Conception and direction: John Romão
Interpretation: Diogo Afonso, John Romão and Rodrigo Pereira
Special participation: Rodrigo Santos (children's choir)
Original Music: Marsen Jules
Light design: José Álvaro Correia
Sound design: Jorge Pina
Video projections design: Joana Areal
Assistant direction: Maria João Machado
Dramaturgy colaboration: Solange Freitas
Figuration: Bruno Simão, Denilson Mário, Hugo Pires, Eduardo Galhardo Calçado, Manuel Liebaut, Nuno Pina, Rui Peixoto
Assistant production: João Belo
Photographies: André Abreu
Co-production: Murmuriu and Teatro da Garagem
Sponsor: Câmara Municipal de Almada and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon)
PREMIERE
19 - 30 March 2008 / wendsday - sunday / 21h30Teatro Taborda (Lisbon)
Reservations: 218854190
TRAILER
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7EM24PX58M
One of these days, John Romão wrote me asking to use, in the theatre, the title of one of my poems, The blood’s direction. I did not tell him anything, but I was horrified, because in the middle of so many verses, so many words, he, even without knowing (and this "not knowing" is perhaps the most troubling), isolated a phrase that is not my but I had gone to pick up to Shakespeare. It is as if the words retain a kind of voice of blood, a secret call, an inheritance or a loss that incessantly seek their own. At the theatre what belongs to the theatre.
In the biography the poet Victor Hugo wrote about Shakespearehe begins talking about him this way: "And who is Shakespeare? Nearly one could answer: the Earth." The theatre is almost everything. Everything is in the theatre.
One of these days, John Romão wrote me asking to use, in the theatre, the title of one of my poems, The blood’s direction. I did not tell him anything, but I was horrified, because in the middle of so many verses, so many words, he, even without knowing (and this "not knowing" is perhaps the most troubling), isolated a phrase that is not my but I had gone to pick up to Shakespeare. It is as if the words retain a kind of voice of blood, a secret call, an inheritance or a loss that incessantly seek their own. At the theatre what belongs to the theatre.
In the biography the poet Victor Hugo wrote about Shakespearehe begins talking about him this way: "And who is Shakespeare? Nearly one could answer: the Earth." The theatre is almost everything. Everything is in the theatre.
José Tolentino Mendonça
(poet, theologian, priest and university teacher)
(poet, theologian, priest and university teacher)
When I was a kid, my favourite game was to refine the intimate and familiar feeling of my life to the vertigo of the unknown. Each time record, every photography, every memory, is a reconstruction of this vertigo, the meeting of two parallels: the outside and the inside, the statism and the speed, the tears and the fire.
Bodies are living increasingly imaginary its history, its identity and its relations, as if they were animated by the life of imaginary images of the body. The Blood’s Direction interrogates this world where all values and symbols lose their meaning and where the man must choose between adapt, whatever the cost, or dare to confront the unknown looking to reinvent a life, relationships and values.
Bodies are living increasingly imaginary its history, its identity and its relations, as if they were animated by the life of imaginary images of the body. The Blood’s Direction interrogates this world where all values and symbols lose their meaning and where the man must choose between adapt, whatever the cost, or dare to confront the unknown looking to reinvent a life, relationships and values.
John Romão
The Blood’s Direction, by John Romão:
Exercise about the childhood, between flowers and blood
A nearly empty stage, flowers and shrubs to our right, and if we can lengthen the look still see a small children's pool, leaning against the white wall near the bottom. Our left builds up a wall made of sunscreens for cars, which are opposed to the image of vegetal and water image the whole right side of the stage provides. Are we talking about a duality?, between the protection, raised by panels of aluminium, and the enjoyment of childhood freedom, evoked by a swimming pool and a vegetal world made of earth? This creation puts us some formal and thematic questions, in the beginning.
