84

MASSACRE

Link PICTURES

Texts and direction: Paulo Castro
With: John Romão and Paulo Castro
Light design: Daniel Worm D'Assumpção
Co-production: Colectivo 84 (PT), Citemor Festival (PT), StoneCastro (AUS)
Supports: Artistas Unidos, Bomba Suicida, Mala Voadora
Photography: Bruno Simão
Colectivo 84 / Penetrarte is a structure sponsored by Secretaria de Estado da Cultura – Direcção Geral das Artes.

SYNOPSIS
The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Chinese political prisoner Lio Xiaobo, who was unable to receive the prize. As a way of protesting China forced several political representatives to be absent from the ceremony. The current president of East Timor and former political prisoner, José Ramos-Horta received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 in conditions similar to those of Xiaobo, obeyed the Chinese rules. It is in this dubious context that the play takes place: money as a way of buying human dignity and making us forget the massacres. Timor (John Romao) and East (Paulo Castro) work with weapons of grotesque, sarcasm and a trash metal soundtrack to make this scenic game hypnotic and dangerous. The mutant metamorphosis of Australia, Indonesia and Portugal make for an in your face confrontation to the East Timor crisis.

PRESENTATIONS
Citemor Festival (Montemor-o-Velho, PT): August 6th and 7th 2011 (www.citemor.com)
Negócio/ZDB (Lisbon, PT): August 9th - 13th 2011
Adelaide Fringe Festival (Adelaide, AUS): February 24th - 29th 2012

REVIEW

The show begins, Romão smokes, Castro trembles, trembles and dances – a beautiful dance -, everything already smells of aesthetics of broken, of a theatre that wants to be strong, that constitutes itself centripetal, and that radiates freedom in its thinking and doing. The theatrical space as a battlefield, where everything fits, where everything can be done and where you decide to go to the limit. And that isn’t easy. (…) It is interesting, this combination of this way of doing, bodily and visual, with another which has a bigger dramaturgy built over the character. The play holds on to a dialogue that is constant, quick and fast about the craziness of geopolitics, politics’ moral excuses, holes and mind spins that Man has to do to put up with himself, to be able to justify the ethical failure that the human genre supposes. Timor colony, Timor decolonized, then invaded, then militarized, then torn down, full of ghosts, Timor land of the United Nations, Timor border between the first and third World, of the development Australia that wants to have good locks on windows and doors, Timor the guilty and real suffering of the Portuguese, Timor pure contemporary history of the planet. (…) Onstage, there is a flag for the metal band Slayer. It is this world full of dead people where Satan, more than a denial of divine goodness, becomes a necessary sanity through the denial that is critical, the denial of the Christian goodness that is accepting of the systematic crime, affirmation of violence that is resistance. And it is that violence, treated in this show as a frail answer, that doesn’t conflict nor can it answer the real violence, that which finds itself in the space of ethical resistance. An answer that won’t achieve anything, that doesn’t give solutions but that is the answer that is left to the individual, the one of the complaint that still says “I’m here, and you won’t bring me down, I’m here and I’ll bite as soon as you come close, I’m already insane, and my insanity is my weapon, my strength”. So, in all this logic, the show ends with a metal ritual, in a spectacular absurdity of light, flames and body energy.”

Pablo Caruana (journalist, director of Sismo Festival in Madrid and theatre critic from El Pays)