In the Same Scene

2011 – 2012

The Performance was created in 2011 within the extension course of the SP Theater School – Center of Stage Arts Formation – and presented in the First International Exhibition + Senses organized by the Culture Department of São Paulo State government in partnership with the British Council.  The performance was motivated by a first investigation into the work of Evgen Bavcar, Slovenian philosopher and photographer who lost his vision at the age of 12, and in the research of the sense of vision, which followed the company since its creation and has guided and inspired future creations. The performance had dancers and interpreters with and without disability.  It had two blind interpreters, one with low vision and a dancer with brittle-bone disease.   The performance started in the theater hall and invited the audience to self-designate (or label) themselves.  They received tags where they were invited by sign language interpreters using LIBRAS (Brazilian Language of Signs) to write a word that could define them.  Dancers and interpreters were already “wearing” their tags. This initial action proposed to challenge those labels produced by society, and which we many times reproduce.  At the end of the performance, the audience was invited to step on the stage, and in a celebration, to dance. Some of them continued with their tags, others removed them, and the mix helped to tell this other history.

 

“Na Mesma cena (In the Same Scene)

With no words, under the realm of the body in action and music, some texts spoken on the stage were translated into sign language.  The music, an excellent and original interpretation, guided blind dancers in the plastic expression with other dancers; the hallucination of a minuscule character exceeded the imaginable in the wheelchair; in the scenic modulation, we see frames of the dance without borders that spread with autonomy throughout the stage.

The procession that joins this scene, from the hall, already mobilizes the audience as participants, who are invited, in the verbal silence, in the musical inspiration and in the language of the gesture, to consider themselves as the additional subjects by a small tag hanging on the neck. The commitment is accomplished in a pact of senses that will culminate in the final scenes in which they will mix with the suite”.  Cremilda Medina (journalist, researcher and full professor of São Paulo University, author of 15 books)