The performance begins, we see a man running, running in search of the rhythm of his footsteps, or fleeing them, asynchrony soon accompanied by a projected text against a white wall, that clarifies part of the original running: "My friends think / I go shopping by foot / to keep me in shape / Nothing to do with that / I just try to escape". The escape of the danger (of various dangers), the fantasies and fears’s own childhood, or the children’s freedom that here always hesitate between the naive and the cruelty will be the leitmotivs of the composition that John Romão will explore to unite a work that navigates between the sensations, abstract images and the concrete imagery reality, offered almost as spectacular compass to chaos. (...)
The creator of The Blood’s Direction has as centrifugator thematic element the childhood, and his fanciful world of desires, not yet standardized for a long socialization, and fears, even if the fear can be transformed quickly into a desire, such as it does on stage, when the child fears being kidnapped but at the same time wants it, under the bedspreads, imagine us. To talks about the childhood, John Romão beyond a fear, this time adult, that of representation - using in its cast non-professional actors, and in this case, children under 10 years to play the performance, as well as some teens, like than did with his penultimate creation, Skaters (February 2008, Almada - Portugal).
The director risks his performance, literally handing it in the hands of two children who are building complex images, bold, that perhaps they themselves do not understand or believe in another level of interpretation, for example, in a certain image – of which scenic dramaturgy falls in the ambiguity between the landscapes of "freedom" and "pleasure" - in which one of the kids up posters in which we read, among other slogans, "eat me." This “eats me” is read by the child as an allusion to the image of the "bad wolf", while the same can be read by the public, possibly in a different reading, as a stated mention sex, the desire for a child to feel sexual pleasure reserved for adults. (...)
In its last theatre creation, John Romão aims to promote the encounter between what exists and what we want to exist, eliminating the fallacy of fable, its Aristotelian plausibility, reconciling, beyond what has already been mentioned (word and body), reality and its game - their simulation, reducing the distance between the object and its real pretence, because his theatre looking beyond the drama, the weakness of the real.
The performance begins, we see a man running, running in search of the rhythm of his footsteps, or fleeing them, asynchrony soon accompanied by a projected text against a white wall, that clarifies part of the original running: "My friends think / I go shopping by foot / to keep me in shape / Nothing to do with that / I just try to escape". The escape of the danger (of various dangers), the fantasies and fears’s own childhood, or the children’s freedom that here always hesitate between the naive and the cruelty will be the leitmotivs of the composition that John Romão will explore to unite a work that navigates between the sensations, abstract images and the concrete imagery reality, offered almost as spectacular compass to chaos. (...)
The creator of The Blood’s Direction has as centrifugator thematic element the childhood, and his fanciful world of desires, not yet standardized for a long socialization, and fears, even if the fear can be transformed quickly into a desire, such as it does on stage, when the child fears being kidnapped but at the same time wants it, under the bedspreads, imagine us. To talks about the childhood, John Romão beyond a fear, this time adult, that of representation - using in its cast non-professional actors, and in this case, children under 10 years to play the performance, as well as some teens, like than did with his penultimate creation, Skaters (February 2008, Almada - Portugal).
The director risks his performance, literally handing it in the hands of two children who are building complex images, bold, that perhaps they themselves do not understand or believe in another level of interpretation, for example, in a certain image – of which scenic dramaturgy falls in the ambiguity between the landscapes of "freedom" and "pleasure" - in which one of the kids up posters in which we read, among other slogans, "eat me." This “eats me” is read by the child as an allusion to the image of the "bad wolf", while the same can be read by the public, possibly in a different reading, as a stated mention sex, the desire for a child to feel sexual pleasure reserved for adults. (...)
In its last theatre creation, John Romão aims to promote the encounter between what exists and what we want to exist, eliminating the fallacy of fable, its Aristotelian plausibility, reconciling, beyond what has already been mentioned (word and body), reality and its game - their simulation, reducing the distance between the object and its real pretence, because his theatre looking beyond the drama, the weakness of the real.
Mickael de Oliveira
(dramaturgist)
Lisbon, 24 March 2008