eraumavezumarquitecto

10X10

2010-01-05T11:03:00.006Z

um teatro à la carte
Como seria um espectáculo no qual o público tivesse a possibilidade de escolha? Com certeza, o resultado não seria um espectáculo convencional, mas sim uma experiência teatral à la carte.
Antes de ser um espectáculo, ‘10X10’ é uma experiência teatral que assenta na aleatoriedade própria da opção em tempo real, tanto do actor como do público. O projecto teatral pensado para apresentação em espaços não convencionais de teatro tem por base um diálogo directo entre actor e público propondo uma colaboração activa por parte de ambos na construção em tempo real desta experiência teatral à la carte.
À la carte porque o espectáculo é da pura responsabilidade do público, uma vez que este último escolhe a ordem de apresentação e a quantidade dos textos a serem apresentados, quais os actores que levam à cena cada um deles, e quem representa qual personagem, ou mais simplesmente, quem fala primeiro.
Antes de ser uma experiência, ‘10X10’ é um processo de pesquisa sobre a noção do aleatório e a aceitação do erro como fenómenos indissociáveis de qualquer processo criativo – e mesmo científico – mas também como variáveis que permitem questionar o cânone teatral e o seu modus operandi tradicional.
A incorporação do aleatório e do erro na produção teatral cria um novo campo de acção, um novo espaço onde actor e público são cúmplices na construção de uma mesma realidade, não uma outra ‘realidade’ imposta pela quarta parede, mas sim uma actualidade que está a ser formada em tempo real.
‘10X10’ é um espectáculo informe, no qual nenhum texto é apresentado da mesma forma duas vezes. A experiência, essa, nunca mais se repete.

10 textos
mais ou menos 'dramáticos'
O convite à criação de textos permitiu chegar além fronteiras e contactar com autores representativos da nova escrita criativa portuguesa e internacional. Dos 60 textos recebidos, seleccionamos 10. O critério de selecção não tomou em consideração a forma do texto, foram escolhidos textos dramáticos como textos em prosa, manifestos e outros tantos géneros difíceis de categorizar. Os textos foram seleccionados não só pela sua originalidade e/ou qualidade literária, mas também pela incorporação de ambiguidades ou situações dúbias que despoletassem múltiplas interpretações e perspectivas sobre um mesmo texto. A ambiguidade, o aleatório e o próprio erro tornaram-se dados essenciais na (des)construção dramática dos textos originais, características estas que foram exponenciadas no desafio de escrita criativa realizado no início do processo de ensaios, com os actores e com os autores Ana Marta Fortuna, Rita Burmester, Tiago Montenegro e Vera Cunha. O resultado do desafio permitiu antever inúmeras possibilidades na inclusão da figura do escritor no processo criativo da pesquisa teatral pela criação de texto a partir da sala de ensaios.

10 actores
entre o drama e a comédia
O período de ensaios foi propositadamente reduzido. Os textos distribuídos aos actores pouco tempo antes do início do período de ensaios. Os actores, esses, nem se conheciam até ao primeiro dia de ensaios. Três variáveis que produziram diversos episódios entre o drama e a comédia.
10 actores num processo experimental que passou pela descoberta de uma linguagem comum entre os intérpretes, pela clarificação da relação do actor com o público e vice-versa, pela sintetização do trabalho de actor à transmissão clara e eficaz da mensagem, pela descoberta da regra, para assim poder abusar desta, e finalmente, pela aceitação do erro como elemento essencial no processo criativo do actor.
Se retirarmos o cenário, os adereços, a luz cénica e, eventualmente, o próprio palco, resta-nos o actor e o público que habitam um mesmo espaço e um mesmo tempo. Teatro resume-se a esta comunicação entre estes dois grupos distintos – actores e espectadores. Teatro não é nada mais que um grupo observando o outro. Como Vera Cunha escreve em 'Confrontos': 'Rufem os tambores, tragam os bobos da corte, os palhaços e farsantes.'

[ images: poster and trailer by Emanuel de Sousa; photos by Vitor Leite ]

Mais informações em estacazeroteatro.com

ROMAN TRAGEDIES

2009-11-21T23:53:00.006Z

Roman Tragedies is a play created by Toneelgroep Amsterdam, part of Bite 08, at the Barbican theatre, performed in dutch with English subtitles, that lasted for approximately six hours with no intermission.
During the performance the audience is invite to walk through the auditorium or onto the stage for another view of the stage and a closer look of the on stage action or to simple enjoy food and beverages and simply chek his/her email in the dedicated on stage internet point.
The play joins other three playscripts by William Shakespeare: Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Anthony & Cleopatra.

Joining an array of media technologies and art forms, including live video stream, live music, messages relay, television broadcast, and a group of performers that throw themselves in such an intensity that sometimes it almost became too real.
The effect achieved by the invitation of the public to become part of the action and occupy the stage erradicates the usual 'fourth wall', albeit the fact that everything is being filmed and therefore you are always in this ambivalence between what is real, and what is fiction, what is coreographed and what is a result of the emotion of the moment.
Although the plays are not intertwined content wise, simply happening one after the other, establishing who is playing what in the next text, and what is happening with a voice off or simply appearing in the message relay ('Julius Caeser will die in 5 minutes'), the play moves from one story to the other with no effort or artifice, simply letting us, audience, know literally waht is happening next.
Roman Tragedies is a political play through which many of the most actual subjects in present politics, governmentality and the notion of country and power are dissecated, to end up with the question of are politicians simply actors? In the end, Chris Nietvelt and Hans Kresting are indeed truly magnificent as Cleopatra and Anthony.

[ photos and video by Jan Versweyveld, Toonelgroep Amsterdam ]

FRANK REVISITED

2009-11-21T23:23:00.010Z

da cronologia factual à curvatura emocional
No ano em que se celebra os 80 anos do nascimento de Anne Frank, FRANK explora a personagem única do século XX e da história da humanidade nas entrelinhas de um registo diário da menina-mulher a quem foi roubada a adolescência. Publicado postumamente pelo seu pai, Otto Frank, O Diário de Anne Frank, oferecido no seu 13º aniversário, documenta a sua vida de 12 Junho 1942 a 1 Agosto 1944.
Annelies Marie Frank, nasceu a 12 Junho 1929 em Frankfurt am Main, Alemanha. Anne, e a sua família, mudaram-se para Amesterdão em 1933, depois da ascensão nazi na Alemanha. Com a ocupação da Holanda e com o início da perseguição judia, a família escondeu-se, a partir de Julho de 1942, num 'anexo secreto' no edifício de escritórios de seu pai. Depois de dois anos, a 4 Agosto 1944, os Frank, os van Pelses e Pfeffer foram descobertos pela Gestapo e transportados para campos de concentração. Anne morreria sete meses depois em Bergen-Belsen, dias antes da libertação do campo pela força militar britânica a 15 Abril 1945.
Het Achterhuis, publicado em 1947, foi mais tarde traduzido para inglês como Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. O diário inicialmente uma expressão privada dos seus pensamentos íntimos, descreve a vida no anexo, num registo entre o real e o ficcional, demonstrando a vontade de escrever ficção.
Em Março 1944, um programa de rádio de Gerrit Bolkestein anunciou a vontade de criar um registo público dedicado à opressão dos judeus holandeses durante a ocupação Nazi daquele país, mencionando a possibilidade de publicação de cartas e diários. Anne iniciou logo a edição dos seus escritos, retirando secções e reescrevendo outras, com vista à publicação do diário. O diário original foi complementado por cadernos adicionais e folhas de papel soltas, criando pseudónimos para os companheiros do esconderijo e para os ajudantes. Na versão editada, a família van Pels tornou-se Hermann, Petronella e Peter van Daan, e, Fritz Pfeffer tornou-se Albert Dussel, passando todas as entradas a ser dirigidas à sua amiga imaginária, Kitty. O diário descreve as situações mais banais de uma vida compartimentada entre as paredes assimétricas de um anexo que acolheu sete judeus durante dois anos, oferecendo o relato peculiar da vida em comum, bem como a visão crítica do mundo, durante o domínio Nazi e a Segunda Guerra Mundial.
Rejeitando à partida os textos dramáticos existentes, FRANK volta a explorar as entrelinhas do diário, criando uma narrativa que, ao desvinvular-se da cronologia factual das entradas no diário, acompanha, não o crescimento físico da adolescente ou o desenrolar da guerra, mas redescobre a curvatura emocional da menina-mulher, pontuada por flashes atemporais que dão vida às mais íntimas imagens latentes da mente delirante da jovem judia.

um monólogo em contra-cena

Explorando pequenos episódios subliminarmente descritos no diário, o monólogo para uma actriz, desmultiplica-se em inúmeras personagens reais e fictícias, numa série de fragmentos que misturam realidade e ficção, registo factual e alucinação emocional. Um percurso marcado pela desorientação espacial, apesar da localização específica no espaço definido do anexo, revelando uma acção marcada pela repetição própria do registo do dia-a-dia, que enfatiza ainda mais o surreal da situação vivida.
FRANK explora assim um espaço intersticial, testando os limites do monólogo e da própria linguagem teatral, explorando a contracena não com outro actor mas com um músico que dialoga em tempo real com a actriz, que por sua vez, dialoga com uma série de personagens, revelando a delicadeza e o sentido crítico, a inteligência e a ingenuidade, o amadurecimento precoce e a coragem, de uma 'consciência intacta e invulnerável', como Ernst Schnabel referiu no Rasto de Anne Frank, a qual sabiamente escreveria a 22 Junho 1942: 'o papel tem mais paciência que as pessoas'.

[ poster by Emanuel de Sousa with photo by Vitor Leite; video stills by Tiago Carvalho; photo by Patricia de Sousa ]

Mais informações em http://www.estacazeroteatro.com/

FIREAAORKS

2009-11-21T22:40:00.007Z

A restaging of Bernard Tschumi’s 1974 fireworks display – Architectural Manifesto 1 – opened First Works Exhibition, outside the AA School in Bedford Square, on Friday, 6 November 2009, where a persistent audience waited under heavy rain for the 'architectural spetacle'.
This architectural event, conceived by Bernard Tschumi, is a re-enactment of a fireworks show realised in 1974 at the AA by Tschumi and a group of tutors and students including Nigel Coates. According to Tschumi, Fireworks 1974 made ‘a point about the pleasure of architecture and the beauty of its uselessness, and realised through a «détournement» (or creative misuse) of Guy Fawkes Day’. The work, together with a short text, was shown originally at the RCA exhibition Space: A Thousand Words, and published in 1978 as the first of Bernard Tschumi’s Architectural Manifestos, that framed one of Tschumi’s first obsessions about decoding the close-knit relations between events, actions and spaces, and how these might be deployed through complex notation systems which have seduced several generationsof architects. Fireworks is a recurrent topic throughout Tschumi’s career and was also used in the inauguration of the Parc de la Villette in Paris, which displayed another of these pyrotechnic events choreographed by the architect in 1991.

[ video by Kirk Wooller, with comments by Emanuel de Sousa and Kirk Wooller]

The event inaugurated the exhibition/book launch of First Works: Emerging Architectural Experimentation of the 1960s and 1970s, an exhibition including single key early projects or other kind of architectural realisations by Archigram, Archizoom, Aldo Rossi, Alvaro Siza, Cedric Price, Robert Venturi, Norman Foster + Richard Rogers, Paul Virilio + Claude Parent, Rafael Moneo, Renzo Piano, Peter Eisenman, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Toyo Ito, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Tom Mayne + Michael Rotondi, Morphosis, Bernard Tschumi, Herzog & de Meuron and Zaha Hadid.
The exhibition is accompanied by the launch of First Works: Emerging Architectural Experimentation of the 1960s and 1970s, AA Publications, is edited by Brett Steele and Francisco Gonzalez de Canales and includes a photograph of the Cedric Price's Aviary in London by Emanuel de Sousa.

FRANK

2009-10-14T17:48:00.013+01:00

a partir de 'O Diário de Anne Frank' de ANNE FRANK

No ano em que se celebra os 80 anos do nascimento de Anne Frank, FRANK explora uma personagem única do séc. XX e da história da humanidade. Publicado postumamente pelo seu pai Otto Frank, ‘O Diário de Anne Frank’, oferecido no seu 13º aniversário, documenta a sua vida de 12 de Junho 1942 a 1 de Agosto de 1944. Anne e a sua família mudou-se para Amesterdão em 1933 depois da ocupação nazi da Alemanha. Com a ocupação da Holanda, e com o início da perseguição judia, a família esconde-se a partir de Julho de 1942 num ‘anexo secreto’ no edifício de escritórios de seu pai Otto Frank. Depois de 2 anos, o grupo foi descoberto e transportado para campos de concentração, Anne morreria sete meses depois.

O monólogo para uma actriz, desmultiplica-se em inúmeras personagens reais e fictícias que materializam 'O Diário de Anne Frank', num percurso emocional delirante pela mente da jovem judia.

CACE Cultural do Porto – IEFP
29 Outubro 2009 [estreia]
30 Outubro 2009
31 Outubro 2009
01 Novembro 2009

Mais informações em estacazeroteatro.com

BEYOND FICTION

2009-09-24T11:58:00.013+01:00

'Architecture is a fiction.' With this provocative thought, Aaron Betsky opens his contribution, 'The Alpha and the Omega', in Beyond Short Stories on the Post-Contemporary, Issue 1: Scenarios and Speculations. A bookazine launched yesterday at the Architectural Association.

