etb English
Theatre
Berlin International Performing Arts Center

The world is in crisis and people are more divided than ever.

Immigration, migration and a refugee crisis has sparked both empathy and fear across Europe, as well as media frenzy.

A weary traveler approaches a wall and hears the voice of a woman. Tentatively at first, he finds a renewed optimism in this encounter. Their relationship develops, but why does the divide between them seem to widen? There is a looming violence that endangers her, and threatens to emasculate him. Will they overcome this? They are confronted by their own view of the unknown and whether they have agency for change.

There are walls being put up and walls all around us. There are walls long established, which seem to be getting wider, taller and stronger. Even in the most intimate relationships, there’s a barrier. This Wall questions representation, preconceptions and the power we have to do something about the situations around us. How much can either of them really know each other? And crucially, will he and can he help her?

Taking Act 5, Scene 1 of The Tragedy of Macbeth by William Shakespeare as a point of departure, we have created a theatrical/musical performance to present a portrait of Lady Macbeth.

Using the form of the monologue to play with different techniques of story-telling, we present the picture of a woman in whom desire and imagination overreach the space that her time and social conditions have defined for her. The woman in a closed room has existed always, exists today.

An attempt at observing the consequences of confining, even forgetting about, the desires and imaginations of one such woman.

Through the character of Lady Macbeth, we explore the spaces created by one recurring, dominant narrative; in her mind, this space becomes her cage. Imprisoned by her narrative, Lady Macbeth is trapped in time and space in a recurring loop that presents no window of escape.

While observing a character trapped inside the dominance of a single narrative, the act of the performance itself attempts to offer a tentative way of escape from the clutches of a single, dominant narrative by engaging itself with multiple narratives. In concrete terms, while Lady Macbeth cannot transcend her narrative, the performers themselves achieve a space where transcendence becomes possible – by merging forms, donning and letting go of different identities (characters), by slipping from spoken text to song to movement.

We came to Berlin about 7 months ago.

One day we bought a one-way ticket from Lisbon to Berlin and left everything behind. The purpose? Start over. The world is a far too good experience to miss. New country. New city. New people. New language(s). A room and then another, and then a flat. Papers to fill, the verbs, the articles, der, die, das, and Europe on the brink.

Somewhere between spoken word theater and a “dysfunctional” musical in English, Portuguese and German, Übersetzung is a kaleidoscopic view on what’s happening in Europe today.

When women get Gordas, they get thick, heavy, strong, penetrating, troubled and really powerful. Be Gordas!

Gordas is a performance that spins around what’s feminine. From its inception, it was aimed to address the issues of what it means to be a woman personally, socially and professionally.

We are actresses investigating passions, concepts, forms, deformities and intensities. So, what does being a female mean? And what does being an actress mean? In the answers we found different concepts: beautiful, skinny, docile, friendly, crazy, incomprehensible, unbalanced, passionate, erotic, etc.

We address three large chaotic groups as research materials: The chaos inside of ourselves (our personal history, our prejudices, our memories, our pains, etc.), the external chaos (social networks, media, the speed of information, movies, theater, music, dance, images, news, etc.) and the possibility of a chaotic relationship between these two large groups (how to articulate what we are with what happens in the outside world).

We step out of the ordinary, reaching beyond conventional patterns, making every day’s life a theatrical dramatization, an artifice, a metaphor of the battle we fight against the established order. In Gordas, all this information implodes in the body of the actresses and becomes performance. Everything that happens is a performance, everything around us is reality and everything we do is an interpretation.