Stage Direction + Set & Costumes Design
NEW EPIC THEATRE | Fear & Misery in the Fall of Democracy
Text and Dramaturgy > Carlota Castro, Pedro Ribeiro | Stage Director, Set & Costumes Designer > Pedro Ribeiro | Musical Director and Orchestration > Paulo Freitas | Choreography > Sofia Loureiro | Raps Composition and Lyrics > Braulio Pitra, Ze Pocas | Political Sciencies Advisor > Alexandre Carvalho | Light Design > Pedro Alves | Sound > Ricardo Costa Megafone | Cast > Alda Machado, Barbara Correia, David Salvado, Jose Magalhães, Rafaela Sa, Sofia Miguel Castro, Tiago Sines, Vitor M. de Sousa | Special guest > Marlene Meireles | Ensemble > Alexandra Florim Camboa (Violin), Andreia Franca (Violin), Teresa Soares (Cello), Irma Lizi Amado (Voice), Paulo Freitas (Piano) | Video op. > Bruno Bernardo | CT4V Executive Producer > Ismenia Leite | Executive Producer, DSM > Mariana Barros | New Production > Quatro Ventos Theatre Company, Garantir Cultura| Sto Tirso PTG
© Images from the show by Andre Leite PS Photography 2020
Theatre. Mobile phones are turned off. Television isn’t there with the ads and programs that don’t matter. For a few hours we want to make them connect with an idea, we want to make them think. But if “they” have never seen a theatre play, how do we connect? How do we link the message to a conclusion? Make an audience think, discuss, listen, conclude. To achieve this goal, there is a tried and tested theatrical form that can be re-integrated into today’s dramatic writing. B. Brecht’s Epic Theatre seeks to keep the audience objective and distant from the emotional involvement of the story so that they can make thoughtful and rational judgments about a social problem. This original creation was based on research and dramaturgy designed through the ideological crossing of two works of Epic Theatre – “Fear and Misery in the Third Reich” and “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” – with the contemporaneity and teenage energy of a Rap/Hip-Hop concert. This project is not intended to educate, or to say what is right or wrong, but seeks to wake up future adults to social and democratic participation.
REVIEWS
“Fear & Misery in the Fall of Democracy”, the latest CT4V production, is a vindication for theater, albeit in a paradoxical game: on the one hand, in line with Brecht’s “Epic Theater”, it proposes a process of “distancing”, strongly ideological through which an attempt is made to develop a strategy of radical interrogation as if to say to each spectator: you are here to force me to think and to think about our world!; on the other hand, it develops a process of involvement and immersion, for which all strategies of theatrical seduction are summoned as if it were demanding to the spectator the need to “connect” to the reality of the theater: he comes to the theater and forgets the outside world. We enter, at the same time, into a kind of all-too-real unreality made of estrangement and alienation, compromise and escapism, realism and illusion, reason and emotions, where everything mixes, in an extremely risky way, in an anarchic delirium: tragedy and comedy, Brecht and Portuguese vaudeville, rap and classical music, erudite text and swearing, Becket and stand-up comedy, MGM musicals and existentialist cinema, ballet and martial arts, etc. Anything goes in this show, not least because the main purpose is to let in our world, our time, our lives to prove that, in the end, there is no paradox in this performance: theater is politics. And, as the Greeks taught us when the polis is in danger when everything is fear and misery, the place of emancipation is theater. Knowing all this and putting it on stage, in itself, is a remarkable achievement of CT4V, a company that makes the periphery a radiant center; but, if we take into account that this creative vortex amuses us, moves us, and surrounds us, we are certainly facing a tour de force that inscribes this show in line with an aesthetic renewal of theater in Portugal. > Professor Eusébio Machado | Assis. Prof. at Portucalense University, Department of Psychology and Education; Scientific Coordinator of the Innovative Plan to Combat School Failure in Santo Tirso; Consultant for the Annual Plan for the Arts of the Basto Center; Member of the Municipal Council of Education of Santo Tirso