The book/magazine edited by Pedro Gadanho (architect, curator and writer based in Lisbon) is a collection of shortstories/fictions that open up a field for reflection on issues such as: urban conflict, social interaction, ecological resources, the evolution of cities, technology and techniques. Beyond arrives at a time in which 'architects and urbanists tackle fascinating issues, offering a fresh take on urban scenarios and speculations of a near future'.
The publication gathers an array of 'young and upcoming European architectural writers' such as Bruce Sterling, Lara Schriver, Shumon Basar, Wes Jones, Kobas Laksa, Superstudio, Aaron Betsky, Gilles Delalex, Michele Provoost, Knut Birkholz, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss', Boris Jensen, Silvia banchini and Luis Falcón and Antonio Scarponi, that in one way or another, joined us yesterday at the AA, where myself, Colin Fournier, Liam Young, Sam Jacob, Pedro Gadanho, Ines Dantas and the audience discussed the premises, the aims, and the relevance of this new publication.
Pedro was one of the first to arrive, directly from the United States, where he had just launched the publication in Harvard.

After the usual formal introduction by myself and Ines Dantas who introduced our guests, Colin started by saying that he had just read the whole book cover to cover that morning. And although he was intending to make the announced presentation 'Urban Fictions', he would rather present some of the main issues that he gathered from his readings of the compiled texts. Colin began by proposing a series of questions on the vitality of fcition, the identity of the authors, the nature of the affect of fiction, referring to beloved fictional authors such as Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, the balance between visual and non-visual, the role of ideology, the relation between past and future, the question of the materiality, the question of what is fictional or not and lastly, the notion of place and utopia. Although not presenting 'Urban Fictions', we had a glance over 14 of an array of 60 something fictions that he had pin-pointed, from the arcadian city to the endless city, from the endless city to the cybercity, In presenting a series of images representative of the fictions around the city, Colin pinpointed a central point of the discussion.
Beyond architecture, the focus of the fictions present in the publication is the city, the urban scenarios and its speculations.
Returning to fiction, the discussion was kicked off by Liam Young and from then on to Sam and to Pedro, returning to Colin who at a certain point dennounced a certain dystopic emphasis in the major part of the texts compiled. Pedro Gadanho, although admitting that part of the texts describe dystopic scenarios or speculations of a near future, pointed out that even the most dystopic point of view has in itself a latent positive approach or outcome, has fiction here is being used to criticize a sitution.
Discussing the reader and the potentiality and limits of the use of fiction in architectural/academic writing, Pedro pointed out that the reader is the one deciding the scope of implication of the actual fiction: one reader can read it as a text and not take anything out of the story being told, but in fiction there is this potential for the reader to read beyond the fiction, recognize a situation that is understated or disguised and in this way, become crucial in the critique of reality, even if this is depicted in a fictional format.
At a certain point, Sam Jacob picked on this critique of reality, and in very plain terms emphasized the somehow fictional approach in the relation between architects and clients, stating that architects always present the positive side of the project and the 'fictional' world-changing capacity of the project itself. Stating that he would never try the dystopic approach with a client, Colin rightly referred that he could be on to something there. Architects always use the positive approach, mainly in the photomontages and renderings produced, but what would it happens if the imagery created depicted a more real, and maybe more dystopic near future.
Questioned about the presence of only a couple of image-based contributions in the publication (the graphic novel 'Re:Doing Dubai' by Wes Jones and the photomontages 'The after Life of Cities' by Kobas Laksa) Pedro referred that more than trying to bring the word back to a proeminent place, he was trying to make a balance between written fictions and image-based fictions, broadning up the scope of the publications, not only directed to the academic and/or architectural circle, but directed to a general audience, interested in the urban scenarios that they live in and move through in life.

[ images: top and center, Beyond publication and AA Dinning Room, photo by Emanuel de Sousa; above, from left to right, Pedro Gadanho, Sam Jacob, Laim Young, Colin Fournier, photo by Kirk Wooller ]

The discussion foccused on many issues around fictions and the city, written techniques and visual techniques, utopia and dystopia and moved from one to the other, as in a gripping novel, when events unfold before our eyes and our imagination constructs a world that although not real could become a reality. Beyond, Issue 2, is indeed becoming a reality, and it is leaving behind the speculations, and returning to values and symptoms, still using the fictional techniques to alert us not about a fiction of the near future, but about the reality of today.

BEYOND BOOK LAUNCH AND ROUNDTABLE

2009-09-23T12:28:00.009+01:00

'Beyond' Book Launch and Roundtable
Short Stories on the Post-Contemporary
Presentation 'Urban Fictions' by Colin Fournier (The Bartlett) + discussion panel
Organised by Emanuel de Sousa (AA), Ines Dantas (Studio3.\ WUDA)
and AA Bookshop
Wednesday, 23 September, 6.30, AA Dining Room

'Beyond' is a new book series dedicated to new, experimental forms of architectural and urban writing. A bookazine in which an extended network of young and upcoming European architectural writers will be given the freedom to survey the outline of themes and things to come.
In an age when conceptual thought is undoubtedly one of the rules of attraction, it is expected that writing may provide again an arena where images are returned to their original frame: the speculative imagination. By seeking expressions that may escape the academic circle and the simple service of the prevailing photographic image, 'Beyond' will propose stories and essays that come near to fiction’s ability to prompt a deeper, appealing reflection on themes that concern us all.
The invited guests are Colin Fournier (The Bartlett), Pedro Gadanho ('Beyond' editor, shrapnelcontemporary.wordpress.com), Liam Young (tomorrowsthoughtstoday.com) and Sam Jacob (fat.co.uk).

Support: Studio3.\institute for experimental architecture Innsbruck

PITIÉ INSIDE OUT

2009-07-07T23:57:00.036+01:00

'I would rather feel compassion than know the meaning of it'. This statement by Thomas Aquinas is radically new, specially within a society eager to discover the meaning of everything and not foccused in what would lead to the actual meaning: feeling it.

Alain Platel says it is important to show suffering in order to intensify the commiseration and compassion. Compassion is a tainted word often associated with condescension. Usually taken in its negative form, as a passive feeling which does not lead directly to a change, compassion entails a more operative role in change if we realise that we all 'have one thing in common, namely that we are mortal, with everything that implies in terms of sickness and loss'. If we realise that nobody is better off than us in this, then this can affect the way we think and act.
Com-passion, with passion, will become the same as loving thy neighbour.

Love others as you love yourself is more the essence of a morality than a religion, it entails a form of leaving among others. In Christ's Passion, on which Bach's Mathew Passion is based, we learn 'an essential fact of human existence, that we are here to die'. The emphasis is on suffering, physical suffering and suffering through the other. It is about the individual's ultimate sacrifice: himself.

Pitié!, the new production of les ballets C de B, by director Alain Platel and composer Fabrizio Cassel (who created VSPRS, 2006) is based on Bach's Mathew Passion. Not simply adapting Bach's sublime music, Cassol creates a new story, beyond Mathew the Evangelist's tale and the poetic version of Bach's librettist, a story foccused on the mother's pain (a non-existent part in the original Mathew Passion), while the central figure, Christ, is divided in two twin souls with a common destiny (Jesus and Mary Magdalene). The desmultiplication into three central figures not only have biblical resonances but it actually entails a counter-biblical understanding of its characters, namely the role of Mary Magdalene and Jesus as twin souls, one not excluding the other, as one male/female soul in the cross, Christ.

The dancers themselves become this trinity, becoming in their own time, their own personal jesus, their own personal Christ. And then the question becomes real and tangible through compassion: 'What do you feel inside?

The 'bastard' dance that Platel has developed seeks exactly this, the physical translation of over-intense emotions in the transcendence of the individual. The contemporary 'shiver and shake dance' is here combined with grand écarts, in a hybridised form of dance that seems an 'inexhaustible source of inspiration: passing on movement material until it becomes distorted and changed so that it no longer expresses the particular identity of one thing or the other.' Movements get distorted, transformed and irrecognizable through the reinterpretation of different bodies doing identical movements, never being the same again. They become private, not following the structure of public movements, but actually materializing the deep structure of the soul inside the body, screaming for the other. A form of turning the world inside out, of finding the other within ourselves.

Regarding the religious feeling as a very private matter (an extreme intimacy know as communion), the performance traces this moments of absolute intimacy, when we show more openly the need of the other, of the flesh of the other body, our own flesh.
Intimacy is intensified in the unfolding of the Passion, not following a narrative structured development, but being constrained by the experience of an emotional crescendo through the body. Skin and flesh become more and more present in the unfolding of the emotions, revealing the incredible need to feel 'the other'. It is about the passion, in all its sexuality, reproduction and viscerality, as the mother when speaking of their children, says 'flesh of my flesh'.

From the initial moment when we see they sat in a row, and one of them starts shivering and shaking, the movements grow exponentially up to the point where reverberations of his own disconcertant body irradiates into the others bodies, to the point when they seem to be willing to tear each others skin into pieces and feed themselves from it, trying to transcend the limits of their own physical body, we are taken in the extreme delapidating voyage of humans trying to ignite their own light. Skin and flesh become omnipresent without recurring to total exposure or nudity, and in doing so, they strengthen the feeling thay are trying to convey, as when they show us their backs and present us the image of defecation as the ultimate private moment, in an analogy to Christ embracing the Cross and relinquishing his body.

When the mother holds the son devoid of life in her arms, we are not looking at the 'mother murderess' (that without condemnation, reflects the deepest conviction of Alain Platel), we are testimoning the real mother that did not step in and take her child's place, suffering through the other that already suffered. This redoubling of suffering is the actual Pitié! The actual image that we take from this experience, is that change does not come from the understanding of the mening of compassion, real change comes from the actuality of the feeling of compassion: I love thy neighbour!

[ images video: Pitié!, les ballets C de la B, directed by Alain Platel, music by Fabrizio Cassol based on Mathew Passion by J.S. Bach, peformed by Aka Moon ]

PROJECTS REVIEW 2009 WEBSITE

2009-07-05T00:04:00.012+01:00

The Projects Review Website 2009 is now online, with an overview of the student projects per units/department and the schools research clusters and year round activities. The website developed by despark (with AA Digital Platforms who has also conducted a revamp of the school's website) presents an interactive grid of squared images that revolve hyperlinking to sub-grids with the students projects per unit or department.

Here are some screenshots of my project pages, in the moment when passing from one page to the next, both pages make an appearence while disappearing, colapsing in one single dynamical image, different realities and distinct scales, strange textual and visual formations, generating an array of unthinkable possibilities.

[ images: website screenshots of AA Projects Review 2009/PhD/Emanuel Jose Rocha Ferreira de Sousa ]

PROJECTS REVIEW EXHIBITION 2009 ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION

2009-07-02T23:14:00.005+01:00

Projects Review 2009 opens tomorrow, Friday 3 July, offering an overview of the AA's 600+ full-time students projects displaying from drawings, modeels, installations, photographs, to large 1:1 working prototypes, intractive media, including the AA summer pavillion in Bedford Square.

The PhD programme exhibition, curated by Kirk Wooller and myself, Emanuel de Sousa, unites all of these modes of representation and presentation, through a full-scale installation in the reception area. Comprising a blown-up tiled catalogue of the PhDs completed and approved until now at the AA, the entrance wall sees itself profanated by a real-time graffiti intervention that tags all ongoing research (and other things) in the institution, challenging the established knowledge.

Projects Review 2009 runs from Friday 3 July to Saturday 25 July 2009.

[ images: PhD Projects Review 2009 exhibition area, AA Reception. Photos by Emanuel de Sousa. Please find more photos here ]

VIEN PAS VIEN VIEN PAS PAS VIEN PAS VIEN IMPERMANENCE

2009-06-30T23:25:00.009+01:00

Nothing lasts for ever, ashes slips through your fingers and life goes with them. Impermanence is a constant in our own lives and we are constantly challenged with a permanent problem: how do we deal with this?

Ashes is a metaphor with biblical and mythical resonances, for something you can't hold on to. Like a phoenix that burns in order to rise again, this apparent negative perspective can hold a positive reverse in which disappearence realises a renewed appearence.

Ashes, the new creation of Les Ballets C de la B coreographed by Koen Augustijnen, is 'about the things people do, or indeed don't do, in order not to loose what they have'; it is 'about the constant duality in everyone's lives, between holding on to something and the necessity or difficulty of letting go'. It is around these tensions that our own body, at a microscale, survives and, at a macro and social scale, our relationships with others and ourselves evolve.

Performed to the sound of Wim Selles' arrangements of the music of the Baroque master Handel and against a grey urban environment conceived by visual artist Jean Bernard Koeman, Ashes survives theatrically through the energy and openness of the melody, in the rythm and harmony of the music (of the baroque instruments involved with the sounds of the more intimate and carnal sound of the marimba and the acordeon). Against the pale shades of grey tones and the cold atmosphere of the street lamp, the dancers leave strokes of colour, with their vivid clothes, the blue of the sky shaking inside a body, the fire of the soul, flaming through the voice off a soprano that invades the room.

Ashes is full of this not-yet moments, when everything seems to become right, when things seem to find their own space and time, they vanish, and the moment and the place are lost again. Full of indecisions, of small miscommunications, little obstacles, the performers are alone in the middle of the crowd, and when alone for real, crowded with all this overload of social patterns that withdraw life from actual life.

It is this game enacted by two of the dancers, a kind of matting ritual, where the female switches between the vien (come) and pas (stop), and the male just ends up in the same place, exhausted, lying on the floor, after swtiching incessantlly between going and staying, between what he really wants and the thing that stops him from getting it. A scene that becomes larger then life, when the female performer leaves the exhausted body behind, and faces the audience, starting the same game with the social mass, that does not respond anymore to the calling, and just sits there looking, as it was really a show what they were seeing.

