Artists talking about making

I don’t think it’s like that. Let me talk about my way of making art. It’s not like “creating a piece of art”. I believe in the relationship between art and life. When you separate art from life, then you deal with creative processes, ideas, communication. But these are external things. When you start with life – which is, first of all, your life, your experience, what you understand about yourself, about the world, what the world puts in you – then you find a creative way to express something you already have. So my performance it is not a process of artistic construction, it is an expression of something that already exists. 

We are talking about ancestry, something that was built before me, not only by my ancestors but yours too. Europeans did serious damage to my ancestors. There was the sea route of the slave trade. Every day, black people died on the ships and their bodies were thrown into the sea. Today, perhaps this makes no difference to you, because the cultural heritage left to you is of great comfort. But for us, it is of great pain and suffering. I’ve already suffered eight attempted murders because your ancestors put into the culture of my ancestors that being a black person is very bad, being a transgender person is very bad. Before colonisation my ancestors were all people, there was no gender. Colonisation came with gender, and made our bodies monstrous: it’s a woman with a penis, a man with a vagina.

This cultural heritage said to us: your religion comes from the devil. Hundreds of people like me were killed or burned because of our religion. Even today this happens. So when I go and I set fire to your religion in the performance, this is not simply a creative process, it is a process of liberation. My ancestors could do it, but now I can honour them. I go into a convent, a church, and I say: Exú lives.

I recognise those processes, but it’s not how it worked here for me. Rather, I started with something that I have to do. There is always something in me that I cannot give a name, a form, a meaning. When I start to feel this thing coming, I realise that it brings something attached to it. Sometimes these are memories. Sometimes it is my body contracting, or wanting to explode into some movement. During the pandemic I was driving in a caravan and suddenly I felt: something is trying to tell me something about this trip, about travelling. So I stopped the caravan and started writing. And then suddenly there comes a poem, about the idea of something that never happens but was rather already happening. 

These are complications, but I don’t like to go into them just in the mind, I  like to work with materials. So for example I have a wheel, I have a chair, and suddenly I remember that I could have some toast, and I start to write. Then I look at my writing, and I start to speak with these objects – and then there appears a memory of my father when we went on vacation. And that became a very, very strong motivation for this piece. I felt, okay, I never really spoke about this before, and I want to go there. So the process is not that I want to make a piece, it’s more that I want to go to that place.

When I build something, it’s my way of talking with something. So I create a space, an environment, and then I can have a conversation directly. It’s a practice I developed that I call dancing post-text. The big question is who I am, but I don’t want to propose that question; I want to experience it. 

I usually say that I have a structure of the show: we know what we are doing, we have the intentions of what we want to talk about, what we want to develop. And, well, I wrote the script! It is actually a sequel to a previous show called I’m So Excited. I wanted to talk about modern relationships. I was talking about a relationship between between two people who broke up in 2015. But every year they do a kind of performance where they talk and that previous relationship. And the man is me, the writer of that performance. And the woman is an actress, Rita . And that was a problem in their relationship because they both wanted to direct. 

And then I wanted to do a sequel. And I opened the process to Rita. I wrote, with her voice very present. I try to open the script to her. What we are working on in the show is a lot about authorship, about who is the author of what we are doing.

But then when people come and see the show, it becomes another thing. Almost like a baby that is not mine now: it needs to go into the world and it needs to change. I like that about theatre and performing arts: how we keep the structure and also be open. 

I think it’s a bit of both. Even though I can’t say that I start with one big idea, usually it’s a lot of them. I always take a lot of time to try to understand if there is one main idea, or if it’s a constellation of different things that connect to each other. In most cases, it’s a constellation, and I have to find a way to connect the dots. That’s exactly what happened here. I always wanted to do a performance inspired by the work and life of Marcel Duchamp, my favourite artist. But in the process I got sort of confronted with my own biography. And so there’s an element of autobiography in this show, and even parts that are not exactly autobiographical, but mostly it’s like my observation of the art world, how the art world works. 

