TEMPS D'IMAGES
20 anos

PAISAGEM (Landscape) is based on the current contemporary context, (in)directly characterized by relational models where violence is the protagonist. The scenic mechanism suggests the idea of a laboratory where, in constant tension and predictable implosion, two bodies repeat a duet that never happens.

Tratado da Invenção das coisas (Treaty of the Invention of Things) is the invention of things on my skin with tattoos. When we say things, we can be referring to lots of things. Things are somehow nameless, undefined, apart from this generic cluster we call things — objects, tales, ideas, materials, images, postponed projects, thoughts, and many others.

Tratado da Invenção das coisas is this accumulation of small narratives tattooed on my body as I was inventing and understanding myself. I was interested in the act of inventing, in inventing my body, and understanding from within the History of Tattoo, my autobiography and the nature of things. Strange invention, this one; made of pain. The invention of myself, made with needles and ink. My body would not exist, if it weren’t for these wounds I invented. This body is tattooed with my affections and with what affects me, whether they are real or fictional. While I was getting tattooed, I was thinking that this inscription on my body was a way of understanding myself and my life, and simultaneously a way of seeing the world. I can claim a symbolic meaning from the images on my skin, but I’m not sure it is up to me to decide. I cannot say that I own my tattoos; they’re simultaneously in me and beyond me, as images with stories and connotations that my body cannot fully define.

Tratado da Invenção das coisas is a performance anchored on this experience of the body. Tratado da Invenção das coisas is this invention of a life, a living encyclopedia of my understanding of things.

La Burla is a choreographic fiction that follows two figures living in a dystopian reality. The encounter between the sacred and the profane takes shape in rituals and invocations of entities that emerge from the depths. Deities, witches, seers, devils, monsters and heroines cross the imaginary of this piece that investigates the relationship between choreography and fiction, activating and incorporating a medieval iconographic repertoire. Two performers on an electric yellow carpet rely on their imagination, bodies and voices to create this musical choreographic fiction.

The Covid 19 pandemic caused an emotional shock around the world, convulsing life as we knew it and contaminating our intimate experiences. Although we all want to forget and overcome what we went through, we haven’t talked enough about the marks that it left on us. We have not yet garnered a wider collective awareness of how our private lives are determined by the political, mediatic, social or cultural constraints we are exposed to. The book Quem tem medo das emoções (Who is afraid of emotions?) brings together incidents that substantiate the evidence of such conditioning, showing the decisive relationship between our individual emotions and the affective bonds in which we are immersed on a daily basis. The book’s purpose is to convey a series of contemporary concepts and authors who think critically about affections, helping us to understand the complex meshes that entangle us. On the pretext of the recent release of Quem tem medo das emoções? and the inauguration of the installation/performance by Eunice Gonçalves, the researchers Jorge Martins Rosa and Graça P. Corrêa join her to exchange ideas about collective emotions and their dissemination in the public space, the emotional impact of images of catastrophes on our bodies and minds — a contagion to which no one is immune —, and also on how art can trigger emotions and contribute to a collective awareness of these invisible threads. One single thought is sufficient to poison the blood. It’s like a tea bag dipped in boiling water. Inert and seemingly harmless, its contents contaminate the water where it submerges. The aroma of the plants is diluted, gently winding in small waves until all the water has the colour of tea. In just a few minutes the whole teapot has the same colour. The same happens with thoughts, which transform the emotional tone of our bodies. Let us imagine that a negative thought pops up in our mind, dissolves silently, and seeps into our bloodstream, without us being aware of it. Suddenly, the whole organism is tinged by the emotional charge that this thought carries and, like a filter, permeates all our behaviours and actions from then on. We acquire the emotional tone of this thought, even if we are not aware of it. What is the colour of our blood after months of thoughts about death, illness or contagion slowly dripping into the mind? What colour did it transmute into after weeks of exposure to non-stop war imagery? Does our concern come not only from the fact that the conflict is happening in Europe but also from the incessant repetition of the same images, again and again? (cap. Varandas, Quem tem medo das emoções? p.80)