Ashes is full of these beautiful abstract images, sequences, sounds and feelings, which we can easily materialise in our own minds, moments of our own lifes, desires of our own souls. The dancers from different nationalities and cultures and with distinct approaches to dance and to their own bodies, just enlarged the scope and exponentiated the possibility of reception by the audience. What units them all in this unique performance was their lived appearence, the experience of life that their bodies already entail, the mature performance that could not be found on the everlasting energy of a young body, but rests in the loaded quality of the movement of a body, that is struggling to live, that is struggling to stretch out in order to touch something that we can not name properly. It is the body in the end of the day looking for its lost object.

In the end, we lay together, in the same pace, breathing together, waking up at different times, most of the times not realizing that someone else is falling a sleep at that precise moment, not realizing that in some complex space-time framework, there is someone reflecting our own fear of dying, or better, our fear of living.

Ashes is about all this and it is about blablabla, like one of the dancers almost falling away said when energy seemed to void is body in the air.

AGAINST THE TIDE

2009-06-29T23:33:00.010+01:00

'Imagine an island separated from the world not by an ocean but by a vast desert. The tribe that survives here has almost forgotten what water was and every day they assemble to tell each other their stories and share their memories of water. Maybe if they remember well enough the water will come back? Aerial performance by disabled artists on the top of 4 metre high sway poles will evoke the movement of water and the ebb and flow of the tides, whilst a specially created musical soundscape, audio description and sign language interpretation will create an epic elemental environment to tell a moving story of loss and survival set in a near future that we can easily imagine.'

[ images: Against The Tide, Graeae Theatre / Strange Fruit, performed at the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival on 27 June 2009, photos by Emanuel de Sousa ]

Against the Tide is a Greenwich and Docklands International Festival co-commission of Graeae and Strange Fruit. The production brought together the creative skills of a team of UK and Australian artists jointly led by Jenny Sealey (Graeae) and Sue Broadway (Strange Fruit) and was performed by a group of 'stormers' (friends from the Storm at the Lyric Hammersmith) among other actors from both companies, namely, Chisato Minamimura, Caroline Parker, Daryl Beeton, Daryl Jackson, David Ellington and Milton Lopes. The announced 'outdoor extravaganza on the banks of the Thames' didn't fall short, creating a small beach with four high flexible poles evoking multiple realities and making the audience look up in wonder. Multiple WOWS! paced the aerial performance that fused theatre, dance and circus, super-sizing the overall peformance with sublime moments in the sky of our own dreams.

[ images: Against The Tide, Graeae Theatre / Strange Fruit, performed at the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival on 27 June 2009, photos by Emanuel de Sousa ]

STORM OPEN SPACE REPORT

2009-06-29T23:01:00.012+01:00

The Storm Open Space Day, This is All Very Well, But What Next?, resulted in a report with some 30 issues raised, discussed and finally recorded in written format in 60 pages full of ideas, desires and possibilities in the aftermaths of the storm. Here are two of those issues (raised by me):

WHY DIVIDE BETWEEN TEXT-BASED / PHYSICAL THEATRE?
[ Emanuel de Sousa / Inogen Kischin / Colleen Campbel / Mariana Gomes / Naomi O’Kelly / Milton Lopes / Ghislaine Granger / Told By An Idiot / Framptic Assembly ]

ON LABELS
Labels are enforced on people. Labels are complete illusions! That's the problem! You have always to be in some box.
Labels stuck to companies but perhaps not in a good, because not all 'physical theatre' companies are the same or work in the same way.
Has 'physical theatre' become a default title for something that is not traditional theatre? Is physical theatre more 'open'? It (actually) seems to leave more space for you (the audience) to work it out. Maybe we just have to acknowledge the differences (Physical theatre companies didn't want to be dance but wanted to be also theatre). Labels!
Critics use these terms to describe and locate the work and outside of London these distinctions are still more pronounced. It is a vicious circle, even in founding (bureaucracy and market).
We should not get bothered by the division, not care about labels, not work on the division, push forward the division and its inherent limits and put the message out.
'This is not who I am!' should be always your statement on labels, always explore every project in every possible way. On the other hand, in your nature, you always end up labeling yourself but you can use it in you’re advantage and not as a limitation to you own work.

ON PAVING YOUR OWN PATH
A new company or an integrator?
Everybody starts doing things for free!
What we are looking is for a space where true integration can happen, where different levels of skill can mix, where different stimulations come together through a wide range of inputs. Everything is a tool!
It is rather difficult to pave your own way, because it involves a whole range of skills and different people doing different things in the structure and build a network where we become able to state our own way of doing/integrating things.
It is definitely a long run! We need a lot of courage to say that you can integrate different strands of text-based and/or physical theatre and improve the work of/in established companies. And a lot more to create a new company to work as a platform where you can create from scratch: a tabula rasa.
It starts with you, with your own curiosity, you just have to experiment and have fun while doing it! And be reassured when you do not know how to define your own work. Be responsible for continuing experimenting and be the next generation that refuses labels. It Is always about pushing the boundaries, your own limits and the limitations of others beyond.
(the work) Is always what you (the audience) want it to be! You (as a theatre maker) should always continue to learn about the 'other' strand / people / side of the coin. Explore! Explore new areas, it always releases something! (It just seems that one strand is always suspicious about the other).

ON WRITING AND PHYSICALITY
It is a constant difficulty to find a space where writing and physical creation can happen simultaneously, sometimes, the writing does not have to be about words, sometimes is all about supporting the structure of the show beyond the words.
We are always concerned about doing new stuff, and sometimes we just have to have fun with the things that are already there. Maybe we should go back to the basics, Greece and the theatre (the 'chorus' led to choreography, dance evolved from the chorus). All is theatre! So why the division? Is it fashion! What is What?
Different genres are necessary for audiences and even for founding. Many companies don't want to be in the box where they are put in. So how can we
challenge this then? (Go home and think about it, do a storm, but when you start doing it, never stop the flow!)

GOOD LUCK! ENJOY THE RIDE!

WHAT IS NEEDED TO SET UP AN ENSEMBLE?

EPISODE 1
I was late…
Nobody is here!
But you know what? Two people are dancing in front of me and I see and hear people discussing next to me and there are people wondering around and chatting with each other (maybe they are gossiping…).
Maybe that's all there is to it.
You just have to meet people and start doing things together.
It seems a lot like the dance I watch now. People get closer, first with fear, and then they touch, enter one another's space and without knowing, they have created something. Yes! Maybe it is just that! It is not about talking things through, or establishing the mechanics of it. Like the dancers moving, it is about chemistry, about feeling the other, touching the soul and interacting. They are already an ensemble without a predefined structure, agreed organization.
Maybe it is exactly that: inter + action.
It just seems a lot like that (I wish you were seeing what I am seeing now).
It is like STORM!
Therefore, I am going to 'storm' somewhere else.
And off I go from this Fair Isle!

EPISODE 2:
And then someone appeared (back again to Fair Isle): Naomi, and then Damian (who was dancing) and then Nesreen (who was photographing everyone)!
So how do we find people to work with? Is that the question?
Speed-dating?!
Well… (that could be an option) I think Whitechapel has something like that, where two artists meet one night and then probably those two artists collaborate in some project in the following months, maybe this could be the starting of and ensemble)
You just have to always be in every event, go to bad plays and good plays, meet your peers all the time, engage with them and other people beyond your own ground, because part of it (of keeping an ensemble alive) is about fresh blood, about always being artistically challenging! Being exciting! On another note, they become your 'professional family' (but maybe is also beyond that)
Maybe the solution (because finding your creative soul-mates could be actually a rather impossible task) is about making work (just try it!) with people you think you might work well. It doesn't have to be a success or a disappointment? And then have the freedom to work outside of your company (of your ensemble)?
Maybe ensembles are about individual creatives just working together and intoxicating others with new ideas and other perspectives.
One or two operative (or pro-actives) ways of achieving this: the Royal Haymarket Theatre Masterclass Programme, the Actor's Centre and the Artsjobs.org.uk.
Just meet People and you will easily find the ones you are looking for.

EPISODE 3:
And they lived happily ever after?
(coming soon)

URBANSCAPES

2009-06-29T00:44:00.002+01:00

HISTORIES AND THEORIES THESIS REVIEWS

2009-06-29T00:07:00.005+01:00

The End of Year Reviews for the AA Histories and Theories, Graduate School Master Programme, counted with an invited audience of critics including David Dunster, Braden Engel, Brian Hatton, Murray Fraser, Bob Maxwell, Douglas Spencer, Kirk Wooller and myself, Emanuel de Sousa. The tutors Marina Lathouri, Mark Cousins, Francisco Gonzalez de Canales and Pedro Alonso conducted a two-day long presentation and discussion of this year's master thesis juries.

[ image: Histories and Theories Thesis Reviews at 37 FFF Bedford Square, photo by Valerie Bennett ]

HOLDIN' FAST TERRESTRE

2009-06-28T22:59:00.010+01:00

At the still point of the turning world. Neither Flesh nor fleshness; / Neither from nor towards; at the still point, There the dance is, / But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, / Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, / Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, The still point, / There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. [ T.S. Elliot, Four Quartets ]

The double bill of The Turning World 2009, at the place, announced a binding theme between two rather different works as the inspiration they both had found in the writing of Milan Kundera.
Italian coreographer/performer Simona Bertozzi presented Terrestre, an 'intense and powrdully-performed solo' freely inspired by Milan Kundera's Slowness. Informed by Kundera's dissection of the fragile naturae of and individual's fate, Terrestre is ' a dialogue between an incomplete human body and its becoming emotionally and experientially significant', tracing the body like a 'map of passing time starting from primordial nature, through an anthropomorphic state to reach the completed, already made human being'.
The precariness and instability of the human body fins here a synthesis that aims at the essence of things, the 'cleaniliness of form', through action, and through repetitive action, 'from the inner nature of memory', the body is pulled and pushed towards many changes of shape.

Dot504 presented Holdin' Fast, taking as their starting point Kundera's best-known novel The Unbearable lightness of Being. The work coreographed by Jozef Frucek and Linda Kapetanea, combined contemporary physical dance with theatricla forms and original music, in a 'no-holds barred ballad about sexual dependency. Holdin' Fast immersed the audience (as announced) in sexual fantasy, as three couples search for the physical and psychic possibilities of the human body.
Through an array of situations and impossible positions, these three couples tried to fulfill their desire and changing will/mood/energy, to finally end stating clearly that we actually eat up the other, and with him/er, we ultimate eat ourselves.

[ video: Holdin' Fast, production dot 504 Lenka Ottova, choreography Rootlessroot (Linda Kapetanea and Jozef Frucek), performed by Helena Arenbergerová, Michaela ttová, Lenka Vágnerová, Pavel Masek, Petr Opavsky, Daniel Racek. Video editing done by christodoulos christodoulou ]

URBANSCAPES

2009-06-25T19:01:00.003+01:00

HOW SHALL I PUT IT? THE WORD OF GOD SLAVOJ ZIZEK MASTERCLASS

2009-06-23T00:56:00.020+01:00

'I like it that it's (sincerely) not so crowded, because I hope you won't be really disappointed, because this time, I really want to do it in a very naive way, what the title says.'
Notes Towards a Definition of Comunist Culture, the masterclass given by Slavoj Zizek at the The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities was a five-day long affair analysing 'phenomena of modern thought and culture with the intention to discern elements of possible Communist culture'. The masterclass was supposed to moves at two levels: 'first, it interprets some cultural phenomena (from today’s architecture to classic literary works like Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloise) as failures to imagine or enact a Communist culture; second, it explores attempts at imagining how a Communist culture could look, from Wagner’s Ring to Kafka’s and Beckett’s short stories and contemporary science fiction novels'.

[ image: Slavoj Zizek, Day 5, The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities ]

Although even in the introduction, Zizek would dismistify this overall plan, in what seemed a more organic (even naive) construction of reflections on 'where we may find utopian and non-utopian (or whatever) traces of what, retroactively, may/will/have been the beginning of a communist culture', the (naive) reflections were intertwined with the 'usual' bad taste jokes, which most of the times presented the most crucial point of his argument, or at least, the seed to it.
From a broadcasting perspective, Zizek would be this difficult public character that producers would want to put a 20 seconds delay, so they could control his sometimes uncontrolled language and apparently lack of politeness, but then everyone would loose the brilliance of his unresting quest, challenging everything, all the time, in every possible way.

Day 1 Utopias
Zizek started with wild animal parks, a kind of utopian fantasy, where the observer is reduced to a pure gaze: the scene is only there for our gaze. Watching the ('boring') channels like National Geographic (or Wild Life), we pointed out that 'animals don't need coaching, they just do it', and therefore a glimpse of a utopian mode is offered to us, a mode without language and any coaching need, 'a world untamed by language', where everyone has his/er place and is in his/er place. In a way, 'animals can have sex a-historically', and with that they overpass the phantasmatic narrative that always entaisl and impossible gazer, the gaze as object, the stain in the image.
Foccusing on historian utopias, through references to Thomas Aquinas, the Roman Empire, the dark middle Ages, miracles and science, Kafka, communist utopias, the television series 'Heroes', Lacan, Badiou's notion of 'subtraction', Zizek pointed that there is a third way to the duality fundamentalism/ liberalism, a collective emergence of 'freakshiness', a kind of freak disciplined collectivity, the ultimate utopian dream, a group of outcasts living together.
Zizek actually started with a reference to 'Blindeness' (the movie by Fernando Meirelles, based on the Nobel Prize José Saramago book, 'Ensaio sobre a Cegueira') where an apocalyptic event, arises in the existing society a kind of animal egotism and then the building of a community, a communist community. In the discussion afterwards, Zizek warned the audience to what he (precisely) had not said: 'I am not saying that everyone would be happy', but this was not really the issue.

Day 2 Architecture as Ideology: the Failure of Performance-Arts Venues to construct a Communal Space
In his introduction on Day 1, Zizek warned that the masterclass would be a rather naive take on the title and warned the audience that Day 2 would be a new domain in his own 'bluffing': '...because tomorrow I will do Architecture!' Referring to an invitation to participate in a conference he explained: 'Things like this make us believe that God exists, literally, when I was approaching my computer to say: NO!, to this invitation, someone rang at the door with a present from a friend, a book on architecture. The book is purely (just) descriptive, on these (how does the Queen calls them here?), these new Performance-Art Venues, but immediately I thought that I could steel all my ideas from it.'
From Lucia Costa/Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia to Stalinist Neo-Gothic Architecture, Zizek pointed out the materialization/embodyment of ideology in architecture, a kind of ideological edifice, where ideology is 'acted out, staged and even stated', staging in a 'mute way' the truth.
Foccusing on Hitchcock's Psycho main character, Norman Bates, running between two ideological edifices (the 'horizontal' motel and the 'vertical' house) and referring to the main goal of post-modernist architecture in ofuscating ideology, Zizek proposed that if Frank O'Gehry had intervened in the motel/house, Norman Bates would not have killed his victims, as the split between these two architectures as ideologies would be resolved. Continuing with post-modernist arhcitecture (and his analysis of performance-arts venues) he foccused on the relation between inside and outside, where the outside is no more an expression of its inside, where there is a cut in the link between function and form, where organs seems to be floating inside a box.
Referring to Koolhaas, skin and organs, Liebskind, multiple axis boxes , the minimal aesthetization, and the 'Kinder Surprise' (the chocolate egg) effect in architecture, shells and sculpture, 'Junk Space' and the 'Bilbao Effect', terrain buildings and lord of the Rings hobbits' villages and 'a house within a house' and the envelope approach, Zizek tried to reflect on the message of this redoubling as proof of the new public spaces being privately developed, stating that Performance-Arts Venues are the Holy Grail for architects.
In discussing the possibilities of a progressive architecture, he noticed the existence in the performance-art venues of intersticial spaces with no function, and that the occupation of these space could be a possibility: new communism begins with new spatial configurations.
Afterwards in the discussion, and taking the reflections back to the centre of communism, when presented with the substituion of the burned down cathedral (religious symbol) with a community swiming pool and then the rebuilding of the cathedral as it were, and questioned to what we would prefer, he replied: 'a swiming pool covered by a cathedral, where people could jump from the towers'.

Day 3 Wagner's Ring as a Communist Narrative
In the first day, Zizek announced Wagner as his favourite, where all his love lies, and actually the foccus on Wagner's Ring was about love. Waht Zizek proposed to do was a total rehabilitation of wagner, claiming that he was actually struggling with a communict project, albeit an unfinished one.
First, we have to reject the historicist reading of Wagner, but not in a sense of idealism of eternal art. as art can be redone in every epoch, work in different contexts, therefore going beyond historical contextualizations. Secondly, we should read Wagner like we read Hegel, study both in detail.
Then, if you connect the music with the stage action, you will discover the modern rule of Wagner's music: the fantasy of reality, the myth. The music becomes the phantasmatical envelope of the stage words/action.
Drawing his reflections on a series of extracts of a recording of Wagner's Ring, Zizek foccused specially in a moment in the end, where the remaining community (of extras in the stage) turn to the audience and remain there in silence looking towards the us. Zizek ended with the notion collective love, stating that love is needed above everything else, love as a call to act, the end of Wagner's Ring is exactly that: a open space for action of the collective, it is up to us now, the true path starts here (after the finalle), in the passage to the collective mode.
And tomorrow, we are back to the 'old boring stuff', here comes the regime totalitarian discipline.

Day 4 Populism and Democracy
Starting as usual with a theoretical point followed by an obscenity, Zizek pointed to the gap between master signifier and proper knowledge, stating that we should make our own cannons, to which he contrasted the 'false avant-garde arrogance' totally integrated in the market system: 'if you think something is disgusting in an art work is simply because, you didn't get it' (which Zizek explored fully with a reinvention of an article on Andres Serrano Piss Christ, 1987, but foccused on an hipothetical recording of Mr. Zizek Shitting).
Proving his point, Zizek stated that truth does not lay in the extreme (and here Zizek positioned himself on the side of the 'stupid' common society), defending that 'extreme' does not mean 'authentic'.
Referring to Ernesto Laclau, Populism as a reactive strategy, Democracy and freedom of choice, Lacan's Lost Object, Obama and the emancipatory dimension of Isalmism (beyond turkish proto-market and islamic fundamentalism), Berlusconi and Putin, the Foucauldian reinvention of the subject and contemporary capitalism, Zizek pointed to out that in the market economy, you can choose between, say 'Coke' and 'Pepsi', but you can never make any radical choice. The eternal dynamic questioning of the subject in consummerist culture only renders the feeling of guilt: making you look 'non-authentic'.
There is always an authentic moment (but they are exceptional), there is a moment when the people discover something has changed, and they are not afraid anymore. Those in power are playing the same 'shock game' as avant-garde (after 1968): 'No dignity! No moral!' Politics have become economics! The public space is becoming more aand more a 'collective shared private dream'. Public space is truning a universalised private space.

Day 5 Environment, Identity and Multiculturalism
Problem: Does this multi-centric world (in which western culture in not any more privileged) compels us to renounce every project of a single universal history no matter how critical it is?
From evolution to historicism, post-colonialism and the provincialization of Europe, abstract history and concrete life world, the 'not-yet' of capital and universalism, the ecological crisis, post-modernism as the fullfilment of modernity and the return to a religious state (after the reign of the secularized evolution in reference to Peter Sloterdijk) as actually the ultimate death of religion, Zizek claimed that 'we always misunderstoo ourselves': particular multiple life worlds are in fact universal capitalism.
Human universality remains in the ruptures, 'the breaking point', the discontinuities of cultural identities, in the sameness of the politics of diversity. In a rather apocalyptic tone, Zizek pointed out that there is no return to 'normal' when the (bad) situation is normalised: the only way is to die. Beyond psychonalisis and sado-masochism, this is the tragic position you have to adopt in radical political struggle. The truly heroic thing is to radically sacrifice family and dedicate yourself to the struggle. 'The true heroism is not to return to normal life!', assuming that he is this kind of hypocrite leftist, devoted to the struggle who gets invited to a conference in the united states, but ty to get a business class ticket.

In a very modest (and naive) conclusion, Zizek asked us if we (including himself) really know what is going on today? 'We have all the jargon, but do we really know what we mean and what that means (second modernity, what does it mean?)'. One thing he was aware that the shattering of all existing world (in a rather apocalyptic approach) could render a new order without possible repetition of the existing one: 'We need Dark Ages!'
The recordings of the masterclass may be downloaded from the Backdoor Broadcasting Company website.

[ The title refers to the debate at the ICA on 18 June 2009, between Slavoj Zizek (atheist, Marxist) and John Milbank (‘radical orthodox’ theologian), where Zizek quoted passages from the Bible, reading the Holy Spirit as as an inauguration of radical communitarianism and in order to proof his accusation to Millbanks of liberalising the Gospel. ]

SORRY! I KNOW, ITS OBVIOUS

2009-06-22T22:27:00.012+01:00

'I am not in love with the human race today! Ok, let's start!' he said.
3 people wondered through the parasol unit, the microphones and the recording device were being set up, while 18 marching band musicians stared statically to the 'abandoned building'. Bonney opened the door, behind him followed a sequito of admirers, friends and unknowns, that filled the gallery. A few more seconds of unresting wondering, and finally he sat in a egg shaped white chair, opened his handbag, form which he took a plastic bag, smiling to a woman that had just sit down among the small crowd. Pulling out a bunch of printed papers, he started to nervously reorder them while looking repetitively to the frosted glass door. Some one/thing was missing.

The introduction by parasol unit, made Bonney grin, while looking at the dedicated audience. Bonney raised, picked up his loose papers, and in two steps towards the door, turned to the crowd and said: 'I am not in a very good mood today!' Telling us about his pick pocket experience just the day before at his doorstep, he wrapped up: 'I am not in love with the human race today! Ok, let's start!'

[ image: Sean Bonney performing, in the background Troop by Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Brichler, 2005, 18 digital archival prints, each 96 x 89 cm, part of the exhibition Parades & Processions: Here Comes Everybody, Parasol Unit, 2009 ]

Sean Bonney was born in Brighton, grew up in the north of England and now lives in London, more precisely in the borough of Hackney (considered by many one of the worst neighbourhoods to live in the United Kingdom of her Majesty's, the Queen, the country of Tatcher and Blair, his nation). He is the author of Notes on Heresy (Writers Forum, 2002), Poisons, their antidotes (West House, 2003), Blade Pitch Control Unit (Salt, 2005) and numerous pamphlets, including Document: hexprogress and, most recently, Black Water (Yt Communication, 2006, the small company he runs with Frances Kruk, publishing the occasional pamphlet, chapbook, or circular). Poems, Diagrams, Manifestos: July 7th 2005 - June 27th 2007 (Barque Press) is the fully illustrated 90-page narrative running from the London suicide bombers through to Blair's resignation.

'Commons' opened the reading evening, blasting 'a highly rhythmic (or arrhythmic) object (the poem) that seeks through maximum density to communicate a dialectical relationship with the cosmos, and to explore the faultlines of official history and urbanism through which possibilities of liberation can be traced.' The second part, 'Commons 2', was exponentiated by a cellist improvisation, that disrupted Bonney's own arrythmic variations with profound soundscapes, combining formal experiment with 'a sarcastic voice rooted in punk' (which the so-called New Generation poets must have been dreaming of 20 years ago when they declared that poetry was the new rock n' roll) to provide an original account of the contemporary metropolis threatened psychogeography, suggesting new possibilities for political poetry and its relationship to the urban environment, while 'making clear that the protestor is also culpable', and 'charting of the effects of official mendacity on the psyche of any individual citizen who knows that all private experience is collective'.

Although some of these lines refer to reviews on his Blade Pitch Control Unit (Salt, 2005), Sean Bonney continues to deal on these issues, viscerally materialising them on a rather convulsive performance, taking advantages of flash spee linguistic games, and long paused words that try to grasp the contemporary reality, the reality of his own perspective on reality and on the metropolis full of 'abandoned buildings'. Curious enough, parasol unit was one of these abandoned former warehouse converted by architect Claudio Silverstrin into an exhibition space spanning two floors and a reading area, one more 'white cube' gallery with a clinic atmosphere, in grey and white concrete forms, an empty vessel.

Behind Sean Bonney, the 18 marching band troopers continued immobilized, looking pointingly at us, protesting silently. When I opened the frosted glass door, it was still day, the evening was still light and accross the road, a seemingly abandoned industrial landscape stood tall. His work-in-progress and notes on his readings can be found at these abandoned buildings, where I found uncommon extracts of his 'commons':

we are geometric problems
in the slots of loveliness
magnetic cores, for example
there goes Thatcher again
inside what I wasancient & elementary
slaughter the fascist BNP
I know, its obvious
to live in it like a language
that whistling, the law
in the privacy of our
threshold values, this serenity
- you know -
inside the hysteresis loop

"you have now reached
to put into practice
the knowledge you
you have acquired ghosts
in short, are ready
work / crime / magic
secret history number
the properties of ideas
put into ourselves
sorry, local residents
this is how you talk
the body’s acoustics
structurally / tearing
your playhouse down"

[ 'The Commons 2 (concluded)', post made by Sean Bonney on 22 May 2009 ]

BLOW OVER HOME ALERT

2009-06-19T23:54:00.007+01:00

In sports terms, we could say that Richard Alston was playing at home, where the audience are people that we encounter in the corridors and staircases, people that watch the ensemble rehearsing above the ground, in a special room in the middle of The Place.
Richard Alston Dance Company was indeed dancing at home, inside the four halls that see the work taking shape, forming itself through the movement of dancers, surrounded by fans and admirers. To which the ensemble who filled the dark Robin Howard Dance Theatre, responded with a hum that reverberated long after inside the bodies that experienced the performance.

The first part included Brink performed to the sound of Eurasian Tango, Movements 1-5, by Ayuo. The work coreographed by Martin Lawrence (rehearsal director of the company) is the development of a shorter version of Brink, to Movements 1,2 & 5 premiered in 2007. The work comprises 4 couples, reinterpreting and deconstructing the classical tango sensual movements. Although dancing in couples, the passionate sexuality that usually tango dancers entail, was not felt here. The coreography presented another spectrum of the classical tango, the sublimated fight between male and female that gives a polite rawness of sexuality to its movement.
After a brief pause, Alert entered the stage in a rather informal way.
Alert is the raw material for a film to be directed by Deborah May, which will be online on the Hear Here! website in October. Four dancers entered the stage chating and playing around among themselves. It actually seemed like The Place in a normal weekday, when students are stretching and alongating their bodies in the staircases, and through the corridors, shouting into the locker rooms, and laughing around the school. It all started in a ramdon way, movements inciting other movements, displacements in space provoked by other bodies invading your own space, and provocations by the other, the dance beside you. Suddenly, with a light change, Wayne Parsons, one of the dancers stood alone in the center of the stage, and surprisingly, Richard Halston entered the stage from the audience, sitting in the dark far end, with both hands on his knees. Silence for a moment, and then he said: Ok!

