Authorship, Research and Creation: Joana Pupo and Pepa Macua
Co-Direction and Dramaturgy: Ana Woolf
Music and Sound Design: Marcos Aganju
Scenography and Costumes: Ana Limpinho
Light Design: Mafalda Oliveira
Production and Communication: Catarina Sobral
Graphic Design: Eduarda Lima
Photography: João Duarte
Video: Maurício Centurion
Video and Consulting: Tiago Hespanha
Ass. Video: Luisa Mello
Photography of the Process: Inês Galvão Teles

60 min > M/14

This project had the financial support of the Portuguese Republic – Ministry of Cultura/ DGArtes, Lisboa City Council – Social Emergency Fund – Cultura

With support of A Escola da Noite, Atelier Concorde, Polo Cultural Gaivotas-Boavista, PenhaSCO e ACCA – Estúdios Clara Andermatt

THE GRAVITY OF A BIRD

From real migration stories by Anouar Ben Janaf, Candy Toma Paulus, Caroline Bergeron, Jaime Mears, Jeff Childs, João David Batista, Laura Afonso, Manuela Tavares, Pacas, Sohel Rahman and Sunil Pariyar.

THE GRAVITY OF A BIRD is a project about rooting, the migrant body and our need for permanent self-construction. How do we connect to the land? What happens when we leave?

There is an urgent need to  ask these questions and listen to the experience of other-bodies, other ways of feeling the need to leave, the foreign being and the possibilities of finding connections in a new space. The project creates, from talks and work sessions with people in a migration situation, this fiction made from testimonies of several others, which will be used as a scenic voice. The experience of displacement of the body and place become strong poetic matters, which allow the development of the binomial “rooting and migrating /moving”, because they touch the underlying question in the making of the body: how is space inhabited? And they touch a fundamental ideia which is the encounter with the other. Who is this other one? And if there is a body that expresses at its ppt another place, how does this experience of the body transform the place itself?

Through the research of real migration stories, we created a piece that questions the paradoxical aspect of the body in life an the ways in which we inhabit the body and the world. Its calls for a treatment of the body as a vehicle for connecting to the other and for permanent self-reinvention. In creation process, we use the acrobatic game and samurai quality as our methodologies and tools for reading and reinventing these materials. Some strong references for this piece are DV8 Physical Theatre, the installations by the artist Shiota Chiharu, the text “Da Hospitalidade”, by Jacques Derrida and the poetry of A. Ramos Rosa in “A Construção do Corpo”.

Two bodies interact in a space of game-challenge, in an act that drinks so much form the choir, from the notion of ritual, from the trance of dance and song, as it allows itself to be crossed by the dissonant, it introduces the unexpected silence, the impossible stop, the deconstruction of form and the validation of criticism and disobedience. The mission os these acts, of this great discrepant ritual, is to aim to the need for self-constructions of a body, of meeting and connecting with new others.