Sufocada em Lágrimas (Stifled Tears) is an artistic reflection on forest fires and their impact on the landscape in the interior of Portugal. The artist wants to create an immersive and sensory piece that transmits the theme in its emotional dimension. The wildfires that have taken place in recent years in Portugal, and in other parts of the world, are directly related to climate change. This is why it is essential to include wildfires in the overall framework of climate change, as well as to understand how climate change is directly affecting people’s way of life in their daily lives. Thousands take to the streets to demand climate justice and the European Union calls on member states to accelerate the transition to green energy. Environmental impact is also part of the economic equation. In Portugal, communities in the areas most affected by forest fires, and experts in this field, have been warning of the devastating effects large fires on the country’s landscape. Although there is a general understanding of the problem, there is a clear inability to act on it. Part of the solution may be to return to the ancient rituals of forest control and firefighting, which were lost with the desertification of the interior of the country. There are no foreseeable solutions and I, sitting in front of my television screen, just cry. My ritual is performative. My TV allows me to witness the fires while keeping me safe at home, watching from a distance. On the other side of the screen, a man is in despair after failing to save the house where he was born. He cries. What if we cried together? Can our tears produce enough water to extinguish the fire?Sufocada em Lágrimas establishes a bridge between art, technology and the environment, through different artistic languages (performance, video, installation, architecture) and proposes to bring to the urban environment the theme of rural fires, questioning the way we think and feel about, their socio-cultural impacts and the preservation of the environment.

ƎSPÉCIE does not refer to the identifiable, but to what belongs to us and we do not know about. At the unlikely instant when the visible touches, crosses and is confused with the invisible. Its dramaturgy is structured by subtractions, the aesthetic experience is installed as a challenge. Its first movement is that of the darkness that invades the spaces of the gaze of the observer. An invitation to diving and immersing in a territory of the possible. In search of other ways of seeing, of experiencing absences as fields of knowledge that are yet to be recognized, and through them try to practice some silence as collective speech. In an unlikely way, light the flash that pops from this intimate and face-to-face encounter with a body in a continuous state of transformation and metamorphosis, in successive acts of abandonment, of construction and collapse, of appearance and disappearance. Encounter with an open body that escapes identity accommodation and meanings, but creates a universe where images are embodied and presented. Like the animal, the woman and the elder, who among others shuffle like a carousel, in a diffuse trajectory, in a flow that transposes the looks in the precise duration of the act of investigation of the performer’s body, by the performer’s own body. That when transiting through sensory-perceptual states makes explicit the unique and singular ability to transubstantiate their materiality, to externalize in actions the liquids inside - the saliva, sweat, tears, the emptiness of the room makes the noise of swallowing saliva seem like a frog. A moment of astonishment: who watches who? The work proposes to refrain from any artifice, including usual technical resources of the theatre, so that each movement, or scenic act, focuses attention on the dynamics and particularities of the body and its relations with space. ƎSPÉCIE is an adventure of life stuck on its surface, of the forces of existence in its multiple, mysterious, strange condition of being in front, intimate and open to what is alive and instinctual.

CORTEJO is a film/book that is part of the performance held in the gardens of Palácio de Cristal, where the Portuguese Colonial Exhibition of 1934 took place. In CORTEJO, the spaces and ideas of the exhibition are emphasized by the absence of buildings and bodies or by their replacement through new themes. The evocation of the ruins or the empty spaces is the logic that drives the entire route.

As of today, everyone has the possibility to recruit a person to cater to their wishes, desires, and dreams. The brother you always wanted to have? That grandpa who’s already gone, and to whom you would you like to give one last hug? Are you single, but want to take someone as an escort to a wedding? Now it is possible. In our company, we have people ready and available to personify everything you need. The only rule: life cannot be put at risk.

In this performance, we watch the recording of episode 500 of MiaPia, a popular television programme. Between culinary moments, unusual guests and tarot players, we accompany Mia and her difficulties in relating to some of the most pressing problems in the world: environmental issues, social inequality, gender inequality, structural racism, wars and (blah, blah, blah). Isn’t this what we sometimes tend to "see" in this inventory? A vague, dull "blah-blah, blah”?

Why?

In the 500th episode, Mia will challenge the short-sighted reflex that blurs her gaze and, despite the pains in her eyes and chest, courageously explores the reach and the limits of her vision. Welcome to MiaPia, your evening show!

LEBRE - Lances de Hermes is a creation that sees the word as image-time, from philosophical hip-hop and cabaret theatre to digital citizens. The project takes as its starting point the idea that we are in an era of velocity and communicability, which are attributes of the mythological Hermes; seen from another perspective, the LEBRE is a diagnosis of hermetic inflation, in Western contemporary culture, subject to manipulation of information, dissolution of values, the commodification of culture and the arts. Alexandre Pieroni Calado and João Ferro Martins revisit the Greek-Latin tradition to reflect on the present time, a work they had already initiated in O Declive e a Inclinação – Fragmentos do mito de Sísifo e A Morte nos Olhos – sobre o mito de Perseu e Medusa. The new creation, Lebre – Lances de Hermes, is an oratory-Downtempo that creatively investigates the ambiguous ascendant of Hermes in our time, especially the compulsive dynamism and the accelerated dispersion of regimens of truth.