Detail - Projetos - OS GIGANTES

Highlight

Agenda

Projects

OS GIGANTES

Victor Hugo Pontes e Dançando com a Diferença

João Octávio

Paulo Pimenta

João Octávio

Paulo Pimenta

In his final play, Luigi Pirandello infuses the text with a sensory, dreamlike atmosphere in which words serve as states of mind: attempts at connection, possible paths, missteps along the way. It is through The Giants of the Mountain, an unfinished play interrupted by the author’s death, that Victor Hugo Pontes returns to a playwright he knows well, following Drama (2019), based on Six Characters in Search of an Author.“Undetermined time and place: on the border between fable and reality.” Everything that happens on stage is, by definition, unfinished. The idea is not to recreate Pirandello’s text in movement, but to transfer to the performers’ bodies that dreamlike sensoriality we see there—the fantasy and the illusion—exploring the limits of communicability and the possibility of an endlessness. In The Giants, what remains of an unfinished work lies precisely in the amputation of the title. We used Pirandello’s play with the creative freedom that lies at the heart of our work with the Dançando com a Diferença Company: perhaps the “Countess’s Company” could reside in the body of a single performer; perhaps the “Cripples,” surrounded by themselves on all sides, wait indefinitely for someone to rescue them; perhaps the “Giants” are out there, in a world that scorns the art of make-believe. “The day is blind.” The night belongs to dreams, and only twilights offer insight to men. Dawn belongs to the future. The sunset for the past.” Anticipating the danger of us all becoming strangers, unrecognizable to one another, we throw ourselves without a safety net into the revelry of this make-believe: the performers take on multiple characters, there are costumes for celebration and play, props, music, dance, fantasy, fantasy, fantasy. It is a battle against isolation—each character, a small island—a strategy to reinvent, in the encounter, the path we seek. With The Giants, we recognize that we are all alike, and it is from here that the play moves into a realm of communion and sharing, the antithesis of loneliness. We do not quite draw the lines that separate truth and illusion, light and shadow, reality and imagination, candor and ruthlessness, face and mask, laughter and tears. Life, even the one seen only on stage, may be just a dream of life; each of us, transformed on stage, may be an artist of dreams, or of the dream.

Credits

Artistic Direction: Victor Hugo Pontes. Assistant Director: Ángela Diaz Quintela. Cast: Bárbara Matos, Bernardo Graça, Joana Caetano, Mariana Tembe, Sofia Marote, Rui João Costa, Telmo Ferreira. Lighting Design and Technical Direction: Wilma Moutinho. Set Design: F. Ribeiro, with photography by VHP and editing by Pedro Ponciano. Costume Design by Pedro Azevedo. Costume Construction by Ana Maria Fernandes, Emilia Pontes, and Domingos de Freitas Pereira. Original Music by Throes + The Shine. Sound Design and Operation by Fábio Ferreira. Artistic Consultant: Madalena Alfaia.

Artistic Director of Dançando com a Diferença: Henrique Amoedo. Production: Dançando com a Diferença (Madeira) and Nome Próprio (Porto). Executive Producer: Dançando com a Diferença, Nuno Simões. Production Assistant: Dançando com a Diferença, Beatriz Barros. Production Manager: Nome Próprio, Joana Ventura. Executive Producer: Nome Próprio, Andreia Fraga. Production Assistant: Nome Próprio, Nuna Reis. Co-production: DDD – Festival Dias da Dança, Teatro Municipal Baltazar Dias, Teatro Viriato.

Nome Próprio is a resident company at Teatro Campo Alegre, as part of the Teatro em Campo Aberto program, and is supported by the Portuguese Republic – Ministry of Culture / Directorate-General for the Arts

Créditos da imagem

Highlight News