QUEM NÃO SABE MAIS QUEM É, O QUE É E ONDE ESTÁ PRECISA SE MEXER

* A good-humored irreverent play which tunes in with post-dramatic theater-making, breaking from audience’s passive attitude and opposing consumerist society. A discussion about utopia.

who

Our generation, or part of it, grew up hearing people speaking about the failure of the Revolution, the failure of the dream, fed by the ideas of uselessness and incapacity of fighting for something, as well as the lack of meaning of life. They had made us believe in this and most of our days we pass trying to recover the belief that we are strong and that things can and will be transformed. In “Who Doesn’t Know Anymore Who He Is, What He Is and Where He Is, Must Get Going”, Cia. São Jorge de Variedades places the play inside an apartment and, with its lenses, creates a good-humored portrait, though cruel. We have energy, will, clarity, but we are dislocated from the center of the action, prisoners in the many apartments. The right way in the wrong time, the right time in the wrong place etc.
Mariana Senne, Marcelo Reis and Patrícia Gifford are full of life and intentions. They have intelligence, ideals, heart, but they live the pathetic of the imprisoned action. The play, however, is far from being pessimistic in relation to the human destiny. The three figures are preparing themselves. On their own, possible way, with courage also to face the ridicule of being lost.

what

“Which is your weapon? Each one has the weapon he deserves!” Inheriting the jammed dreams from 60s, teenagers in the 80s, adults in the 2000s, apprentices of themselves in search of new strategies, of updating their wills, getting gratefully rid from the past and crying out, still unskillfully, for freedom in the present-future.

“Who Doesn’t Know Anymore Who He Is, What He Is and Where He Is, Must Get Going” presents four movements of three figures in an apartment, engaged in desires of revolution. The play begins in the street, where the audience follows the steps of Mariana Senne, who discloses her crisis on a corner: “I am not Hamlet. I don’t take part anymore. My words have nothing to tell me anymore. My thoughts suck the blood out of the images. My drama doesn’t happen anymore.” She asks for help from any passerby to nail small posters that will remain for some time on chosen walls.

where

Since its previous plays, Cia. São Jorge de Variedades has the purpose to extend its force field beyond “inside” the staging-room, or the rehearsal-room. Its action has already reached theater halls, backstages, dressing-rooms, corridors, squares, streets, homeless shelters. The group is in search of a real interference in the urban daily flow, creating images, characters, figures not tied to the ruling logics of the cities scenarios, so re-structuring them.
The objective is not to disappear between people, nor to create a definite and separate space of representation. It’s to restore at every moment the artistic way as real possibility, the world as space without limits of invention, intervention and communication.

In this play, Cia. São Jorge de Variedades brings the energy from streets of the neighborhood to the inside of the performance. The characters of the play are three citizens, alike any others in the streets; however, they provide explicit provocation and invite the others to observe, also to act, and to have an opinion about what is seen. The atmosphere generated by Muller’s texts support a state of powerful improvisation that allows a real exchange between people’s day-to-day lives and the uncommon existence of the three figures leading the scene.

Needs to move

We also know that nowadays information and desires circulate worldwide in a very fast way, creating a net of facilities but also mediocrity. In this play we give form to certain habits and dreams which we believe are recognizable in large-scale, in search of the gestual, mental, emotional vocabulary that at the same time supports & imprisons us. But in the words of Rosa Luxemburg “Anyone who doesn’t move, doesn’t feel the gratings that imprison him”. So we aim at the movement itself, the joy in being able to move in direction of new constructions, and cry out to the metropolises of the world: “Who Doesn’t Know Anymore Who He Is, What He Is and Where He Is, Must Get Going”!

HEINER MÜLLER AND OUR CONTEMPORARY CONDITION

” I tear the doors off their hinges to let the wind and the cry of the world inside. I smash the window. With my bleeding hands I tear the photographs of the men who I loved and who used me on the bed on the table on the chair on the floor. I set fire to my prison. I throw my clothes into the fire. I dig the clock which was my heart out of my breast. I go onto the street, clothed in my blood.”
(Ophelia – “Hamletmachine”, )

There had been three provocations which had started the creative process of staging the play “Who Doesn’t Know Anymore Who It Is, What It Is and Where It Is, Must Get Going).

– “the necessity of historical reflection;
– “the search of an ‘live’ and true relation with the audience;
– “the fight against the theater domestication, which can be expressed in the oppositions “success X effect” or “entertainment X intervention”.

According to the author’s view, it only make sense to write for theater nowadays if it happens to oppose, to provoke the [established] theater. As continuing solidary and critical of Brecht, Müller approaches in his texts in a recurrent form the relation individual X collective. Our position while citizens and artists continuously are provoked through his works.

Müller´s language releases itself from proper language, taking instead possession of imaginary structures of the dream. So his texts are inhabitted by a rich set of provocations, suggestions, malleable and permeable materials that compel the artist to place his opinion. In other words, the process of theatrical creation is radicalized: any illusion of a theatrical creation aiming only ‘to give voice to the author’ is vanished.
Also the use of fragments and the re-reading of pre-existing authors are basic characteristics of his writing. This exclusion of rigid drama structures proposes to the artist a release and at the same time a challenge. When provoked by this freedom Cia São Jorge de Variedades created a collective play-writing by the actors in the scene, using as material the Müller’s plays, his interviews and his biography, speciallly stretches from the plays HamletMachine (Die Hamletmaschine) and The Mission (Der Auftrag) and the interview Necrophilia is love to the future; and also texts written by the actors and stretches by the Brazilian writer Juliano Garcia Pessanha.

“Quem Não Sabe Mais Quem é, O Que é e Onde Está Precisa Se Mexer” (Who Doesn’t Know Anymore Who It Is, What It Is and Where It Is, Must Get Going) invites to improvise and suggests the striking questions: who are we here, today, in this century? Which masks are we dressing? What has happened with our sensitivity and our blunt senses? How can we truly recognize our condition, whichever it is?

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