Richard started very calmly and in a gentle way, giving specific tasks and directions to Wayne that precisely performed a set of specific positions. At some point, Richard actually apologysed to Wayne, because not deciding which would be the next move, Wayne started shaking with the effort to remain in the unatural position we had been put into. Then, Richard said: 'Now, if you can remember it all, do it again...' To which wayne smiled. The improvisation that followed, based on the positions foregiven by Richard, was a delight, and Alert ended with a long silence after the dancer stopped, a silence sudenly broken by Ricard's warm and pleased: Ok! (black out)

After the interval, the second half started with Serene Beneath, followed by Blow Over performed to the sound of Philip Glass - Changing Opinion, Lightning and Open the Kingdom (Liquid Days, Part 2) - from Songs from Liquid Days. A shorter version of Blow Over premiered at Sadler's Well in 2008. A few days before of its premiere, I was fortunate enough to sit in one of the rehearsals and see the first stages of creation of this work co-comissioned by Sadler's Well and Dance Umbrella.
The music by Philip is rather moving, specially Changing Opinion, performed with two dancers Hannah Kidd and Wayne Parsons, a duet that enthrills for its simplicity. Recalling the rehearsal, at some point, Richard said to Wayne: 'It is more subtle, you almost don't touch her', and it is true, the subtlety of the elaborately structured and repetitive style of Philip Glass music, reverberating like the hum inside the room:

Gradually
We became aware
Of a hum in the room
An electrical hum in the room
It went mmmmmm

We followed it from
Corner to corner
We pressed out ears
Against the walls
We crossed diagonals
And put our hands on the floor
It went mmmmmm

Sometimes it was
A murmur
Sometimes it was
A pulse
Sometimes it seemed
To disappear
But then with a quarter-turn
Of the head
It would roll around the sofa
A nimbus humming cloud
Mmmmmm

Maybe it's the hum
Of a calm refrigerator
Cooling on a big night
Maybe it's the hum
Of our parents' voices
Long ago in a soft light
Mmmmmm

Maybe it's the hum
Of changing opinion
Or a foreign language
In prayer
Maybe it's the mantra
Of the walls and wiring
Deep breathing
In soft air
Mmmmmm

[ Philip Glass, Changing Opinion, in Songs from Liquid Days ]

STORMING AROUND

2009-06-09T21:32:00.005+01:00

The week of theatre ended with an improvised site-specific piece performed by a group of stormers. The performance invaded the intersticial spaces of the Lyric Hammersmith, in a work that was devised throughout the week (in the scarse spare time between workshops) drawing inspiration form the thoughts and practices that Josette-Bushell Mingo shared in her own workshop, in the beginning of the week, entitled What do we want to say and how do we want to say it?.
Drawing on inspirations from Pina Bausch to Blade Runner, Josette looked at space and stories, exploring the unusual spaces of the Lyric that are often forgotten (stairs, windows, tables, alcoves, passageways) from where we can still draw inspiration from.

The performance involved moving through these spaces, with short spoken word interventions that punctuated the physical interaction between bodies, objects and space. The banal architecture of these forgotten spaces exponentiated the ensemble performance, igniting the stories between them and the audience. Whatever they wanted to say, they said it and the audience experienced it completely, often expressing it with sighs and wows!

THIS IS ALL VERY WELL, BUT WHAT NEXT?

2009-06-09T20:07:00.008+01:00

The final day of STORM was an Open Space Event, facilitated by Lee Simpson (Improbable). This is all very well, but what next? was not a conventional conference or meeting, the idea of Open Space is an interactive and inclusive way of structuring a meeting that allows you, the participant, to set the agenda. The event was announced as a dynamic way of talking about complicated and important things and as particularly good at turning talking into doing, at making things happen.

[ images: Lee Simpson opening the Storm Open Space ]

Open Space Technologies (OST) was initially developed by Harrison Owen in 1985. It basically offers a method to run meetings of groups of any size ('technology' meaning here a tool/process/method). It is a self-organizing process, where participants construct the agenda and schedule it during the meeting itself. At the beginning of an Open Space participants sit around a circle, the facilitator briefly re-states the theme of the gathering, inviting the participants to identify issues or topics of discussion. The proponents come to the center of the circle, write the subject or topic of discussion on a sheet of paper and announce it to the group, choosing a time and place for discussion and posting it on a wall (setting the agenda and the timetable for the day).
Participants hear The Four Principles and The One Law, which state that whoever comes is the right people; whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened, whenever it starts is the right time and when it's over, it's over. The one Law, usually referred to as the 'Law of Two Feet' (or the 'Law of Mobility') reads as follows: if at any time during our time together you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing, use your two feet. Go to some other place where you amy learn and contribute.
The sessions run concurrently over the course of the day and in the end of the day, when the Open Space is 'closed', a document is ready with all the ideas and discussions that were being addressed by all the participants. A kind of manifesto, made for action.

[ images: proponents write down their topics of discussion, announcing it to the whole group before pinning the sheets on the wall ]

STORM Open Space was the culmination of a creative week of workshops on theatre, talks, happenings, networking, performances, thinking and challenges between established thetre companies and 40 emerging european theatre-makers.
All of us, filled with new experiences shared the same dissatisfaction, inspiration and belief that PUSH, Graeae and the Lyric had shared with us in the beginning of the week that 'theatre and the arts is a human right to be enjoyed by all; that theatre houses are places to share, talk, reflect, spread joy, get happy, teach and get angry; one of the last meeting places where we can see the panorama of human life'.
In the beginning of the day, when we sat accross each other, in a egg-shaped form, filling once more the main foyer of the Lyric Hammersmith, noone would expect we would cover so much ground. Many topics were raised and discussed throughout the day (I proposed two discussions, which reports will be posted shortly), such as the eternal division between text-based and physical theatre; the difficulties to set up an ensemble; the sinuous paths of creative founding; the future of STORM and the actual future of these 40 emerging artists.

[ images: one of the discussions set by Josette-Bushell Mingo on the future of STORM; general view of the main foyer of the Lyric Hammersmith, with the mural painted during the week on STORM ]

After 7 hours of discussion, we were back to the same place, back to our egg-shaped form, staring at each other, sharing the experiences of the week, the temporary conclusions of the discussions and our dreams and feelings.
Lee Simpson closed the Open Space, but the space remained opened in our minds. Although the discussions of the actual day were stabilized in a single document, everyone left with a thousand thoughts storming in their heads, in their bodies, announcing that after theses STORM, other storms will happen around the world, and that after this nothing will be the same.
A new generation of theatre-makers will ignite spaces and audiences in the near future, constructing the 'place for solidarity and difference' that Josett-Bushell Mingo wanted to create through this joining of forces to develop each other and actually make things happen!

STORM

2009-06-08T19:29:00.016+01:00

Josette-Bushell Mingo described STORM as when 'unexpected forces come together and nothing is never the same after that'. STORM was exactly that, an opportunity for emerging artists and theatre-makers to gatecrash the visual and physical theatre party and discover wat it takes to create boundary busting-theatre: from spoken improvisation to installation, site specific to spoken word, puppetry to physical theatre.
In a week of intensive activity directed by acclaimed directors, Josette-Bushell Mingo (PUSH), Jenny Sealy (Graeae) and Sean Holmes (Lyric Hammersmith), 40 european theatre-makers (although most of them based in London, and I was one of them) were given space and time to discover contemporary theatre companies inside out.

[image: detail of polaroid wall with all the stormers ]

The week-long workshop was 'staged' at the Lyric Hammersmith, literally taking over the building in every possible way (to the point, that the walls were painted and drawn upon) and brought together an array of established theatre-makers that included: Helen Paris and Leslie Hill (Curious), Ferdy Roberts (Filter Theatre), Josette Bushel-Mingo (Push/TystTeater), Javier Marzan (Peepolykus), John Wright (The Wright School), Barby Asante, Benji Raid (Breaking Cycles), Toby Jones and David Jubb (BAC centre), Sean Holmes and Simon Stephens (Lyric), Aitor Basauri (Spymonkey), Paula Garfield (Deafinitely Theatre), Scott Graham (Frantic Assembly), Mem Morrison (performer), Steve Tiplady (puppetry), Lee Simpson (Improbable), Jenny Sealey and Mojisola Adebayo (Graeae), Vicky Amedume (Upswing Aerial), Helen Chadwick (voice coach), Richard Greogory (Quarantine), David Farr (RSC), Wolfgang Stange (Amici Dance Theatre), Paul Hunter (Told by an Idiot), John E Macgrath (National Theatre of Wales), Emma Rice (Kneehigh Theatre) Francesca Beard (poetry performer).

Impossible to resume the full experience of the workshop, here follows a glimpse of my own path through the week, through the myriad of wrokshops offered, trying to rationalise the experience, emotions, feelings and sensations, that punctuated each hour of these never-ending days.
We started the week with two questions: Where do you come from ? Where are you going?, in a ice-breaker session led by Helen Paris and Leslie Hill for 40 strangers that sat around the tables in the main foyer of the Lyric Hammersmith. In colourfull pieces of paper, yeallow, blue and pink, histories and dreams were written down: I am coming from 'darkness to light', 'home', 'a city where people's names end with Buttons', and 'I am not sure where I am going but I intend to be busy', 'I am going with knowing what Is the mening of going', 'I am going on a trip', 'I am going'.
And off we went to our first workshops, the groups became smaller, the space changed, in a minute we were in the main stage of the Lyric with Ferdi Roberts of Filter Theatre, that after a brief talk about Filter's on-stage fusion of live and recorded music and sound, naturalistic and stylised physical movement, and video images, led us into a world of wonder experiences. The group of strangers holding each other in the centre of the stage, heads with heads, shoulders with shoulders, started breathing together, silently, a silence that became a sigh, small ressonances of each others body, that grew bigger and louder, to the point that the sounds created made us travel to an imaginary space: space of storms, accross highways, winding away the fauna of the far away landscape, and back again to the plateaux of background sounds of the Lyric.
After luch time, where ther was time to chat, rest, meet other stormers, get a breath of fresh air, sit and dream, plot an plan (as they said in the programme whatever you need to do or whatever feels right), we went to our next workshop.
John Wright received us with a huge smile, welcoming us like children welcomes their playmates, and 'play' was the ruling word of the day, or at least, this afternoon where we investigated concscious and unconscious play, finding the game, revealing and hiding the game and the devolopment of text and situations out of nothing, or better saying, out of playfulness. Out of basic and simple movements, the exercises were puinctuated by hilarious situations that started every time with the impossible provocation: Well, I heard you know all the moves... Yes, I certainly do!
The first day ended with a conversation with Toby Jones (Every Boy Deserves Favour, Infamous) and David Jubb (BAC) who talked about their own personal and professional path, their dreams and fears, their way of living theatre. Of the myriad of great moments or lines of thought, one stroke me as really special and hilarious: Toby took off his shoe and threw it in the middle of the human circle, that sat around the stage of the Lyric Studio. The shoe just laid there, without any interest, but as Toby made it clear, it all changes when the actor enters the stage, at that precise moment, the shoe becomes incredile important. 'Oh! I know he lost he shoe!', 'Someone robbed the shoe!', 'It is not a shoe, that is obvious!' were some of Tony's lines enacting the audience in its eagerlness to try to make sense of the uninteresting shoe in space. And that's all it takes!

The next day was spent with Sean Holmes, artistic director of the Lyric Hammersmith and Simon Stephens, playwright (On the Shore of the While World), in a workshop where we should basically Write a short scene and stage it. Well, that's quite a challenge to someone who is not used to write. The morning session examined how character is dramatised rather than described and how dialogues and action can be charged to release words in a way that engages audiences. Simon took us step by step through some basci questions such as: what qualities are need to be a playwright? or What must all palys be about? or what's the difference between a human and an animal, that took us deep into 'deep structure grammar'. In the end, what we arrived to was Inclination, observation, analysis and technique as basic skills for the playwright as the main function of his endeavour is to actually map behaviour, namely people's behaviour, as this is ultimate the thing that all plays should be about: People. We actually ended up with thre basic questions that all scenes (and basically all plays) should respond: What do they want? What is stopping them? What do they do to get it?
Sean Holmes took the lead in the afternoon, staging some of the 14-lines short scenes and actually staging them, concluding with scratch performances that worked mainly the possibilities that are buried in a simple amalgamation of words, words that mean actions, that construct people, characvters and situations, a conflict and its resolution ( I will post the scene I wrote in one of the next posts).
In the evening, Mojisola Adebayo presented a first rehearsed readind with British Sign Language (BSL) interpretation of her new play Matt Henson, North Star, inspired by the true story of Mathew Henson, an African-American who in 1909 was denied his place in Artic history as the first man to reach the North Pole. Set in an imaginary Vaudeville decadent theatre, Danny Sapani, Matt Henson, was exponentially amplified by the interpretation in BSL by Jacqui Beckford, the Weather Lady, which gave visceral expression to the voice of the man, the adventurer in a full lived experience of his great adventure, his life.

The following day started in an Improbable way, with Lee Simpson wanting us to create work by the seat of your pants and the skin of your teeth and stepping on stage before you are ready. Foccusing on the improvisational approach that underpins the creation of an Improbable show, the work was done in the most imporbable way, how to put two human beings, telling the seame story simultaneously wihtout knowing what the story is about. Just go along.
The afternoon was set to other tunes, with Helen chadwick leading a a workshop where we explored singing in harmony as a group. Leraning songs from scratch in just a few minutes, we filled the room with harmonious sounds and melodies, that spread through the building, other workshops and ended up in the square in fornt of the Lyric in the middel of the city, singing to the four winds, that when you go out far, how far is far enough far? And realizing that when you think you are far enough, you are just scratching the surface of yourself. It was beautiful, I cannot explain it, so I am going to continue, because it had to be experienced to fully understand it (I guess).

