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 ]
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Labels: 10X10, dgartes, estaca zero, galeria paris, Portugal, teatro
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.
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.
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 ]
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.
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
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Labels: anne frank, estaca zero, Hitler, performance, Portugal, teatro, theatre, WW2
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.
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.Labels: architectural association, architecture, Beyond, Book Launch, city, Colin Fournier, Liam Young, Pedro Gadanho, Sam Jacob
'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
Labels: AA Manifesto, architecture, Beyond, Colin Fournier, Liam Young, magazine, Pedro Gadanho, Portugal, Sam Jacob
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'.
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 ]
Labels: alain platel, bach, dance, fabrizio cassol, les ballets C de la B
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 ]
Labels: architectural association, london, projects review 2009
PROJECTS REVIEW EXHIBITION 2009 ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION
1 Comments Thursday, July 02, 2009 | 11:14 pm.
[ images: PhD Projects Review 2009 exhibition area, AA Reception. Photos by Emanuel de Sousa. Please find more photos here ]
Labels: AA PhD Dialogues, architectural association, london, projects review 2009
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.
Labels: dance, Koen Augustijnen, les ballets C de la B, southbank centre
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.
Labels: dance, graeae theatre, physical theatre, strange fruit, sway poles