I can’t explain exactly how ideas come, how I try to grasp them or find a way to make them communicate. But I can say that my process of making always starts and finishes with writing. So I don’t start in a studio, for instance. I write everything, and I just keep writing and writing, and at some point something will pop up. It’s funny, because I have been working as an artist for more than 20 years, and I’m always surprised that I don’t know exactly what I’m doing: I’m just writing and writing as a process to reach something. And at some point in the process, usually when I’m like feeling completely lost or feeling pressure to start solidifying my ideas, then I just look at what I have been writing for three months, four months, sometimes a year or more, and I see the performance is already there, it’s done. I always come to this point in my processes when I ask: should I do something more or is this it, the point that I should stop – because I read the text, and I think; everything is already there. 

Sometimes I tell myself that maybe I should stop doing performances and just publish books, or share the texts. But I have the strong feeling that my work is pretty much dramaturgical, in that sense that it all lies in what is being said and how.

Both at different times. A very long time ago I start collecting ideas that I felt that were related, about set, music, movements, rhythms, colours. At some point I realised that from these fragmented ideas there was coming a big picture that I would like to achieve. What kind of piece did I want to build? It was related to energy, a type of occupation of the stage. 

And then when I started the process with the dancers, that’s when I went into the small bricks. Sometimes they were very small, like 30 seconds of a collection of movements, or a specific song that I wanted to grab but didn’t yet know how to use. For the dancers I think for a while it felt like it was all different materials, but I knew that they would at some point get linked up.

The project started from an idea that had been on my mind me for some time: how did Kuduro influence my movement as a dancer and my performance as an actor? Then I began some collaborative work with other artists such as Xullaji, Michelle Eistrup and Sofia Berberan. I was sketching out a bigger picture and at the same time I was attentive to small gestures, to the unexpected memories that are unavoidable in such a personal project.

Tita Maravilha: Cigarra and I mix up the works we have as a duo and those we do individually. In that, we have both visions and also many seeds. For example, the seeds for what we are creating for PT.23 were planted four years ago, when we formed the duo. We are doing a bit of a recycling job. The work we are is like a premiere, except that our previous work is camouflaged inside it. It’s not a work with an impeccable design, it is made to contain flaws, to allow improvisation to happen.  

Cigarra: On the first day, we already visualised the whole piece. Within that, we put pieces together and then we transform them. It’s a puzzle of how our things can fit together in one way and come apart in another.

Tita Maravilha: The first goal is the work itself, with all its imperfections, with the energy we have on the day. We want to make sure that the performance has lustre and has presence. So first comes the technique, the know-how.

But there is also the game, the recycling. In the puzzle that is going to be presented, it makes sense to us to think of it as a recycling system. It’s an important word for us. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel for every show.

Cigarra: So the piece here is not just one piece. There are always other sources and references.

It comes a lot from ideas in my head, sometimes concepts, sometimes just images. Then somehow they begin to come together, and I start to understand them naturally – and the composition arrives from that. It’s quite natural, I don’t propose a method of composition, or compositional tasks – even though I do sometimes use some (for example the cube from Trisha Brown’s Locus). But it’s really about movement, and for me, movement comes from the shape, but from inside the shape. So it’s really important for me that things are coming from the inside your body, you’re not building shapes from the outside. 

In this piece, because I was studying traditional dances, a lot of the composition come from drawings of traditional dances. The drawings are quite structured and clean, so the question was: how do you enter inside and find the energy of the composition?

I think I always start with a general plan or with a situation, a context, but when I go into practice, I tend to leave that big picture aside and go with the seeds of ideas. Every day I try to go with a different seed to see how that seed resonates with people. Because I’m more interested in the human material that comes from people themselves, rather than filling in an idea that I have pre-planned.

I sometimes think of it almost as a therapeutic process, where you start with the outlines and become more intimate to create a safe environment, until you can give something that is genuinely from your own place. I want to bring out these things, things that shine but also speak of a very internal, personal layer.

With BAqUE, I think the idea came first. Then I thought okay, for this idea I want to have people from music and people from dance. I want to do a project that is a bit more multidisciplinary, like an event or happening. But between that idea and now, it’s completely different. The music people couldn’t do it because of their schedules. Other people have other specificities in music, in the way they are on stage. So I try to listen to what each person brings, or what they make a point of not bringing. So even though it’s not really therapy, it’s far from therapy, the listening has to be similar. 

The ideas for my works are all autobiographical, although they are not presented as autobiography. Also, they they always start from some kind of challenge that I set myself. In How To Kill Naked Women I started from a very personal situation, a very drastic change in my life. At 19, I was raped at 19 by a tattoo artist. I thought I was going to die – but I didn’t. I survived. From that moment, I began to ask myself: If I survived this, which was already so extreme, what could be next? Maybe I will not die. How will I not die?