The last day of workshops started with Paul Hunter of Told By an Idiot, fascinating us with the idea of the fine line that exists between comedy and tragedy, and how the work of the company strives to explore the human condition by revealing it in a style of theatre that is bigger than life. Through a variety of strcutured exercises including verbal and non-ver-bal improvisation, rhythm, timing and ensemble work, we created hilarious situations that wre basically and amplification of our own lives.
The afternoon workshop lead by Emma Rice of Kneehigh Theatre, continued along the sme lines, with more intense and extreme physical work, we actually became bigger than life, experimenting positions and perspectives that changed our relation to space, gravity and the other people. Intensified through the introduction of musicality, the simple physical movements, became charged with the power of an embedded story.

[ images: Claire Cunningham perfoming a site-specific piece based on the workshop led by Josette-Bushel Mingo (PUSH) in the patio of the Lyric Hammersmith ]

The day ended with the Open Mic Night where some of Stormers presented improvised work, the results of the exercises developed in the workshops, in what became a rather emotional night, full of sketches of life, love and theatre. Caroline Parker was unforgetable as Kate Bush: Heathcliff, it's me--Cathy. Come home. I'm so cold!Let me in-a-your window. 5, 4, 3, 2. The end!

PS: This one is already too long and at the same time too short to say so many little huge things and moments that punctuated these never-ending days and nights.

THRLLING WONDER STORIES SPECULATIONS PETER COOK STRIPTEASE

2009-05-31T01:59:00.008+01:00

'Thrilling wonder Stories: Speculative Futures for an Alternate Present', a symposium, co-organized by Liam Young (AA Inter 7) and Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG) took place at The Architectural Association, on Friday, 29 May.
Jumping between the real and the imagined, stories from fields like gaming, film, comics, animation, literature and art, not to mention architecture, were gathered in an array of presentations, pseudo interviews and short Q&A sessions with speakers such as Geoff Manaugh, Viktor Antonov, François Roche and Stéphanie Lavaux, Warren Ellis, Archigram (Peter Cook), Ian Macleod, Squint Opera and Jim Rossignol among others.
Although being only present in the morning, we can surely state that we saw a truly thrilling wonder story, whose main character, qua superhero, Peter Cook, transforming himself, undressed the architect figure and became the radical superhero of the 'weird-shit architecture', defending the pertinence and value, and innovation capacity of the underground stream of radical architecture/art research projects accross the world.
Here are some photos of the strip-tease running lecture.

Reminding all of us that architecture is about pushing edges, Peter Cook, the Archigram hero, 'has arrived' and dwels in the ordinary world as we do. When questioned about if there would be any science-fiction precedent in ancient history (a notorious fixation stated by the chair of the event, Geoff Manaugh, from the first instance) he just replied that he was not 'a very good historian'.
Neverthless, Peter Cook left us an outline for a Thrilling Wonder Story in an image of a recent painting/project, that seemed to depart from the premise that when a log is cut and thrown into the river, you can foresee the movement, but you will never be sure that it will get and how it will get to the finishing point. The wonder is in the trip!

URBANSCAPES

2009-05-31T01:25:00.006+01:00

URBANSCAPES will be a scattered photoessay accross the blog. From now on, photographs (with the tag urbanscapes) will be regularly uploaded, recording the everyday events and spaces that we live in and pass by in our everyday urban life. Mostly focused on London, the images will depict ramdom shots, in a reinvention of the flanêur experience accross the urban landscape.

BLACK ON BLACK

2009-05-30T20:39:00.017+01:00

'Dawns and Dusks' at the Louise Blouin Foundation in London, is an impressive retrospective of one of the most important american female sculptor, Louise Nevelson. The retrospective, the first show of the artist in 40 years in London, gathers an array of work by one of the most influential and innovative artists in the post world war scene in the US, namely in New York, where she was based. The works of art always challenges the viewer with ambivalent structures, between the aesthetic realm of painting and the material construct of the sculpture. The assemblages presented here cross the development of a carreer that was based in the collection of urban lefthovers including street-discarded furniture, scraps of wood, refuse from factories, hat forms, patterns and moulds which were then assembled and painted, uniformizing the structure into a new collection of forms and shadows.

[ images: view of the gallery, with Untitled (1964, wood painted black, 263.5x263.5x52.1cm) and in the background, 'End of Day Nightscape' (1973, wood painted black, 281.9x421.6x16.5cm); 'Cascade VII' (1979, wood painted black, 269.2x330.2x40.6cm); detail 'Cascade VII' ]

The artist synthesized the process and the recurrent choice on black as follows:

'When I fell in love with black, it contained all colour. It wasn't a negation of colour. It was an acceptance. Because black encompasses all colours. Black is the most aristocratic colour of all. The only aristocratic colour. For me this is ultimate. You can be quiet and it contains the whole thing. There is no colour that will give you the feeling of totality. Of peace. Of greatness. Of quietness. Of excitment. I have seen things that were transformed into black that took on just greatness. I don't want to use a lesser word. Now if it does that for things I've handled, that means that the essence of it is just what you call alchemy.' Louise Nevelson

Louise Nevelson considered herself a formalist, part of the Abstract Expressionism among others like Rothko, Kooning and Reinhardt who were close friends of the female sculptor.
The monumental works here presented sometimes seem to become cabinets of curiosities, filled with every possible reality. Often overwhelming, the works stand between the painting and the sculptuere, usually hang or leaning onto the wall, they create a kind of a black void, an intersticial space that becomes full with the viewer entering the offered reality.
'End of Day Nightscape' (1973, wood painted black, 281.9x421.6x16.5cm) encapsules one of these transcending experiences that seem to swallow the viwer into another dimension, another reality, and in-between place.

'[T]he work that I do is not the matter and it isn’t the colour, [...] it adds up to the in-between place, between the material I use and the manifestation afterwards; the dawns and the dusks, the places between the land and the sea. The place of in-between means that all of this that I use—and you can put a label on it like ‘black’—is something I'm using to say something else.' Louise Nevelson

The artist seemed to resume her approach to life and to art in this willingness 'to show the world that art is everywhere'.

OTHER TRANSPARENCIES

2009-05-30T20:20:00.004+01:00

Here is the abstract of the paper I presented at the AA PhD Dialogues 2009: Ideology in Transparency, on Friday, 8 May, entitled 'Other Transparencies: Heterotopia Disrupting Modern Self-Transparency'.

'The paper investigates ideology and heterotopia in relation to the social ideal of modernity as ‘the utopia of absolute self-transparency’ [Vattimo, 1989].
The subjection of modern society to scientific analysis – analogous to the one applied in the natural sciences – was not only an epistemological programme but also a revolutionary move towards the ideal of a radical transformation of society – the self-transparency of reason and the self-consciousness of ‘being’ in the public sphere.
The belief that society could be transformed through similar processes by which matter and natural form were being transformed implied a framework of unilinear (universal) history; one that would come to an end with the end of revolutionary utopia of the nineteen-sixties, making impossible in principle the realisation of self-transparency.
The utopia of aesthetic rehabilitation of the beautiful and the everyday was now a distorted counter-utopia, coping with an idea of ‘being’, not as ground and as stability of eternal structures, but rather as event and as plural ethics of interpretation.
‘Other Transparencies’ explores the appropriations of the term heterotopia – as textual and geographical ‘other’ sites – in cultural and spatial theory, in order to diagnose a ‘transferred’ understanding of ideology, in contrast to the supposedly ‘post-ideological’ conditions of the present.'

A forthcoming publication on this year's theme, Ideology in Transparency, is being edited by Kirk Wooller and myself, Emanuel de Sousa.
For more information on the AA PhD Dialogues 2010, please visit AA PhD Dialogues.

DIALOGUES

2009-05-30T19:57:00.004+01:00

[ images: Eva Eylers presenting, photo by Valerie Bennett; Morning panel dicussion moderated by Marina Lathouri, clockwise, Yara Sharif, Kathleen O'Donnell, Eva Eylers, Marina Lathouri, Hyun-Tae Jung and Emma Cheattle, photo by Kirk Wooller; Roemer va toorn Q&A after the lecture ]

' [...] The event counted with presentations by ten PhD candidates from six invited institutions around the world, namely the AA, The Bartlett School of Built Environment, Columbia GSAPP, ETSA Seville, The London Consortium, and University of Westminster. Marina Lathouri (Co-Director of the AA Histories and Theories Graduate Programme) and Murray Fraser (Professor of Architecture and Coordinator for Postgraduate Studies and Research at the University of Westminster) moderated the two panel discussions. The day was concluded with a keynote address by Roemer van Toorn, Professor and Director of the Projective Theory Programme at the Berlage Institute. Roemer’s talk, entitled ‘Learning from Free Indirect Discourse: Aesthetics as a Form of Politics’, argued that ‘free indirect discourse’ – a cinematic conceptual method initially theorised by Pasolini - has spatial and aesthetic implications that could be of decisive importance to make architecture politically again. [...]'

[ extract from the review by Kirk Wooller and myself to be published in the AA Projects Review 08/09, forthcoming ]

IDEOLOGY IN TRANSPARENCY

2009-05-30T19:37:00.009+01:00

Here is the poster for this year's AA PhD Symposium, AA PhD Dialogues 2009: Ideology in Transparency which announced the event around the world.
I designed it using as a background image a photograph of mine taken in Oxford on a greyish day a while ago.

AA PhD DIALOGUES 2009

2009-05-30T19:16:00.006+01:00

‘IDEOLOGY IN TRANSPARENCY’
AA PhD DIALOGUES
2nd Annual AA PhD Research Symposium

Architectural Association
School of Architecture
36 Bedford Square
London WC1B 3ES

Friday 8 May 2009, 10.00 – 7.00
aaphdsymposium.net

AA PhD Dialogues is an annual international event organised by a select group of PhD candidates at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London.
AA PhD Dialogues is the follow-up event to the 2008 AA PhD Symposium, ‘The Critique of the New: Questioning the Legitimization of Newness Through Technology’, with Mark Wigley (Columbia University GSAPP) as keynote speaker.
Each year a theme is selected based upon a particular set of terms that address current questions within contemporary architectural discourse. This theme operates as an umbrella under which individual PhD research can be collectively discussed in an international forum.

THEME
The notion of transparency has achieved a continued, if varied, currency in architectural discourse throughout the twentieth-century. Along with a multitude of material attributes, transparency advocates a shifting, yet ever-present, ideological sensibility. Towards the latter part of the twentieth-century, however, the general notion of transparency as an ideological mechanism began to decline. Today, while a literal sense of transparency remains, seemingly its ideology does not. This symposium aims to resurface the question of ideology in (contemporary) architectural discourse by creating dialogues around the following questions:
_ As the notion of transparency appears to be superseded by the immateriality of the digital, how can contemporary architectural research address transparency’s role as a technological innovation, as a mechanism for design, and, above all, as an ideological device?
_ Do new design technologies and media produce more transparent systems of communication?
_ Despite the apparent displacement of ideology in current architectural arguments and projects, what are the subjacent ideologies that remain and how might we be able to scrutinise them?

KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Roemer van Toorn, from the Berlage Institute

ORGANISING COMMITTEE
Doreen Bernath, Nerma Cridge, Eva Eylers, Kris Mun, Emanuel de Sousa, Tania Lopez Winkler and Kirk Wooller

BUILDING!

2009-05-30T19:07:00.009+01:00

Here is the manifesto I presented at the AA MANIFESTO: IDEOLOGY, among readings of the old favourites: Futurist Manifesto by FT Marinetti (1909) and Surrealist Manifesto by André Breton (1924).

BUILD!
Think before you build, but never stop building and rebuilding.
In building you discover the other side of the computer screen, in hacking buildings you fight the ruling systems, in transforming buildings you are renewing society.
If you get it wrong, just be happy, you just finished the newest ruin of the near future.

BUILD SPACE!
Don’t build forms, build space. Build the void, discover the interstitial space of emptiness where fullness is achieved, like the air you breathe through your lungs, architecture will be the everchanging vessel.
If you end up with a blurred bubbly blob, just join the rest of the world!

BUILD ARCHITECTURE!
In building you are creating the space of future, present and past, collapsed in a single space and time filled with exponential possibilities. Build the future, living the present, not forgetting your past. Be here and now always.
Just trust your own vision, your own voice and have a laugh drinking.

BUILD!

AA MANIFESTO LINE-UP

2009-05-30T18:40:00.015+01:00

[ images: Eva Eylers, Kirk Wooller and myself 'cheering', photo by Valerie Bennett; Eva Eylers starting her manifest and audience; Kirk Wooller delivering his manifesto from the rooftops; the end of the event, after some manifestos ]

Here are some photos of the AA MANIFESTO: IDEOLOGY, which took place at the AA terrace, on Tuesday, May 05.

You can find more photos on the Flikr AA PhD Photostream.

1 MINUTE! 1 MANIFESTO! 1 BEER!

2009-05-30T18:16:00.017+01:00

AA MANIFESTO: IDEOLOGY was a pre-event (a 'beer summit' to tell the truth!) organised as a pre-event to the AA PhD Dialogues ‘Ideology in Transparency’, 8 May 2009.

Here's the calling we launched along with a bunch of posters (which I designed) that announced the event throughout the AA and wider London.

'Calling All Visionaries!
Are you disgruntled with the current state of architecture?
Do you have a better vision for its immediate future?
Can you formulate this vision into a 1-minute manifesto?
Will you seize this opportunity to shout it from the rooftops?'

