1800 Ft / Student: 1400 Ft / season ticket is valid
Duration: 1h15
In English, with Hungarian subtitles
Post-show discussion! After the performance on 6th October, Katalina Erika Pásztor will talk to the artist and the audience. Everybody is welcome!
Produced by Mundo Perfeito and Alkantara.
A Portuguese man visits the town of Beirut year after year. He is several people that are always the same. Several men that year after year walk the same path throughout one day, in centre Beirut. The city changes, it metamorphoses at the mercy of times’ erosion and History’s convulsions. This man never changes but he always lives different days in each visit. The days that the ever changing city allows him to live.
This show starts from the supposition that in each city there is another city, an underground city and that underneath that city there is another and another, in an endless number of hidden cities that time reveals in the most unexpected way. These underground cities are at the same time past and future, they are all that no longer exists or does not yet exist in the present.
Mundo Perfeito translated into English means: “perfect world”. This company is based on the setting of a kitchen in a small apartment in Amadora, a city in the suburbs of Lisbon. Mundo Perfeito is recognised by the quality of its work and a constant drive towards innovation.
“This project starts from an hypothesis that says: in each city there is another city that exists beneath it, and under the latter one there is another city that exits beneath it and so on so forth. Accumulations of cities exist underneath. From time to time, and for unknown reasons, fragments of these hidden cities emerge to the surface and appear, facing the present of the supposedly new city; appear bluntly or hesitantly and sometimes with cruelty and severity. An act of violence that resembles the extreme violence that one day the new city itself carried out against the old one, destroying it under the pretension of doing so for a better future. This project is an attempt to invite the spirits of hidden cities to come up to the present city, so we can wander with them in their old cities and get lost there. In other words, it is an attempt to over-lap the present with the past and even with the unknown future. It is an attempt to create moments where time stops, so that past, present and future will be blended together, so that it would be easy to become lost. A place with a lot of crisscrossing and complicated passages, paths and barricades, holes and cracks that makes the history of the city much more complicated to be simplified. A place appears exactly as a labyrinth where time would stop and streets become as if they are one same street and where the lost person will have the impression of repeating the same day or the same moment over and over again. This is why the lost person has the feeling that he has never left the city. He is trapped inside it; in spite all the exits that exist. Actually, once the traveler visits a new city, he will meet parts of his past that he has lost one day in his own city. So, what he thought that one day he had lost and would never own again, will be waiting for him in the other unknown city. He travels in order to re-live his past again in this strange city and it might be also a desire to find the future of his own city somewhere else. This city is there, somewhere there, no doubts. One can hear it, one can see it, one can feel it, one can smell it, and one can taste the bitterness of the fact that this city will keep telling him that: I will disappear sooner or later and you are going to spend your entire life seeking for me.
This city is so fragile. Once he enters it, he will have the taste/feeling of danger. He will get the impression of walking over an old bridge that might fall down and collapse in every step he is going to make. He should pay a high attention and be careful as he walks inside it, so that the catastrophe will not happen now. Finally this project is an attempt to show these moments of desperation, where all these shiny lights and all these wonderful colours are there but to hide the guts of the city and to hide the fact that the city eats itself little by little".
Tony Chakar, Rabih Mroué and Tiago Rodrigues
2007
RABIH MROUÉ (1967)
Actor | director | writer
Rabih Mroué studied theatre at the Lebanese University of Beirut and started very early, since 1990, to create his own plays. He belongs to a new generation of Lebanese artists who emerged at the same time in Lebanon and in the whole world by their innovating creations. He began in 1990, introducing into his own plays performances and videos. Very quickly, the work of Rabih Mroué gained a great success over the European scene. In a perpetual search for a new contemporary relation between the various languages of the theatrical artistic forms, it questions the definitions of the theatre and the relation between space and form, the performer and the public. His work is minimalist and uses different media such as video, performance or theatre. He strongly underlines the economic and political Lebanese context by carrying out almost documentary plays in which fiction and reality mix.
TIAGO RODRIGUES (1977)
Actor | director | writer
Since 1998, he worked several times with the Belgian company tg STAN in various performances spoken in English and French, touring in over more than 15 countries. In Portugal, he directs the company Mundo Perfeito since 2003, with which he created 8 performances, establishing himself as one of the most relevant young theatre makers of the country. As an actor, he has also participated in various TV and film projects. Recently he played in “Mal Nascida”, the last film from the acclaimed Portuguese director João Canijo, and he also wrote and directed his first short film. Being a versatile artist, Tiago Rodrigues also directed several independent TV series, as the prized “Zapping”, wrote scenarios, lyrics for music, published a poetry book and regularly writes opinion articles for newspapers. Tiago Rodrigues also teaches theatre at the contemporary dance school PARTS, in Brussels. In Portugal he taught at ESMAE and Balleteatro, two art schools from Porto, as well as the Évora University and the Escola Superior de Dança from Lisbon.
TONY CHAKAR (1968)
Architect | writer
His works include: A Retroactive Monument for a Chimerical City: Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (1999); All That is Solid Melts Into Air: Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2000); Four Cotton Underwear for Tony : Ashkal Alwan, TownHouse Gallery, Cairo, also shown in Barcelona (Tapies Foundation) and Rotterdam (Witte de With) as part of Contemporary Arab Representations, a project curated by Catherine David (2001-02); Rouwaysset, a Modern Vernacular (With Naji Assi): Contemporary Arab Representations, the Sharjah Biennial and Sao Paolo, S.A.(2001-0 3 ); Beirut, the Impossible Portrait: The Venice Biennial (2003); The Eyeless Map: Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2003); We Can Make Rain But No One Came To Ask (with Walid Raad), Frankfurt (2003); My Neck is Thinner than a Hair, a lecture/performance with Walid Raad and Bilal Khbeiz, shown in Beirut, Brussels, Paris, Berlin, London, Basel and Singapore (2004); "A Window to the World": Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2005); Modern Art Oxford (2005); Various Small Fires: The Royal College of Art, London (2007); "Memorial to the Iraq War": ICA, London, 2007.
Tony Chakar contributes to Al Mulhaq (Annahar's cultural supplement) and other European art magazines. He also teaches Art History and History of Architecture at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux Arts (ALBA), Beirut.
Performance by:
Rabih Mroué, Tony Chakar, Tiago Rodrigues
With: Tiago Rodrigues
Set and lighting design: Thomas Walgrave
Executive producer: Magda Bizarro
Assistant: Joelle Aoun
Collaboration for the French version: Judith Davis
With the support of:
Direcção Geral das Artes / Ministério da Cultura (Portugal) and the help of Instituto Camões (Lisbon), Ashkal Alwan (Beyrouth) and Teatro Maria Matos (Lisbon), Programme Culture de l’Union Européenne.
French version coproduction Théâtre de la Bastille – Paris / Théâtre de l'Agora - Scène nationale d'Evry et de l'Essonne, in the frame of the project Développement culturel de la région Ile de France.
Performance presented in the frame of the project Sites of Imagination (2007):
at Girona (ES), Marseille (FR), Lisbon (PT), Ljubljana (SL), Cagliari (IT), Alkantara Festival 2008 (Lisbon, PT), Kaaitheater (Brussels, BE), Rio de Janeiro (BR), Paris (FR) at Festival d’Automne à Paris, Genéve (CH), Glasgow (UK), Martigues (FR) and Montemor-o-Novo (PT) at PT.09.
Also presented at:
Alkantara Festival 2008 (Lisszabon, PT), Kaaitheater (Brüsszel, BE), Rio de Janeiro (BR).
With the support of:
