Residências

Improvisation work around the photographs of Gregory Crewdson (Sous la Surface des Roses), a very much cinema like work which resonates in the visual and scenic universe of the creations “N’huit” and “Traces” by the choreographer Cyril Viallon. The photos of Crewdson present to us a realisation, a suspended instant, (and not only because this is photography), characters become brutish due to an overwhelming event. Nothing is known about this event, it is up to the spectator to make up the story. Thus it is intended for the performers to embody and expressiveness to the psychological states motivated by a photograph chosen together; to recreate the before and after, the poetry and the pain before an event. A sensitive work which intends to transport the human feeling through the body and its expressiveness.

The idea for “MATILDE something or Juliet Berto” is a “one girl-woman show” which takes us in the journey of an imaginative personality emerging on stage. The world of this woman/girl/being is nourished by all the strange, illogical and absurd thoughts and ideas which inhabit her head. A game with all she wanted to be and all she is not...with the things she would like to do and the things she is not able to do... A show which explores the relationship between text, voice and movement. A dialogue between fiction and reality, between doing and observing, between intimate and public, between the character I create, myself and the audience. A dialogue where at times the frontiers are clear and at other times they melt and disappear.

Starting from the premise of a contemporary musical, this project has as its purpose to create a symbiotic character through which the sound, the theatrical and the movement work as just one means of expression. “Augustus hears cars like sea waves” (provisional title) is an invitation to the creative exercise of “seeing something as something else”. A world where the song is choreographical, the action is musical and the movement is a tool creating a challenge to the identification of the artistic object. The project’s creative engine is the “play” between different realities/means that are found simultaneously in a given moment or situation. Quote: Huizinga defines game as: “a voluntary activity performed within certain and determined time limits and space, according rules freely consented, but absolutely mandatory, endowed with a purpose in itself, accompanied by a feeling of tension and joy and the consciousness of being different from the ordinary life.”

It is found in the need to reach the pinnacle of recognition, in the yearning of living the role of a pop icon… where one goes through several steps, and here without obtaining a positive result… here we turn on the experimental, the installation where one searches for an identity that brings to us the those 15 minutes of fame…leaving in the edge this moment so often claimed!

LES ARTISTS [work performed by the students of 3rd year Theatre of balleteatro escola profissional] LES ARTISTES is a performance made up of fragments of interviews – one of the languages and the most feared journalistic genres, because it is the one less controllable as it is always a communication with two people – it becomes a struggle between what we want to find about, what we think we want, what is told to us or what is thought of what is told to us. Language – and the media themselves in all their varieties, structures and techniques -, is an interpretation of realities. This is, they are events and realities always given in second hand; there is always a guiding line, a thought, a way to manipulate words so that the audience gets some information or knowledge, at first, not biased. LES ARTISTES celebrates this immateriality not only of the media, but also of the cinema, architecture, music, painting... And theatre itself. A theatralization of the everyday speech is done of flashbacks, reversals and amputations of feelings and, mainly, of confessions. They are interviews to artists who summon ghosts of perfections, of the artistic process, of the frustration, of the desire of glory... The interview is after all always recognition of the personal importance to whom five minutes of fame or time was given.

Uh! #2 [work performed by 3rd year students of dance in the balleteatro escola profissional] is understood as an occasion to activate the path of study for 3 weeks that is explained in the exterior look as a true staging itself. We are imagining an atmosphere with its own specific density given with very few fundamental elements: mainly body, light and sound. We want to question the tension of the distant form of sense and sign, distant from image that is inscribed in the surface of bodies wrapped in a mystery. In these previous years our research was directed to a sense of regression, or waste, in the end it is an attempt that only intends to address our time. The regression that we are interested in is the one understood as the abandonment of thought, shape that shows itself, closer to the trance than the intellect. Clearly we are not in a position not of contemplating mental realizations that allow us to form ideas, but the will is that of regression to a simple static pathology. We put in second place the history of humanity as a history of ghosts and images as it is in the imagination that the fracture is operated and the dialectic re-composition between that which is multiple but at the same time unique. In this sense, the plasticity for us is related to a non immobile pause, charged with memory and dynamic energy, a pathos capable of moving and disturbing the body emptied of thought, in a constant research only in itself, a body that does not spare itself in favour of an unattainable ideal.

Coming back to the theme of the body, in this work I had the will to focus on the immune system as that which allows us to survive and to get together with other beings which live in us, substances, strange bodies which invade us.

This system is extremely complex, made up of set of small specialized cells and proteins, all leading to a choreographical harmony which is being written in the body’s inner space, invisible to the naked eye.

By disturbing that harmony, small imbalances occur and immediately the system reacts so that at the maximum of the speed, the initial balance is reestablished. Throughout this process specific cells conserve the memory of the event and will in the future recognize the invader. Memory exists in these cells as in the conscience of each of us.

Choreographical project with the students of the second year dance of balleteatro escola profissional

What is the necessary practice to embody the potentialities of the body and intensify its presence?
Laboratory of Contemporary Movement with the students of the third year dance of the balleteatro escola profissional