Texts: Dimítris Dimitriádis, Mickael de Oliveira
With: Cláudia Dias, Cláudio da Silva e João Folgado
Music: Daniel Romero (.tape.)
Sand sculptures: Pedro Mira
Light design: Daniel Worm d'Assumpção
Photography: Susana Paiva
Production: Nelson Vitória
Co-production: Colectivo 84 / Penetrarte, Festival Citemor
Sponsorships: Artistas Unidos, Bomba Suicida, Câmara Municipal de Almada, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian
Colectivo 84 / Penetrarte is a structure sponsered by Direcção Geral das Artes - Secretaria de Estado da Cultura.
PRESENTATIONS
Citemor Festival (Montermor-o-Velho, PT): july 31st and 1st august 2010
Plataforma Internacional de Artes Performativas Portuguesas (Montemor-o-Novo, PT): june 4th 2011
Marstrand Festival, Black Box Theatre (Oslo): 28th e 29th march 2012
Today, death and the notion of ending cross each other permanently on a day to day basis, without anyone stopping or noticing it attentively. Death is like melted ice cream on the sidewalk, you can’t taste it and when you walk beside it you don’t want to lick it. “I'm Dying Like a Country” (1978), a text by Greek contemporary playwright Dimítris Dimitriádis, speaks of death in a territory devastated by civil war, political corruption and by the subversion of morality, a tragic figuration in a kind of mash-up of all perversions and subversions. It was this text that started us writing our own proposal, which joins the sweet taste of absolute decadence and the denial toward the actual state of European societies with the end of the world, which happens slowly by the seashore, with its tongue glued to the sand, looking for the ice cream. It’s a show, so to speak, scatological, for trying to understand what is the end of things.
REVIEW, excerpt from the review A gadanha daquele que ceifa
“There is the desecration of the referentials magnified by western society, there are the desecrated bodies of the actors with whom Romão has started a relationship and implication that is so severe, close and ethical as the one [Rodrigo] García has with his actors. A relationship in which the actor’s craft with his body is at disposal, as if the actor was totally distanced, psychologically, from what the body does and is done to it, the desecration that it suffers, a body that is already anonymous and that even so keeps the dignity, the humanity. (…) I die as a country reflects a decomposing and sold out society, where inertia and not thinking by ourselves is the rule. The company Colectivo 84 has the willingness and courage to talk about problems of the Portuguese society, although not exclusive of them, (beach and beer, a past of war and colonialism, a latent racism of “niggers and monkeys”, etc.). Money and well-being for bodies crushed by shame, hurt in their dignity. Deformed minds in a referential emptiness, who center their frustrations in cheap cultures, that celebrate hatred which is masochism and a dignity with the chest out which is prolonged humiliation.
Pablo Caruana Húder (journalist, director of Sismo Festival Madrid and theatre critic from El País)
SHOW