The Materiais Diversos Festival promotes the meeting of different audiences and imaginaries around the arts (dance, theatre, music and performance) with thought, questioning actuality and fostering cultural participation as a condition for citizenship. Born in Minde, in 2009, it spread to Alcanena and Cartaxo (in 2013) and became one of the most representative projects for programming outside the large centres in Portugal, attempting to think and act from the places it originates. It had been occurring annually until 2017 and became a biannual event starting with its 10th edition in 2019.
From the 5th to the 15th of October 2023, the Festival Materiais Diversos will be in Alcanena and Minde with a program of dance, theater and music shows, installations and conversations. Slowing down and making people, places and processes visible are the mottos of the 12th edition of the festival.
A Invenção da Maldade is composed as a rite of passage and a struggle, a grouping of bodies which risk the unknown, becoming vulnerable to other rationales and realities. It is a reflection on evil as an inherent presence in relationship to the other, form the beginning of time to the present. As Rodrigo Garcia says, in a text written about another work by Marcelo Evelin, Batucada (2014): “All matter is made up of fifty per cent of hate”.
It is around the bonfire, which has existed as an invention of culture and interaction for 400 thousand years, that the work is developed. The bonfire allowed for the domestication of humanity and the animals which approached, creating a place-situation where people began to gather to warm themselves, eat, tell stories, celebrate and practice rituals. In A Invenção da Maldade, the public once again gathers around it.
The action takes place in a raw, horizontal space shared with the public, as an invitation to an experience. A configuration with direct lighting, naked bodies, bonfires reinforced with branches and logs, which are never lit, and a soundtrack made up of electronic percussion and wind chimes which are manipulated in real time. “They produce a type of floating atmosphere, like the noisy silence of a sanctuary or the wind passing through a wooden cabin. They are the sounds of something that isn´t there.”, states the philosopher Jonas Schnor, writer and researcher in the area of performance.
PREMIERE
5 April 2019 – 7 April 2019
Campo, Teresina, BR
21/02 — 07/04/2019
Campo, Teresina, BR
26/11 — 21/12/2018
Campo, Teresina, BR
Sofia Matos
sofia.matos@materiaisdiversos.com
+ 351 913633452
skype: sofimatos
Marcelo Evelin/ Demolition Incorporada
www.demolitionincorporada.com/news
Diversos