BANANADA: OPERANTÍPODA (Part I) — Marcelo Evelin
Marcelo Evelin will be in residence in Caen and Faro in April, and will hold an open rehearsal on the 17th at 7pm in Caen.
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.
On stage, we see a sculptor creating a sculptural piece in real time while exterior elements – handled by the actors – contaminate, frame, document, interfere, prevent, enhance or simply create plans parallel to the action. The execution of this sculpture not only constitutes the core of the show but also invades, disturbs, praises, calms or questions it. Whether through the noise, the demanding technical needs, the formal challenge he proposes or the dialogue he can establish with the actors, the sculptor and his materials assume a theatrical and visual game enabling a new review of the relationship between the one who makes the work, the created object and everything that feeds and destabilizes its conception. The mystery that surrounds the creation of a sculpture arouses the curiosity of the actors who try to understand, or want to test the limits of the impetus of the artist who builds it.
And all this, one could say, consists of an idea of theater that these actors, as part of a collective, intend to reflect: creation as a “recreation”, a space for freedom and experimentation; the show itself as a creative, raw, living process that escapes the control of each performer/creator, in permanent evolution, as opposed to the idea of a finished work, defined and complete in detail, built from an external and unidirectional look.