ALWAYS DREAM DREAMS AND BACK AGAIN

2009-05-30T17:39:00.009+01:00

After six months since the last post, here am I! Again!
And writing in English! And with new ideas to make this blog alive again, (besides the comprehensive resource of cool websites of creatives that I know people, specially friends, use to avoid googling for some architect or designer)
From now on the website will shift between english and portuguese, depending where the action is placed, as since 2008 (old news, I know) I have been based most of my time in London (some people say, I am doing my PhD, and so I should believe so... everyday)
Well this (pseudo) return has been in my mind for some time now, but it got always postponed, and then a series of events, just made me think about it again.
First it was a visit (well, a comment that was left here in one of the posts) which made me think that it was still alive (although almost dying and threaten with extinction in the blogsphere) and secondly, this friday, in a lecture at AA, a blogger (Geoff Manaugh, BLDGBLOG), said that nowadays, if your blog has not 400 visits per day or per post in each day (oh my god, I had 26 visits this month... what a disgrace) , it is like the end of the world (you are like in the dead zone of blogsphere).
Well, I am alive and kicking, as they say.
I am not aiming at having 16.000 people every month visiting the blog, but who ever is interested in architecture and theatre, then they will have posts on that every other day.
Well, I should stop writing! Till the next post (which will be right now, I will do some retroactive posts to put everything up-to-date, so this week, will be peculiar, with a bunch of posts all uploaded instantly... we'll see)

ALBA

2008-10-31T23:28:00.020Z

'Vuelo fresco sobre lechos vacíos.
Sobre Grupos de brisas y barcos encallados.
Tropiezo vacilante por la dura eternidade fija
Y amor al fin sin alba. Amor! Amor visible!'
Federico García Lorca, 'Cielo Vivo' [Eden Mills, Vermont, 24.08.1929], in Poeta en Nueva York.

da poesia do realismo
ALBA é a história de uma família de mulheres solitárias num povoado distante.
Após o enterro de seu marido, Bernarda Alba decreta um luto de oito anos a todas as mulheres da casa, confinando-as ao espaço austero e claustrofóbico de sua casa.

A terceira e última peça da trilogia de dramas folclóricos do escritor espanhol Federico García Lorca (1936), divide-se em três actos, todos situados no interior da casa de Bernarda Alba, que vive com as filhas Angústias, Martírio, Madalena, Amélia e Adela, a sua mãe senil, Maria Josefa, e a criada, La Poncia. Inspirada em personagens reais e descrita por Lorca como 'um verdadeiro documentário fotográfico da vida rural', A CASA DE BERNARDA ALBA é o culminar do teatro lorquiano. Completada pouca antes do seu assassinato por simpatizantes nacionalistas, no despontar da Guerra Civil Espanhola, Lorca demonstra como o realismo pode ser elevado a um nível poético.

ALBA reduz a trama de Lorca à sua essência, as mulheres da casa, posicionando a figura feminina no centro do conflito dramático, expressando os valores imaculados da fecundidade e da liberdade de espírito, constrangidos pelas convenções sociais, de um mundo rural marcado por códigos comportamentais vigentes desde a idade média. Uma adaptação que se prendeu com a interpretação do texto, num trabalho metódico sobre a tradução, o texto e a sua oralidade, com o intuito de efectuar cortes necessários a uma economia do espectáculo e a um reforço do sentido da encenação.
De cinco filhas passamos a quatro filhas, de três criadas passamos a uma só, das dezenas de mulheres figurantes passamos a uma plateia, que apesar de continuar a ser público, se torna activa na contracena com os actores, nem todos eles mulheres como seria no original. No entanto, a introdução do elemento masculino no universo fechado da casa de Bernarda Alba, possibilitou uma renovada leitura da peça e das suas personagens.

Explorando temas de repressão e liberdade, paixão e amor, angústia e luto, conformismo e tradição, ALBA revela os efeitos dos homens sobre as mulheres e a tensão opressiva do seio familiar, conduzindo-nos ao clímax da alvorada do dia seguinte, o Amanhã.

uma outra identidade
O processo criativo de ALBA, teve como ponto de partida a primeira residência artística do ESTACA ZERO TEATRO, levada a cabo na Gralheira, em Agosto, durante três dias de trabalho colectivo de pesquisa teatral 'por terras onde se respira ruralidade, à procura de uma outra identidade que não a nossa'.
A paisagem montanhosa da Gralheira, proporcionou um contacto directo com a terra e com as gentes de um meio rural marcado pela tradição e pela vida comunitária semelhante ao retratado por Lorca, possibilitando aos actores a criação de memórias activas no trabalho de ‘construção da personagem'.
Num 'processo sistematicamente orientado', o estudo aprofundado do texto associado a exercícios de expressão corporal e dramática, gerou um vocabulário teatral, sucessivamente depurado e sintetizado. Todos estes exercícios foram reescritos diversas vezes, mas, por mais depurados em termos formais e plásticos, por mais coreografados em termos sonoros e visuais, acabaram por ser sempre uma acção que pretendia, na essência, activar o texto de Lorca.

Contra a expansividade do preto, a contracção do branco do dispositivo cénico, que pela sua configuração mutável se anula enquanto cenário, criando um lugar de acção, sem precisar tempo e espaço. Um não-lugar, entre o real e o imaginário, um lugar contínuo entre um passado, um presente e um futuro.
Na criação de uma experiência que unisse a tradição melodramática popular com a racionalidade do acto teatral moderno, procurou-se a objectividade cénica aliada a condições de representação minimalistas, de modo a salientar a visão crítica do texto, num equilíbrio precário entre sentimento, reflexão e participação activa do público.

Em ALBA, a curva dramática quase tradicional é subitamente interrompida, materializando o prenúncio de uma das personagens de Lorca: ‘de repente o coração pára’.

Alba é a mais recente produção do ESTACA ZERO TEATRO.

ERARITJARITJAKA

2007-01-18T23:13:00.000Z

'Pela Música, privar as palavras dos seus perigos.
Pela música ainda, carregá-las de novos perigos.' Elias Canetti, Die Provinz des Menschen

'Eraritjaritjaka' é em si mesmo um enigma, entre muitos, presentes na nova peça de Heiner Goebbels, a qual cria e recria realidade sobrepostas, testando constantemente as nossas capacidades sensoriais na percepção e entendimento de um mais profundo segredo.

Depois de Ou bien le débarquement désastreux (1993) com base nos diários de Joseph Conrad, Heiner Muller e Francis Ponge, passando por Max Black (1998) a partir de notas de Paul Valéry, Lichtenberg, Wittgenstein e Max Black; Goebbels termina esta triologia dedicada aos diários íntimos, abraçando Elias Canetti, um escritor 'espontâneo', fragmentário, que através de suas anotações diárias, contrói livros abertos, repletos de 'pequenos poemas em prosa'.

'Sinto-me em casa quando, de lápis na mão, escrevo palavras alemãs e toda a gente à minha volta fala inglês'

Fugindo à estrutura narrativa linear do romance ou à construção rígida do convencional texto dramático, Goebbels retoma a obssessão por este tipo de narrativa aberta, que revela verdadeiramente o pensamento do indivíduo, trabalhando o segredo subjacente a certos instantes passados.
Esta nostalgia obssessiva dá vida a 'Eraritjaritjaka', a palavra aborígene australiana que significa, na sua essência, 'o desejo por algo que se perdeu'. Embora tocando implicitamente temas como a cidade e a casa, e, o contemporâneo sentimento de errância e desenraizamento modernos, trabalha-se essencialmente este estado de angústia e melancolia, por entre 'mordazes observações sobre sujeição e dependência - das palavras entre si, do texto e da música, das próprias pessoas umas em relação às outras'.

A produção inicialmente concebida para o Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne, constrói-se sob um regime austero de linhas geométricas, topografias rigorosas, limites, como o preto e o branco, em cima e em baixo, a ausência e a presença.
Polaridades que não se esgotam na dialética entre palavras e música, desde logo envolvidos pelo som do Quarteto de Cordas de Chotakovitch, interpretado pelo Quarteto Mondrian de Amesterdão, mas que se estendem a outros elementos como o espaço cénico, a luz, o filme, na ambição de Goebbels em criar um 'conceito alternativo de obra de arte total'.
Esta terceira colaboração entre Goebbels e o actor alsaciano André Wilms pode mesmo ser fatal para aquilo a que chamamos modernidade, para a ordem que determina e atravessa todas as coisas, segundo Sabine Haupt. Wilms encarna o maestro, o demagogo, o domador de animais, todas passagens extraídas de Mase and Macht (Massa e Poder).

E de repente Goebbels faz o inimaginável: derruba paredes, tira de cena o seu actor e projecta-o numa 'série de níveis sobrepostos que fazem eco um dos outros'.
A casa em miniatura que acompanha Wilms no seu movimento abstracto pelo vazio, é agora projectado numa casa de tamanho real, um tela bidimensional que nos permite passar a acompanhar o actor num percurso 'real', inicialmente pelo porto, depressa para nos prender a um universo paralelo de melancolia, circunscritos ao apartamento de de uma personagem baseada no sinólogo Kien, o bibliófilo do romance de Caneti Auto-da-Fé.

Perturbando a sua 'minuciosamente orquestrada mesquinhez', os seus gestos banais e momentos privados, a câmara transforma toda uma realidade em algo verdadeiramente monstruoso, realçando a repressão e dependência do indivíduo nos mais pequenos detalhes do dia-a-dia da nossa vida.

O espaço confinado a que nos entregamos, a figura solitária em que nos revemos devorando os seus próprios vestígios, relembra uma grotesca meticulosidade à la Jacques Tati, trespassando um quadro de René Magritte, o outro lado do espelho de Alice no País das Maravilhas, numa experiência visual muito próxima da surrealidade kaufmaniana de Being John Malkovich ou de Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Entramos no registo mais íntimo, quase voyeurista, entrando literalmente no filme, avassalados pela profusão de associações de palavras e imagens, assombrados por vozes de crianças e mulheres, paixões passadas, atordoados pela música e colagens de texto em contraponto.

Transgredimos limites, do palco para o filme e do filme para o palco, para no final perceber que este eterna quimera de descobrir o nosso lugar se encontra em nós mesmos.

'Cobarde, verdadeiramente cobarde, é aquele que tem medo das suas lembranças.' Elias Canetti

KING KONG

2006-09-06T11:28:00.000+01:00

Michael Wolf 'Architecture of Density' Hong Kong, China

CUBIX

2006-09-06T11:11:00.000+01:00

“Our aim was to achieve transparency in the concrete structure.”
SANAA Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa
Zollverein School Essen, Germany

by thomas Mayer

PILE UP

2006-09-05T12:56:00.000+01:00

Empilhado. Soldado. 'Freitaged'!
Bem vindos à nova, FREITAG SHOP ZURICH reciclada, composta inteiramente a partir de velhos contentores de transporte. A nova loja dos irmãos Freitag - criadores dos sacos instantaneamente tornados ícones de um estilo de vida urbano - localiza-se numa zona industrial sem grande interesse, que se transforma na nova zona hip pós-industrial de zurich, com o novo mini mega arranha-céus que permite ver do topo mais de 10,000 camiões que atravessam a HardBrücke todos os dias e guarda mais de 1,600 sacos FREITAG -todos eles com design único - em exposição.

A nova loja representa um passo à frente em espaços comerciais, revelando não só um entendimento profundo do conceito global da marca, e o seu efeito no meio envolvente, neste caso, num ambiente industrial degradado, fazendo deste a base para a produção de novas tendências e mentalidades, apontando para a reciclagem de elementos na produção do que já mais novo e excitante na actualidade.

ANY

2006-08-31T18:03:00.000+01:00

Anyang Public Garden, Korea by Fernando Guerra
Alvaro Siza, Carlos Castanheira, Jun Sung Kim

PERFECT DAY

2006-07-21T16:23:00.000+01:00

'A Perfect Day', Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige, Lebanon, France, 2005

Neste retrato de uma personagem e da sociedade que o rodeia, Malek e a sua mãe lutam contra a inerente inércia depois de 15 anos desde a guerra civil libanesa quando milhares de pessoas desapareceram, incluinod o pai de Malek. O título e a situação lembram o optimismo do clássico de Lou Reed e a banda sonora do filme apenas reatesta essa força positiva. O filme que foi apresentado no 14º Festival de Curtas de Vila de Conde 2006 apresenta o mais recente projecto de Joana Hadjithomas e Khalil Joreige, compondo um documento histórico que fixou no tempo a Beirute actual - pós-guerra civil pré-ataque israelita.

Preso no trânsito, Malek avista Zeina, a mulher que ele ama. escrevendo mensagens ao telemóvel ele tenta desesperadamente alacançá-la, mas está claro que ele não o quer ver mais... a sua mãe Claudia não aceitou ainda o desparecimento do seu pai. Ela permanece em casa caso o seu marido retorne, enquanto Malek conduz pela cidade sozinho. Cada um deles vivendo com o vazio de um amor perdido. Mas hoje pode ser o dia perfeito para deitar por terra os fantasmas do passado. Malek acompanha a sua hesitante mãe que finalmente declara o seu marido morto na ausência de um corpo. e nessa noite Zeina parece estar pronta para dar uma segunda oportunidade a Malek.

O filme retrata a moderna Beirute, não a Beirute que vimos ser destruída pelo telejornal, numa actualização do espectáculo da guerra do golfo, mais crua e sem efeitos especiais, mas a Beirute de um médio oriente que se torna actual, cosmopolita, urbano, pseudo ocidental.
Vemos Beirute pelos olhos de Malek, um jovem muçulmano que se remonta do passado, não com diálogos profundamente elaborados, mas por sequências de acções simples, que atestam a componente pessoal e individual do filme. Toda a história se desenrola, com um recurso minímo a diálogos complexos que explanifiquem o que se passa dentro das personagens, antes se serve do olhar destes, a troca de olhares entre os indivíduos, o seu posicionamente e comportamento no espaço, revelando esta fusão da tradição no mundo moderno, reconstruido da nova Beirute.

