À volta do Alkantara (V): Teatro Praga versus Forced Entertainment

O que se segue é a pré-publicação de parte de um diálogo conjunto entre duas companhias que, coincidentemente, partilharam o mesmo festival, o Alkantara: Teatro Praga e Forced Entertainment. O desafio lançado por mim às duas companhias consistia numa pergunta comum que depois de respondida seria partilhada com a outra companhia. As sete perguntas, que foram respondidas por e-mail (uma por semana) nos últimos dois meses, versaram temas como a descontrução, a retórica, a relação com o espectador, a sexualidade, a economia e o a responsabilidade artística. Ambas as companhias responderam ao desafio no meio dos processos criativos das suas mais recentes peças, ambas apresentadas no Alkantara: Discotheater (Teatro Praga) e The World in Pictures (Forced Entertainment), tendo as respostas do Teatro Praga sido assinadas por André e. Teodósio e Pedro Penim, e as dos Forced Entertainment por Cathy Naden e Robin Arthur. O resultado final, entretanto concluído, será reunido em livro a editar em Novembro.

Question #4

Vamos levar as coisas um pouco mais longe e discutir a retórica no teatro contemporâneo. Por exemplo, é ou não verdade que se joga um jogo de faz-de-conta ao se solicitar a participação do espectador quando se sabe que o espectáculo funciona sem essa participação? Erica Fisher-Lichte, uma teórica alemã diz, aliás, que qualquer intervenção, mesmo que solicitada, será sempre mal recebida. E Jean-Philippe Domecq, um dramaturgo e também teórico francês diz que a descontrução dentro da desconstrução nos permitiu evitar a questão da qualidade do objecto, mas ainda continuar a considerá-lo uma «obra». Conseguem quantificar o vosso nível de retórica?

Forced Entertainment:

...Like many modern or post-modern artists we're suspicious of rhetoric, or the idea of it. And like all modern or post-modern artists we're deeply complicit with it. The Australian critic Susan Melrose has expanded on thei dea of the 'contract' between performers and their audience, where the fundamental question in the theatre is reduced to this 'What do they expect of me and what do we expect of them?'. We like this analysis, but, like mostabstractions, it doesn't quite deal with everything (and besides, the rush to adopt the language of economics to describe artistic experience has always felt...... impulsive? Cowardly?) Let's deal with some observable aspects of the practice: we always acknowledge the presence of the audience. For us, perhaps the worst crime of the conventional theatre is that it pretends that the audience is not present. That in a playhouse in London we are seeing the seacoast of Bohemia. Forced Entertainment pieces pretty much always talk directly to the audience. Or to be more honest and more accurate to *an* audience (many of our shows contain performers who seem to imagine that the people in front of them are something other than they are, not an art house theatre audience, but people who have come to watch a sub-erotic seedy cabaret act, or a thread bare vaudeville routine, or a public confessional etc. And those shows pretty much always leave a space in which the audience feels both invited to, and constrained from, commenting on or reacting to what they areviewing. This is not a mistake. We are obsessive in our pursuit of the'present' - the 'being in the same room' of the theatre, and at the sametime, the set designs always contain some kind of barrier between 'us' and'them' - a line of lights, most commonly, a device for saying that *we* arethe people in this room who will be doing the talking, the acting, theposturing. And of course that is a deep-seated rhetoric, and a contradiction that we have never managed to resolve in any of our pieces. Perhaps that tension, that desire to be in the same room as the audience paired with are fusal to give up control, the democratic urge to proclaim our humanity as performers (many of the shows contain incompetence as a central tenet),while stead fastly refusing to allow any one else to have a go (other than in the mental space opened up by the pieces), perhaps that tension is where all the power of the work lies after all.

All the best,

Cathy and Robin

Teatro Praga:

It’s all for you
song/lyrics: Scout Niblett (from the album ‘I am’)

“Oh sweet lifer I tremble but my course does not.
Oh sweet lifer ripe with flesh and matter I tremble
but my course does not.

Give me an M.
Give me an A.
Give me a G.
Give me an I.
Give me a C.
For magicians.

Give me an M.
Give me a U.
Give me an S.
Give me an I.
Give me a C.
For musicians.

Give me an L.
Give me an O.
Give me a V.
Give me an E.
For lovers.

Give me a T.
Give me an R.
Give me a U.
Give me a C.
Give me a K.
For the truckers.

It’s all for you.
It’s all for you.
It’s all for you.
It’s all for you. ”

P.s. Lyrics transcribed without permission, like always. We love stealing love.

André + Pedro