Training, Artistic Residency, Creation and Theatrical Circulation, Edition.

Voice duo and percussion to a room with sloped floor. Repetition about the absurd, crossroads of passion and revolt. To strike view scams to the relentless myth, inactual: sisyphean, the show starts as it ends, twice. On a good mood, it is dry, dust, too much and sweat.

The meaning of the myth of Sisyphus oscillates between the futility of the punishment that the hero undergoes and the reiterated questioning of authority. To that extent, it allows you to develop a critique of the ideas of completeness, purpose and usefulness that govern the dominant ideology in our Western culture, said democratic and developed. Given its ambivalence and openness degree, the myth allows reformulations that respond to particular situations of every age and culture, so this project explores the idea of absurd inscribed in it, based on the recognition that we live one time technocratic rationalism and of general mobilization for productivity, paradoxically or not, sustained in a growing infantilization of individuals. Understood like this, the myth of Sisyphus is not so much an opportunity to say, with Camus, that there is an individual agency’s consciousness that susbsists the global meaninglessness of human life, but is rather the symbolic matter that allows to defend the absolute necessity of artistic activity in facing economistic logics that seek to govern. For the examination of the myth does not only reveal the hero inscript in the repetition of a meaningless task but gives us to see someone involved in an endless process of trial and failure. In a way, this commitment to a set of instructions and rules tend to experience the exhaustion and the appearance of singular forms of subjectivity, making the size of a potential libel resistance. It is therefore a free expenditure portrait and unnecessary excess that could well be the artist as a young man.

In the process of research and creation of the show it took place a training course aimed at students and professionals of the arts on performative practices and procedures that deal with the absurdity and the futility. In addition, the project envisages the publication of an author’s edition of the score and the performing text in a volume comprising original images and a critical exercise by José Miranda Justo around the theme of absurdity as is explored in this proposal.

credits

creation Alexandre Pieroni Calado/João Ferro Martins
voice over Imogen Watson
music João Ferro Martins
musical arrangements «Poeira» Filipe Raposo
text José Miranda Justo
technical direction André Calado
executive production and communication Marta Rema