O trabalho de actor revela-se na ausência deste, e na total entrega do seu corpo à personagem, a fotografia resume-se à captação do mais vulgar efeito abstracto das luzes nocturnas quando se trespassa a cidade e, aí, sente-se a personagem omnipresente em todo o filme, a própria cidade, a Beirute do sonho, a reconstruida Beirute que congrega a força das personagens e da sociedade que a construiu de novo.

O filme parece um prenúncio do futuro próximo da Beirute novamente destruída, e a última cena, quando acompanhamos Malek ao acordar na avenida junto ao Mediterraneo, depois de ter passado a noite ao relento, apenas recorda que acordamos todos os dias para viver novamente.
A corrida descompassada a que Malek dá início, com múltiplas paragens abruptas e recomeços fugazes apenas atesta a história de Beirute e a nossa história pessoal.

TIMES 3

2006-07-21T11:22:00.000+01:00

Three Times A Time for Youth, 2005 , de Hou Hsiao Hsien

Como sentimos a passagem do tempo? Como uma sensação a qual não possuiremos outra vez. Lembramo-nos dele não porque foi um momento maravilhoso, mas porque o perdemos para sempre, só podemos relembra-lo com a nossa memória, por isso mesmo é tão maravilhoso.
Assim sentimos a passagem do tempo, a vida a passar fugazmente por nós, esventrando a nossa realidade pela lembrança de um tempo passado, ou um tempo que há-de vir.
Hous Hsia Hsien, apresenta-se com Three Times como cronista da nossa própria mortalidade, filmando de forma sublime a implacável presença do passado e a impermanência do presente futuro. Hou evoca através de três momentos diferentes na história de Taiwan, um tríptico atravessado por três histórias de Amor. Com os papéis principais sempre a cargo do mesmo par de actores - uma camaleónica Shu Qi e Chen Chang -, Hou abraça aqui a ideia da reencarnação - as diferentes personagens têm não só a mesma aparência física, como trazem também memórias de outras vidas - e do amor eterno.

Three Times começa em 1966 num dos inúmeros salões de bilhar de Taiwan, com 'Smoke Gets in Your Eyes' (The Platters) acompanhando os jogadores em volta do bilhar. 'A Time for Love', assim entitulado retrata a crescente atracção quase imperceptível entre um jovem recruta militar e a jovem do salão de bilhar. Na volta do serviço militar, o recruta descobre que ela partiu, produzindo assim uma poderosa metáfora da nossa passagem fugaz pela terra, preservando aquele momento inesquecivel na nossa memória, mas relembrando-nos que este já passou. Encetando uma odisseia através do país, Hou intercala os ambientes languidos dos salões de bilhar, com os fugazes percursos entre as terras, num registo nostálgico da época e da sua própria juventude, aparentemente auto-biográfico. O reencontro dos dois finaliza com o toque tímido das suas mãos contra um fundo de reflexos luminosos de um piso humedecido por uma noite chuvosa, uma imagem que, à partida, podia se considerar cliché, mas que aqui se materializa de forma sublime, e carregada de uma beleza nostálgica. Hou retrata o amor mais inocente, mais verdadeiro, com um subtexto marcado pela esperança, aquele que nos vai ficar na memória.

Regressamos a 1911, numa reconstituição mais focada na estrutura social, reconstituindo o ambiente de um bordel do início do século - revisitando 'Flowers of Shanghai'. 'A Time for Freedom' reconstitui uma nova era, uma nova história de amor, e, uma novo registo formal, mimetizando o cinema mudo do início do séc. XX - todos os diálogos são apresentados de forma escrita, apesar de se ouvir uma banda sonora, o efeito de flash-back, apenas é enfraquecido pelo som de algumas acções mantido em algumas cenas -, embora mantendo o estilo de Hou com os seus longos planos de filmagem de enquadramento muito cuidado. De todos, o retrato mais político, apresenta o romance entre uma consorte e um jovem escritor-activista que luta pela independência de Tawain do Japão. O prazer estético que advém das formas ritualistas em que a sua relação se desenvolve, em nada perde o seu significado e cada pormenor parece ganhar uma presença asfixiante, que corrubora o título algo irónico de 'A Time for Freedom' em que a mulher presa sofre em silêncio, enquanto o seu amado luta pela libertção do povo.

Um corte abrupto, reposiciona-nos numa via rápida da Tawain actual, perseguindo um casal numa mota a alta-velocidade. A liberdade aparente não é menos tiránica neste retrato de 2005, 'A Time for Youth', mostra-nos um cantora de rock epiléptica que deambula por entre noites em discotecas, relações de ocasião e disputas entre amantes. O retrato de uma sociedade cheia de gadgets tecnológicoscomo a internet, o blogging, o e-mail e os telemóveis , mas que nem por isso comunica, numa materialização de um mundo sem significado, sem valor, sem história. Hou apresenta o mundo mais liberto, em que uma rapariga pode amar outra rapariga e o desejo carnal é claramente exprimido e sentido. Relembrando 'Millenium Mambo', retraça a relação entre a sua amante homosexual e um jovem fotógrafo, que se intercruzam morbidamente. Não será difícil perceber a escolha de uma tão fantástica história para retratar a sociedade contemporânea, em que Hou manipula uma série de símbolos claramente datados, provando a sua capacidade para apresentar a solidão e desespero da geração X do novo milénio. O foco sobre um grupo sem grandes perspectivas ou objectivos ganha aqui um tom mais recriminatório, em parte facilmente entendido pela própria experiência de Hou muito mais assente na aura nostálgica dos anos 60, infundida pela vigor da juventude e impulsos mais adolescentes, na inocência do amor.

Em todos os tempos, Hou criou um cinema que nos força a pensar sobre as relações entre o pessoal e o político, entre o passado e o presente, a memória e o futuro. Consegue filmar de forma intima a alma das suas personagens, as emoções que as esventram e dilaceram como o poema que o jovem escritor de 'A time to Freedom' declama: 'Embora este lugar tenha dilacerado meu coração, este me massacra para o deixar'. Hou filma a dor no limite da experiência humana, mas encontra conforto na sua eternidade. No momento em que eles apertam as mãos, em que a consorte cobre os espelhos, em que a moto pára debaixo de uma ponte, nós vemos as personagens a viver o passado, o presente e o futuro simultaneamente.

"Ni passé, ni avenir. Juste un présent affamé" Shu Qi em 'A Time for Youth'

Three Times, o novo filme de Hous Hsiao Hsien quase que podia ser visto como três curtas metragens. O filme incluído no 14º Festival de Curtas Metragens de Vila do Conde, compunha com 'Millenium Mambo' e 'Flowers of Shangai' uma retrospectiva do realizador chinês de Taiwan, com uma obra que se distingue por um excepcional rigor formal e estético. Shu Ki é absolutamente brilhante, na forma camaleónica como se transforma e ganha vida como personagem das distintas eras; a musa de Hou Hsiao Hsien prova ser uma actriz de múltiplos espectros e de uma consistência interpretativa fora de vulgar.

SUITE

2006-07-10T12:59:00.000+01:00

LE POMPIER : "...excusez-moi, j'ai l'ordre d'éteindre tous les incendies dans la ville."
IONESCO SUITE de Eugène Ionesco
de Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, La Comédie de Reims

“Estar ao corrente é já estar atrasado; é preciso correr mais, é preciso saltar para a etapa seguinte” Ionesco

O termo suite aparece pela primeira vez numa recolha de danças de Attaingnant publicada em 1557 – trata-se de uma sucessão de movimentos mais ou menos rápidos (gavota, courante. entre outros).

Ionesco Suite é um composto de retalhos de Eugéne, o dramaturgo 'absurdo' que aqui encontra a materialização precisa do seu delírio imagético na encenação depurada e despojada de Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota.

'Os temas da acumulação e da proliferação, a rejeição das convenções, um certo tipo de empenhamento pelo teatro, uma desconstrução dos códigos das linguagens misturada com um perpétuo fascínio perante as palavras' constrói a obra de Ionesco a qual continua a ter uma inegável presença na memória colectiva. Encarado como um laboratório, a encenação propõe um work in progress, nunca terminado, jamais estagnado, que flutua na profundidade de textos sempre actuais, sempre reutilizáveis, na produção de um 'um espectáculo de geometria variável onde o número de actores, papéis, sequência de cenas, podem sofrer alterações, constituindo-se numa espécie de rapsódia teatral'.

Tudo parece retornar à quotidiana banalidade da reunião familiar, uma longa, quase infinita mesa, que se deixa habitar pelas personagens 'absurdas' da realidade de cada um, numa qualquer festa que não tem fim nem propósito. O propósito não é a festa, é o comportamento dos indivíduos nesta, e como a pressão quotidiana e a confluência de diferentes forças, provoca a reacção deste perante o outro - os outros.

Envolto numa comicidade preversa, 'se decidirmos encetar com ele um diálogo, é provável que a Sua visão do Nosso mundo nos transtorne efectivamente. Subtrair o teatro à realidade. Com humor, sim, mas um humor burlesco. Um cómico duro, sem finesse, excessivo. Nada de comédias dramáticas, tão-pouco. Mas regressar ao insuportável. Levar tudo até ao paroxismo, até às fontes do trágico. Fazer um teatro violento: violência cómica, violentamente dramática. Evitar a psicologia, ou melhor, conferir-lhe uma dimensão metafísica. O teatro advém do exagero extremo dos sentimentos, exagero esse que provoca a disjunção da frouxa realidade quotidiana', como Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota refere.

Ionesco cria este clima de estranheza, abrindo espaço ao campo da invenção, não deixando que nos 'instalemos nos hábitos'. Por detrás da graça, da loucura dos desvarios do absurdo, reside a real tensão, uma verdade e uma humanidade inegáveis, incómodas, como quando nos sentamos à mesa em família, tudo está lá. Daí que se recrie este efeito intimista com o público, numa encenação em que os próprios actores começam como espectadores, e, a certo ponto, os espectadores se metamorfoseiam em personagens do imaginário absurdo que nós mesmo produzimos e incutimos nos actores, com nossos olhares presos nos seus, perdidos numa emaranhado de palavras que sobrevoam as nossas mentes. E assim suster na discussão da diferença entre uma tartaruga e um caracol toda a nossa existência em sociedade.

O próprio cenário ecoa este depojamento, a mesa em que celebramos é o leito em que procriamos. Passamos de Jacques ou La Soumission/Jacques ou A Submissão, ao Délire à deux/Delírio a Dois, cantamos La Cantatrice chauve/A Cantora Careca, exercitando as palavras em Exercices de conversation et de diction françaises pour étudiants américains/Exercícios de Conversação e Dicção Francesas para Estudantes Americanos, para acabar com La Leçon/A Lição, para finalmente percebermos que os pequenos chapéus multicoloridos não são um mero reflexo da celebração, mas evocam o lado mais grotesco da tragédia quotidiana. Não é fatalista, é factual. A discussão da diferença entre o caracol e a tartaruga é nada mais nada menos que a eterna dificuldade em comunicar: ROBERTE: Chat... Chat.../JACQUES: Chat... Chat.../ROBERTE: Chat... Chat.../JACQUES: Chat... Chat.../ROBERTE: Chat... Cha-a-a-at.../JACQUES: Chaaaaat... Chaaaaaaaaaat...

"Dislocation aussi, désarticulation du langage" Ionesco

HELMET

2006-07-05T13:54:00.000+01:00

Álvaro Siza Vieira
Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre, Brasil
Vencedor do Leone D'Oro na Bienal de Veneza em 2002, a Fundação Iberê Camargo mostra Siza Vieira no seu melhor. A força da curva e dos tramos rectos intersectantes, só atestam a facilidade e controlo dos dispositivos disciplinares e a vontade de os levar a um exponencial transcendente.

Uma riqueza formal que se aproxima de maneira inequívoca das fases finais de Le Corbusier e Frank Lloyd Wright, onde a manipulação formal atinge novos limites. Tal como estes, o fascínio das rampas é aqui reforçado pela sua separação e autonomia face ao volume concreto, como se se tivessem deslocado e formado um novo volume quase material.

Tal como referido por Carlos Eduardo Comas, de longe, as rampas assemelham-se à 'Helmet Series' de Henry Moore. Estas rampas disformes parecem quase continuar a sua pesquisa do interior-exterior, interior no interior, interior no exterior, exterior no interior, exterior no próprio exterior, a eterna questão do dentro e do fora, e do fora cá dentro, tal é a ambivalência do espaço intersticial entre as rampas levitantes e o volume agarrado ao céu.

Entramos num espaço que aprentemente é encerrado pela abóbada celeste, um dentro ainda cá fora.

Relembrando Henry Moore, os consequentes volumes que se espraiam pelo terreno assemelham-se a um braço de uma armadura, com articulações diversas para a criação de múltiplos espaços entre o interior e o exterior.

As rampas que formam fugazmente este espaço ilimitado parecem nos trazer à ideia as múltiplas rampas do centro cultural SESC de Lina Bo Bardi, os rasgos explosivos na parede de betão, uma certa ingenuidade sabida do efeito transcendente que se quer criar. Como num desenho de criança, onde na imperfeição se encontra a mais pura das verdades, a verdade do espaço. Nunca presente materialmente, sempre omnipresente metafisicamente.