I worked a lot alone at the beginning, like I usually do. I like to train my body to reach a certain limit, that thin line beyond which things can go wrong. So we have to be super disciplined – otherwise it would be impossible to do this piece. There is a bed of nails. There’s a suspension rope. There’s cutting flesh and drawing blood. We are inflicting pain, but we are are authorising the infliction. If there wasn’t discipline and precision it would be impossible to accomplish it, we would die. Hence the title.

Usually I start with the very strong will to say something. Usually a way I have of doing activism is through my work, and I try to make it somehow poetic in this case (in the previous work, it was more like a documentary). Here I wanted to talk about all the shades that exist when we see, when we say “woman”. What is that? There are really a lot of possibilities and a lot of ways to represent this strength of being a woman. What is femininity? What is being a woman? What are the relations between women? What is to be a daughter? A mother? A lover? A friend that takes care? I work more with friends and people that I love, not just because someone is an amazing dancer. I need to work with love.

I was very interested in working with the idea of heritage and ancestry. In this work, a lot of us have family that was born in colonized countries. So we have this conflict of belonging to the country that colonised but also belonging to the country that was colonised.

For me, music wise, I have a side that we could call a club head. I like the drums, I like the bass. I invited an artist that I love, but she works with subtlety. So this was a huge challenge, it was like a big digging inside why I always express in the extreme, I am loud, I move a lot. I have strong opinions. I love a lot. So in this way it was like, how can subtlety be hyper powerful?

It was more like, let the space talk and let what stays talk instead of being me trying to control everything that I want people to see. So for me, it was not easy at all because soundwise it felt empty. We found this space of loud silence. Especially nowadays that everything is screaming. Silence can be the most powerful tool of all. Great.

Processes have different ways of being built. Sometimes the idea comes out of the process, sometimes the idea precedes the process. Normally what you see is the result of the ideas applied during rehearsal and production time. But for this performance I had more time, because it was built during the Covid lockdown. All I knew was I wanted to reply to piece I’d done in 2005, super-Gorila.

That was a performance where I was really tired of the world and I decided to make a performance where I would explode the world. So I came in with a bang and I decided I wanted to destroy everything. But with this piece I was like: maybe that’s not a very good thing right now. So I decided instead of exploding the world, I wanted to explode the idea of myself. 

The basis was I’m a sculpture, and I’m diluting myself in actions. Some of them, are abstract and some of them are reenactments of social things, like playing basketball, digging a hole, cooking. So it started with the body. And then I thought: I want to have this exhaustion of the body, of the images. And then I started adding, adding information. Yeah, this is an answer to the other performance, but instead of having an aesthetical proposal, instead of the idea coming before the process, now it’s the opposite. Everything that will come out here are things that I remember through my movements, or quotations, or even the history of Teatro Praga. So it’s like neurology, how the brain is working in opposition to the body. The idea that your body is having is not the idea that you think you’re having.

I can’t talk to you about the creative process, about categorisation, because I’m talking about art and life. I’m talking about the worth of my life, the cost of my life. You can go to your home, but I don’t have a home. I go out into the world and I live in a forest and at any moment I could be murdered. How can I talk about the creative choices, about art? That’s a privilege for people who have privileges. I have to talk about life, I have to talk about my struggle. I have to use art as a way to amplify what I understand about myself and about the world.

The beginning is all about opening space. People are entering. The light is giving space. I’m rolling my body and giving space with the muscles on the floor. It’s all about giving space, opening. In the end, it’s like compressing and compressing. The tension is higher. The pitch is just one column. It’s just one spot. It’s like a pressure cooker: pfft! This is a new space. Actually, this new space brings me to another piece that I have created already. Every time I make a show, its ending is like a starting point for another. I think it’s a life process.

I think a lot about beginnings and endings. I usually say that the first 40 minutes, it’s to establish the main picture and the narrative. And then we can play with it. We can even change the game. For example, in this piece, we have two actors who enter the show in the middle and that changes everything. 

I usually don’t do the curtain call. I like it when the play ends still in its own fiction. I like people to leave the room still in that movement, in that temperature.

