OTRO (OR) WEKNOWITSALLORNOTHING
Enrique Diaz / Cristina Moura / Coletivo Improviso
09/10/2010
, 
21:00
10/10/2010
, 17:00
Direction & dramaturgy: Cristina Moura, Enrique Diaz
Concept/project: Enrique Diaz
With: Cristina Moura, Denise Stutz, Daniela Fortes, Enrique Diaz, Felipe Rocha, Raquel Rocha, Renato Linhares, Thierry Tremouroux
Set design: Aurora dos Campos
Music design: Lucas Marcier
Light design: Renato Machado
Costume design: Luíza Marcier
Video design: Felipe Ribeiro
Assistant direction & dramaturgy: Alex Cassal
Interns: Michel Blois, Isadora Malta
Light operator: Leandro Barreto
Stage manager: Aurora dos Campos
Tour Manager: Henrique Mariano
Collaborators: Adriana Seiffert, Álamo Facó, Alessandra Colasanti, Alex Cassal, Bel Garcia, Cristina Flores, Daniela Amorim, Ernesto Solis, Fernanda Felix, Flavia Gusmão, Felipe Abib, Ignácio Aldunate, Joelson Gusson, Keli Freitas, Mariana Kaufman, Michel Blois, Nuno Gil, Patrick Sampaio, Pedro Brício, Pedro Henrique Monteiro, Thiarê Maia.
Production : ENRIQUE DIAZ AND MD FORTES PRODUÇÕES LTDA, Machenka Produções
Production / Rio de Janeiro : Rossine de Freitas, MD Fortes Produções Artísticas
Production Europe: Made In Productions
Coproduction: Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Hellerau – European Center for the Arts (Dresden), Wiener Festwochen, La Ferme du Buisson, Scéne Nationale de Marne – la-Vallée, Funarte – Prêmio Myriam Muniz, Tempo_Festival das Artes (Rio de Janeiro), Le-Maillon Théâtre de Strasbourg/Scène européenne (Strasbourg)
Performed in portuguese with italian subtitles
Running time: 1h 20min
NATIONAL PREMIERE
Ok. Let’s start by telling a story. I’m walking down the street, this street with the low trees. I walk for approximately eight minutes. Then I catch a bus. There’s this woman with colourful clothes talking about some neighbour who cried loudly all night and she wasn’t able to sleep, and now she’s so tired. The bus passes an old factory, a man pushing a supermarket cart, two black men changing a door, a 12- or 13-year-old girl reading a newspaper.
Lévi-Strauss died yesterday. At the third bus stop, I get out of the bus and walk a little further. A man with a red t-shirt with “Copacabana” on his chest is next to a small table at the sidewalk, with cell phone covers, pens, watches and sunglasses. I ask him if he could answer some questions. He says yes. “What were you doing before you came here? What are you afraid of? Do you live far from here? What would you do if you had only one hour left to live?” Or we can talk about a whale, a harpooned whale, its eyes still lively looking at the men who are about to cut up its flesh. The whale sees and knows. It is there, right there with the men who cut its backside. It’s part of the scene.
Or we see a woman leaning in an armchair at her room, a cigarette between the fingers. Maybe we can see a book, a book lying on the floor, the cover turned to us, with the figure of a woman leaning in an armchair with a cigarette between her fingers, and above the figure there’s a name: Clarice Lispector.
Or we can see recorded images with a bearded man, seated in a chair, who says: “The otherness resupposes the existence of something on its own account, autonomously, independent of me. When I look at myself, I see only slices, disconnected parts. The other’s presence is the tool that chains these parts in a so-called ‘being’. A work-in-progress being.
Furthermore, our function in the world, our construction of subjectivity in this world is going to be a constant search for the self reflected in all the other things and persons.”
Or we can talk about you. Do you know the person who is sitting by your side? Is this person looking at you? What is this person’s eye colour? Could you see this person crying? Could you see this person with a moustache? Could you see this person wearing a bikini? Do you know what this person thinks about love? And about morals? Have you already heard this person’s voice? Try to ask her/him something like, for instance, “Do you like singing under the shower? Do you remember the first time you fell in love? Do you remember the last time you cried? Do you trust me? Would you marry me?
Please?”
Or we can be a collective of artists working on different disciplines in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, seeking to establish a new field of encountering, exchanging experiences and training, and working in a mixing of dance, theatre, music, video and performance art. By now, we are joined around a coherent and deepened research, a work with healthy lucidity and vigorous radicalism, an explosion of organised creativity. Or someone gets up from his chair and asks: “Where are the dragonflies? The jaguar? The crabs? Where are the elephants, the children, what happened with that whale, when is the pig going to appear, why is it so hot in here, where’s the beach with colourful umbrellas and cheerleaders,
where everybody starts to sing and dance?”
Someday in 2009...
Dear residence participants, let’s prepare new walks this week, trying to amplify and deepen our previous experiences. The walks establish another field for our work, a different kind of listening and a more sensitive way of viewing. The type of material that comes from the streets has a hybrid characteristic that expands our issues, questioning the place of theatre, the relation with the other, with memory, with the things we bring with ourselves and our position in front of the things we observe.
In the previous experiences, at the cemetery, at the central bus station, at the ferryboat and on Taquara’s streets, the walks oriented the previous material’s presentation, in a kind of documental punch, showing a register of the things that truly happen. Now we’re also going to concentrate on the articulation of the material with the scene reality. Not only observation, record and interview, but we also have to establish a poetic view of each meeting point between experience and performance. A specific language to talk about this kind of things. Besides, we have to choose our commitment level:
Am I part of the experience? What’s the fiction level in this friction between me and the other’s material, the street, the public spaces? How do the ideas of articulation, system and methods affect the way I act out my relation with the other, with the street? Let’s remember also Jean Rouch, the impression that the movie Jaguar installs in a specific reality, for instance, through the actors’/characters’ voices recorded ten years later.
In order to organise the walks, we think of some possible categories:
1. FLANEUR. Go out to the void, without a goal, without knowing what’s going to happen. Places with specific dynamics like bus stops, with their particular time in which people wait for a long time. Look for a procedure’s logic, like the Blue Rule that Thiarê has created: arrange the world using blue elements, search for blue objects, follow people with blue clothes, standing nearby, participating as a blue element.
2. SOPHIE CALLE. Arrange an experience that impels us to the encounter with the other, like Fernanda and Raquel saying “Today I woke up and decided that I’m going to fall in love with somebody”. Follow somebody and describe this person’s route, almost making contact but not achieving this goal. Create fables, systems that facilitate the encounter, mixing reality and fiction. In this case, it makes sense to use diverse perspectives and subsequently cross these points of view – pictures, videos, notes, vestiges.
3. MICRODOCUMENTARY. Make a sort of documentary or imaginary biography of the other. Think about the instruments we have in order to make that cartography and what the indicators are that we should use. Blend with the other, change places and ask ourselves: “What’s it like to be in another person’s skin? What’s this person seeing, what’s happening in this person’s life?” Get to know this person’s choices, his/her particular world, so close and so far away. The notes on the refrigerator
door. The photos of his/her son. The route to the office. The doorman’s chat. Papers. Thierry and his “autrement”.
4. HERE AND THERE. Link the walks to this exact time and place, mixing here and there, outside and inside. A dramaturgy that develops the happening and brings the “be here” to the core of the question, and not only brings the pieces of information about another place visited in the walks. As with Denise’s trajectory (which we can fuse with the mountain landscape) or with Michel and Isadora’s sequential video.
Alex Cassal – March 2010
www.madeinproductions.eu
Enrique Diaz / Cristina Moura / Coletivo Improviso
At the age of 18, Brazilian actor-director Enrique Diaz (1967) was one of the founders of the Companhia dos Atores de Rio de Janeiro, a company that became famous in the early nineties with A Boa A Qu, a performance inspired by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges. Enrique Diaz directed an entire series of – classic and contemporary – performances. As an actor, he puts the actor’s contribution and physical presence at the centre of his work. Since 2002, he has been leading the Coletivo Improviso, that resulted from an encounter between a number of artists of various backgrounds at a workshop for dancers and actors. Multidisciplinarity and improvisation are the main features in the collective’s approach that is meant to shed new light and raise new questions on ‘the city’. Enrique Diaz’s work has been shown at various cities across Brazil and at festivals and theatres all across the globe. For Répétition.Hamlet he received the Prix de la Critique française for the best foreign performance of the 2005 – 2006 season. In 2007, Enrique Diaz made his first appearance at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts with his theatre piece Seagull-Play.
Cristina Moura (°1969) is a leading choreographer, director and actress. She studied classical ballet and was a member of the Brazilian Group Endança for ten years. During the period 1996 – 2003, Moura left her hometown of Rio de Janeiro to work in Europe with various companies, including
Les Ballets C de la B. Since 2004 Moura has also joined the Coletivo Improviso. More recently, Moura has been working for both dance and theatre. She was choreographer for Enrique Diaz’s Seagull-Play project at the 2007 Kunstenfestivaldesarts. Her solo dance performance Like an idiot, created in 2003, has been presented over a hundred times all across the globe.
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