Artistic Residencies
Cut by all sides, open by all corners
CO-PRODUCTION
Premiere at Festival Alkantra june 2018 / Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, Lisboa
Presentation at Walk&Talk july 2018 / Teatro Micaelense, Ponta Delgada
Conception and artistic direction Gustavo Ciríaco
Direction and dramaturgy assistance Catalina Lescano
Performers and collaborators Ana Trincão, André Loubet, Diana Narciso, Gonçalo Egito, Gustavo Ciríaco, João Estima, João Grosso, José Neves, Lúcia Maria, Manuel Coelho, Paula Mora, Rita Delgado, Rodrigo Andreolli, Sara Inês Gigante, Sara Zita Correia, Tiago Barbosa
Guest performer Carla Gomes
Design Sara Vieira Marques
Sound artist Bruno Humberto
Lightning design Tomás Ribas
Management and communication Jesse James
Executive Production Catalina Lescano
Co-production Teatro Nacional Dona Maria II, Alkantara Festival, 23 Milhas - Ílhavo, Walk&Talk - Arts Festival
Artistic residency support Teatro Micaelense, Espaço do Tempo, Devir-Capa
Research residency Universidade Federal de Campinas - UNICAMP, through its project “Artista em Residência”
Project supported by Ministério da Cultura / Direção-Geral das Artes
Cut by all sides, open by all corners, Gustavo Ciríaco’s new creation,
invites the audience to a rhapsodic journey through the territories that
configure the theatre as a scenic, sociological and architectonic space
and its connections to the surrounding world.
Thought as a site-specific project, Cut by all sides, open by all corners
is an itinerant piece through the space of the theatre that operates like
an expanded sculpture. The piece creates a field of positioning, staging
and manipulation of the reality from where the spectator stands, building
up an interpretation through a theater in dislocation.
Just as in a sculpture, where the cut gives access to a fruition that
includes the reality around, the theatre is this multiple and complex site,
cut by all sides, open by all corners, which hosts people in different
platforms of interaction and distinct agents in operation. By way of
comparison to the relational sculptures of minimalist artists Donald Judd
and Robert Rauschenberg, characterized by the inclusion of elements of
subtle interactive appeal, this project intends to displace and relocate
the elements that produce theatricality. By moving these elements to
other spaces in the same building and neighboring areas, the idea is to
dispose them as provokers of performativity. An expanded theatre sets
in, activated by the audience, through its position in space, its viewing
point. A theatre is thus re-shaped with the same elements that distinguish
it and constitute it as an experience.
The tableaux vivants were a popular form of theatrical representation
in the 19th century. Following the spirit of moving images, a group of
actors would reproduce an image in pause and gradually animate it.
This project includes the participation of local volunteers in creative labs
during the research, and later on during the life of the performance as a
way to recover iconic images from the history of the performing arts. The
piece wishes to update experiences that marked the habit of going to the
theatre in the local and national context, by setting true inflexion points
between the present and the past, with the complicity of the public, that
reenact and give sequence to an archive of the performing arts.
The project foresees the participation of a team of 5 performers (actors
and dancers) and, through an open call, a cast of local volunteers
(inhabitants, regular theatre goers, people interested in performing
arts). In a similar way to displacement of theatrical elements from its
physical centre towards its spatial periphery, the idea behind conducting
workshops in association with local initiatives as a way of audience
mobilization, social insertion or professional improvement is to welcome
agents from outside regular art contexts and invite them to explore the
idea of making theater as the center of relationship between the theatre,
its whereabouts and the world beyond. At the same time, attention is
generated around the interstitial zone between fiction and its daily life,
and the inside and the outside of the theatre.