I come more from cinema than theatre, and when you see a movie you don’t applaud in the end. In theatre, applause is almost like, okay, we started and now it’s the end, but I like something more prolonged. This show really needs that because the ending is very messy, very violent. 

So yes, the ending is very important. In all my shows. The ending is usually the most important thing. 

That’s hard, because I like to believe in the idea that the performance has already started, ages ago, and it will never end. And I like to work in a way that feels like that. This is something that I work on in each performance, but also on the connections between performances that I do in the space of one or two years. So I always start with the last scene of the previous performance. It’s almost like a continuum, where maybe you are doing the same performance since you started. 

It’s very curious I feel like my last three works are wrapped inside their beginning and the end. It’s a bit like if I cut out the middle and just link the beginning and the end, they would fit perfectly. In Carcaça we start in the audience and we go to the front, to the left, to the back. And the last scene starts at the back and crosses to the front. So we could link the first and the last scene. It’s as if the beginning announces something and then the piece goes somewhere, putting layers and deviations that create depth, and then at some point goes back to the essential starting point.

Boca Fala Tropa opened with a moment as if I were not on the theatre stage, but rather on a more improvised stage in a more spontaneous dance situation. That was important to establish the atmosphere of the show.

The end of the show, where I deal with forgetting, is perhaps the most mysterious part of the show for me. I can’t really explain why I wanted to talk about forgetting, but intuitively I think that forgetting belongs at the end.

Cigarra: The beginning is about seduction. When we open it has to be an entrance that seduces, whether that is a gradual entrance or like love at first sight. Then we keep going and going, and this swells and subsides and entices until it reaches the end. Unusually, this time we are doing a different kind of ending. It’s the first time we’re ending on a downbeat. Usually we go, go, go… and the ending explodes. 

Tita Maravilha: This time the ending is down, but in a way that’s still very satisfying. We’re doing that for this show, but we don’t know if we’ll do it again. It is totally site specific.

I wanted the piece to have a tempo that you could feel the entire piece. Like following an arrow of energy from the beginning till the end. So the audience would leave the time from outside the room, and really enter the time of the piece. That’s why the beginning of the piece is so focused, it asks: how do I focus on these bodies? To really give time for people to notice them without any prejudice because they are just bodies like ours. I wanted to let people see everything that they wanted to see, so then we can continue with the work. 

The motto for this work was something like: why do we see weakness as something that pulls us down, instead of as a tool for strength or guidance? So the ending was about how to continue resisting while being vulnerable. I feel that the group are together alone, and alone together, but they keep going. It’s not an end: they are still working. Even when they stop, they are still understanding where they are and who are they and how they will continue.

My initial idea was that our bodies don’t precede us, that we start with costume. So costume makes known who we are, without revealing our bodies, and then our bodies would be revealed.

But this was difficult to do before our costumes were made, which took a long time and was close to the premiere. So instead, the beginning of the show is almost an outburst: this is how we are, naked. Let’s start with everything on the table. This is exactly what you see. There’s no doubt here. And after this chapter, we can talk about other things, okay? So it’s almost like: let’s talk about other things now that the body is no longer the big mystery here.

And the end was created through an idea that is central to BAqUE: death interrupts life. I wanted that interruption, that shock to be in the dramaturgy, instead of just in the emotion. So we had a lot of cuts. So, you see a scene? It’s cut. Has someone entered a scene? Yes – then suddenly, it jumps to another part. The end couldn’t be different from that. During the piece we created a poetic world, a very affectionate world, almost trying to capture our childhood, or create a new childhood. But the real world, it cuts in, it takes that away before you think it’s the end.

We had thought of this idea of the audience having dinner at the beginning of the piece, because in Pasolini’s film version of 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade, which is a main reference in this piece, many scenes take place at a dinner table. By chance, there was a time in the PT23 schedule when the audience would be having dinner, and I thought: perfect! So let’s invade that space, their private space.

I am very interested in the intersection between the public and the private. What’s the barrier? Is there a barrier? And there are other questions that appeared after reading the book like: what is fiction and what is reality? How can we make an art show that cannot die? Or live throughout eternity? The questions don’t have an immediate answer, the answer comes with the repetition of the show, or with the reaction of the public, or sometimes we have to accept that it never comes. Our body turns into the real show after a while, the old skin dies to give a place to the marks of the show.

While you were walking in, there was a DJ set already happening, mixing bass and beat with voices. I wanted people to enter into an environment, rather than just sit down and wait for the piece to start. With the end the important thing was taking the tapes off the floor. It was like: the stage had set a line, but in the end we can choose to remove it, and just exist in a space that’s not predetermined. So again it was trying to give space for us to be together, to breathe together, instead of finishing at a determined point.

They’re very connected. The first thing I say is: actors, as we know now, came from this idea of dancers who danced to the sound of flute. Then I do this travel through my history and theatrical history and bodily history. But at the end, I just play the flute – exactly how I started. It’s like so many years have passed by, so many things have happened. But at the end, I’m I mean, it’s just a thing where I’m just dancing with the flute. 

Normally, like performances, especially in theatrical ones, are very narrative. There is a beginning, middle and end. But maybe this one is like I’m inside a circle, with no beginning, no middle, no end. 

I am not talking about piece of performance, I’m talking about ritual. A body can be sacred, it can be profane. When my ancestors believed in a sacred body, for the coloniser this was profane. So in Meu Santo Corpo Profano we put these together, the sacred and the profane.

I make a ritual of the church – and we know how rotten that is. We know what goes on behind the scenes in church, the rottenness of priests’ paedophilia, the luxury that these people live in while taking money from everyone. And then I give my body to that too. 

At one moment I disappear. I give the stage solely to the music. But why did I choose that? It’s an interesting question because I build my shows with improvisation. If you and see a rehearsal with me and Mark, we don’t plan, we just do it. Next day we continue. And then the piece itself, it creates this moment. I think there is always something deciding for me. What I don’t do is: I improvise, I look, I analyse, I compose. That’s not how I work. What I do is just like: let’s work and see where we go. And suddenly we start to repeat things and when we repeat the next day, we repeat and then something happens – and we see where the piece wants to go.

I would say the most important thing is the entrance of the two other actors. The first 50 minutes is between me and Rita, and that’s the only thing you see. When the other two enter, it becomes another show: they are almost like the past of our relationship and we are the present. They have a different vibe, almost childish, but we have a heavy presence. I would say that change is the most important thing in the show. It totally changes the game. They do an audition when they are playing us in a movie about me and Rita, that I am supposedly directing, but in the end it’s not like that either, it’s all false.

That’s a hard question. There was an idea that the show has already started in theory, and will continue on and So inside the show you also have many moments of beginning or restarting all over again. There’s actually four moments, four different movements of circularity and invisibility. So maybe what I’m performing in this the background, disappearing out of the stage, disappearing because I have this chroma key green suit on, disappearing behind a piece of paper that I wrap around myself. When I was reading the text, I thought: this is the only thing that I can actually do as a performer with my body there: to try to come up with strategies for not being there. 

I would say that usually I like to start with simple ideas where the audience can enter and understand what is the world of this work. So that is very relational, it establishes a channel between the performer and the audience that is not noisy, that it doesn’t bring too many questions. Then after that, I can look for the edges, for deviations. For example in Carcaça, the first part is very choreographic and formal, and the group fills the space with energies that you understand. You can understand the architecture, that they are a community of people, that the dance is combining traditional and contemporary moves. Then comes a quartet with the shirts up and you feel this doesn’t fit. It looks strange. And a wall comes up on stage and you know there’s a shifting point. But that turning point I think has started already with the shirts quartet.

I really like it when I evoke my childhood home in Portugal. It was the place where I came to live when I arrived from Angola, and the community there allowed me to have such direct access to Kuduro dance. I lived in a neighbourhood in Cascais, where many Angolans passed through. They used to bring Kuduro cassettes, and that was an essential factor in my formation as a creator

Tita Maravilha: Our metronome is the dance floor. On a dance floor, you don’t need to explain much. Our pedagogy is on the dance floor, how to warm up a dance floor. The public make themselves available to come and dance, to listen to whatever music you play too. We are really interested in seduction, and that these people have fun and get emotional.

Cigarra: We are very pop.

Tita Maravilha: As much as we come to PT23 with some kind of marginal aesthetic, advancing the avant-garde, we know we are working with pop. I feel that when we are invited to close PT23, it has to do with presenting something that can be seen as fresh, that we don’t take ourselves too seriously. I know very well what the audience wants when they come to see us, and we’ve planned it like a pop artist plans it. It has to do with the sum of our identities, our performativity, the noise and strangeness we generate. We are two Brazilian women closing this festival. A cis woman, a trans woman, two non-white people, immigrants. People know we work with noise, and with an open heart. They know there is humour, but somehow we don’t take ourselves too seriously, even though our work is serious. We don’t know if what we are going to present today is going to work. It’s going to be a live experiment with people, for people.

