described as layered, live, and immersive. How did you approach building the score, and in what ways does sound become its own character or emotional terrain within the piece?

I tend to think of composing a score in two layers: the main themes, and what I call the soundtrack’s dramaturgy. The themes themselves don’t feel like something I actively “make.” They come to me from somewhere else — I like to think of them as something I receive.

For the past six years, I’ve felt that my sister, Mariana Casella, who passed away and whose presence appears in the show through text on screen, is sending me melodies from what I imagine as a kind of collective consciousness, where we all exist as pure energy. 

Once those themes arrive in a rough form, I begin organizing them throughout the piece. I assign specific themes to characters and allow them to transform as the characters evolve. Sometimes I attach a melody to a particular memory and repeat it as a leitmotif, so that the presence of the past stains or colors a current experience.

I think of harmony as emotional and spatial landscape. In Trouble Score in particular, I associate musical composition with the feeling of leaving home and returning home. Even when “home” becomes dissonant or painful, it never really leaves us — it travels with us, no matter where we go. The music becomes a way of mapping memory and emotion, allowing the audience to move through those inner landscapes alongside us.

The show revisits a backdrop of racial segregation and a military dictatorship—histories that might not be widely understood in Canada. How do you bring humour, pop sensibility, and even playfulness into this material without losing sight of its political weight? 

The Brazilian political and social landscape of the 1970s and 1980s is essential to understanding the inner lives of the characters in the piece: a Black father seeking freedom through a version of the “American dream” and financial success, and a white mother — the granddaughter of European immigrants — who was active in the student movement against fascism and the military regime.

We wanted to show the complexity of a mixed-race family emerging from poverty and moving into São Paulo’s segregated middle class, within the fragile context of Brazil’s young democracy after twenty years of violent dictatorship. That historical backdrop deeply shapes how the family relates to power, opportunity, fear, and aspiration.

With context comes nuance. Nothing is purely black or white. Nothing is simply right or wrong. There is the world into which we were born, and everything that came before it — our ancestry, our social conditions, our inherited histories. All of that forms what we think of as our personal mythology. As the Healer says: “We are shaped by the multiple histories of our arrival.”

We use humour and pop to fictionalize and expose the pressure of reality, and to reflect how families often process political history — through escape fantasies that exist alongside very real structural trauma. In that sense, we try to imagine the creation of a new mythology — for ourselves and for anyone in the audience who might desire one. But in order to imagine something new, it’s essential to understand where we came from.

You’ve created this work as siblings and long-time collaborators. How does your family relationship shape the way you build a piece like Trouble Score? Does it allow you to push each other in ways you might not with other artistic partners?

We’ve been collaborating for almost our entire artistic lives, though rarely together on stage — even though that’s actually how we began. Our very first collaboration was a spoken word and music concert in a tiny alternative café in São Paulo. In that sense, this show feels like a return, and a celebration of that original connection between poetry, melody, and blood.

What was especially unique about Trouble Score is that we consciously stepped into our archetypal roles within our family dynamics. As we developed the piece, we began to see each other with a wider understanding — looking at each other’s perspectives, and at each other’s shadows. In that way, the process has been deeply revealing, almost like getting to know each other again.

It also allowed us to recognize and step away from some of our inherited trauma patterns. Doing that work together has been incredibly rich. We supported each other not only as collaborators, but as siblings, helping each other heal while practicing what we feel we came into this world to do: to create.

This is the Vancouver premiere, presented in partnership with the Vancouver Latin American Cultural Centre. What conversations or points of connection do you hope this work opens for local audiences here—whether around memory, migration, identity, or myth?

In many ways, all of the above. I believe Trouble Score is quite universal in that sense. It’s deeply human, and it moves through memory and identity as shared territories — things that, in different ways, connect all of us.

Every person has experienced some form of trauma or significant loss. Everyone has developed patterns of survival. Everyone has inherited a past mythology. As the Healer says in the show, “Every person I know is a landslide.”

I truly see this work as an invitation. An invitation to consciously ritualize pain and suffering into secular healing prayers — whatever that may mean for each person, and through whatever forms or passions they live through. An invitation to embrace ancestry, with all of its gifts and its tolls. An invitation to look at trauma without shame, and perhaps to find something powerful there.

It’s also an invitation to stand face to face with your double-self with love and gratitude. An invitation to shine light into your fears and to integrate with your own shadow. An invitation to sit in the darkness until there is no longer a sense of two — only a deeper sense of wholeness.

And finally, an invitation in itself to begin writing a new mythology. 

Magic realism plays a strong role in the piece—transforming trauma into rhythm, shame into song, and memory into something almost alchemical. Is there a moment or image in Trouble Score that you feel captures this transformation most vividly for a Canadian audience?

There’s a scene we call “The Small Room,” when the mother figure, “Martyr,” after another confrontation with the father, “Trickster,” steps into a small room and closes the door behind her. She begins to cry uncontrollably, and her tears gradually become a massive flood. The siblings wake up and find themselves swimming through the apartment, trying to reach her.

The scene seems to resonate deeply with audiences because it captures the terrifying and magical scale of children’s memory — how emotional moments are remembered not realistically, but as something vast, overwhelming, and mythic.

Anything else you’d like us to know about the two of you as artists or the production as a whole? 

I would only add that while Trouble Score is built from a very honest and personal story, it’s not an identity piece in the conventional sense — that’s not what we do. Our biography is a starting point, but it’s not the destination. What really drives our work is language — how it’s constructed, how it shapes reality, and how it can both reveal and distort experience.

With this piece, we invite the audience to join us on a journey of imagination, self-reflection, and the deconstruction of language itself. In the end, it’s less about our specific story, and more about how language itself shapes what we believe is possible.

Trouble Score premieres at PuSh Festival on Feb. 7, 2026 at the Vancouver Playhouse. Tickets here.