There is one focus that is not necessarily the most important part of the piece, but is maybe the core of all the research. That is, we use a Monteverdi song, a lamento, and the question is: how do we find the connection between this Monteverdi song we use, a lamento, and a herd of pigs (the title of the work Vära, comes from the word for a herd of pigs). So pigs and humans, they have a body that is quite similar inside. Or, when a pig is killed, in the traditional way in the countryside, they cry a lot. And the first thing they do when a baby is born is they make you cry, to make sure you breathe. So this relationship really interested me: how to you connect these two, how do you find a hybrid voice?

I think the trio that comes almost at the end of the show. It’s done by three trans men, Ary Zara, Keli Freitas and Eric Santos. It was one of the first things that came up when I encouraged them, instead of dancing, to do interactions among themselves. It’s simply the three of them interacting affectively, aggressively and gently, in an intense way. For me, the encounter is something really special and makes me feel very alive when I forget a little bit about the world and connect with this very small distance that exists between people. Maybe it’s a summary of where this piece is from: it’s a return to childhood, or maybe it’s not telling your past but inventing a future that would be great if it had been lived in the past.

To talk about the middle, I have to talk more about 120 Days of Sodom. I explain on stage that in de Sade’s 120 Days there are four women, who I say are the narrators, but they are not much talked about and not represented in the various film versions. They appear, narrate, and leave. I started making parallels in my head, both about myself and my personal life, for example, about me being raped and about them too. So I divided the acts of the piece not as they are in 120 Days, but by narrator. Each act has connection to one narrator. 

By the end, it is as if we were saying: we are here because we have the privilege of being here. We are here massacring our own bodies, but there are women who don’t have that choice. There are women who were not in control of the decision to inflict pain upon them. I was very interested in creating this cycle, giving our blood almost as an offering to those who were not allowed to do so.

It’s difficult to choose! But there’s a moment where two women come face to face. They are using the vocabulary of krump, which is considered hyper masculine. People don’t understand the style, they feel it’s aggressive and violent, and in reality it’s one of the most connected with African roots and with spirituality. So for me, that duet has a lot inside. The movement is one thing. Then your eyes see two women. Their bodies are coming together, with their mouth always open, like they can’t stop screaming. But at the same time they are getting together, like when you find a sister, you can maybe calm down.

But I guess the medium that is vital to the whole piece is the music. It’s because the piece is like a live set. So everything is being done here. We had lots of sounds, from Portugal, Mozambique, Angola, Brazil. Researching the music was asked: who leads the ritual? It’s always the drum. So here it’s the same. The person leading is the musician, but now it’s with machines. 

Well, there is this modality at first in which I’m almost naked. (Actually, I rehearsed a lot of times naked, but it was a mess and I hurt myself, so I decided to have underwear.) And then there’s a part where I’m dressed. And I like to emphasise this transition with the thumbs. I do a lot of things with thumbs, because opposable thumbs, they’re very important for humanity and human evolution. So I dress with the thumbs, and I have these two balls, which are like the moon and the sun – but in an abstract way. So there’s like these two parts, where first you might think maybe it’s like neo-primitive stuff, and then later I am clearly dressed.

It doesn’t really work like that. I am not doing theatre, I am expressing a ritual.

Real-time editing, yes. It’s part of my work. But I don’t edit from from a place where I’m not also doing something. It’s curating in real time. I’II give you an example. I met CAConrad, an American poet, who has a practice called somatic writing. For example, you smell and taste a strawberry while you are writing. This makes your editor, your self-editor, go to the smell and the taste, and lets you write things that you are not editing. This is something I practice before I work. I don’t go and warm up my body. I warm up with words or with writing or speaking while my attention is on another thing. It’s not actively composing. I’m not interested in that because that’s just my mind, my self-editor. So I try to put myself in a place of presence, and I decide from that place.

Yes, totally. Sometimes the first version of the script has a lot of ideas. Like, all my ideas are here. I usually write the script two years before I start rehearsals. But I also try to write for the specific people I want to work with, so when I start rehearsing with the actors I have to edit a lot. Sometimes I have like ten, twenty versions of the script, because I’m never satisfied. Especially dialogues! I love a good dialogue, but it’s so difficult to get it: we are so messy, we don’t finish our thoughts, our sentences. And then when we write, it’s all very polished. So I like to get this feeling of this messiness. So we improvise a lot. Sometimes my shows are like 70% or 80% scripted and the rest improvised.

Yes, I do. There’s the process of editing, of cutting things, adding other things, changing the order. Also enhancing some idea that maybe deserves something more. Or the other way around. I think that’s pretty much what I do most of the time. Maybe 75% of the time of creation is doing that. 

I do it in front of my computer. And I think that the process of editing also affects what I do in the performance. For instance, when I’m lifting the paper with my hands and there’s a portion of text that comes to the floor, as if I’m typing it. Well, those little pieces of projected text are some of the things that I cut out in the editing process, and they ended up on the cutting-room floor. 

I never thought about it like that, and maybe it’s a linguistic thing. But it’s very curious to think this way. I think the editing process is crucial. Some scenes or moments only achieve their place in relation to what comes before and what comes after it. The editing, the organisation and combination of ideas, is very important for this authorial place of feeling. So I spent a lot of time in that kind of editing.

Also, in creation I find that the body doesn’t always need to be the master of the stage. When I find a problem it’s often because too much is going on with the bodies, and I have to reduce that to give space to sound, to stillness or maybe silence. It’s usually related with more contemplative moments, where you need less action and more space for perception or sensibility. And often I find I need to lower the ‘loudness’ of the body. 

I always work from what happens in the creative processes. Things don’t all appear at once: they emerge and find their place, some end up disappearing, others settle in. My creative process is basically based on this dynamic. I’m constantly searching – that’s why I revise, amend, clean and mess up.

Cigarra: Well, all this recycling, these references that we bring back and mould and rep remould and reposition, they never stay the same. They are revised by us. We’re always revising things, it’s a very lively process for us. We’ve been doing it all these years, on a daily basis.

I work in a close relationship with the performers. They are the key for me, for my work. Here, the creation process was four months, super intense. I think we discovered a lot. With the material that we make, I think it cannot just be manipulated or edited, as if it were score. To re-edit, we would really need to dive back into the environment and atmosphere that we discovered during rehearsals, and recreate it. Because I don’t want the outcome to be a shape thing, something that you just do. It’s something that you really need to understand with your body, to dive into the work as something that you propose to yourself. 

I spend the whole time revising! Yes, sometimes I make decisions in the moment, intuitively, but I usually make decisions after watching the rehearsal video, a bit more distanced from the situation. Every day I record and go home, watch videos and then make decisions about what to adjust. I always record rehearsals, I even record the shows so that the next time we perform I can say look, let’s adjust this part or that part. So for me, revision is constant.

I think my hand is more present in the editing than in the piece, because that’s  where I can really choose the themes, and things can come and change and become something else. So I have to be very attentive to the editing, it’s what can give the rhythm of the scene. It doesn’t leave so much room for improvisation. In fact, in BaQue the guidelines are very clear, so the variety comes more from the performer being at ease or in relation to the audience rather than from the movements.

No it’s not really like that. It’s very punk. I’m not someone who rehearses a scene over and over. Of course we have to train and be skilled: with the bed of nails, for example, it has to be like that. But making the piece itself is very intuitive. Because the work is made not just inside the rehearsal space, it’s made outside. It’s mixed up with hormonal stuff, with lives. For all this to work, they have to trust me and I have to trust them.

Many people say that they are perfectionist. I’m not! I think there’s something really precious when you don’t edit, when you don’t revise over and over until it’s perfect. I don’t need this perfection. It’s not easy because if you deliver something that is not hyper-revised and perfect, people say you could do more this, or this. But there’s this heart when something is not highly choreographed. I think we need to give space for what comes. 

I normally tend to do that, but here it was more mixed because I started out first with movement, then words, and then sometimes they didn’t fit so I had to rewrite, or I redo the movements.

The public is not my responsibility. What matters is not how the audience feels, what matters is my own surrender to what I do. I’m not representing anything. This is my surrender to my divinity. 

In this audience here are curators who will judge the work, try to categorise it, to say that it is about this, it’s about that. They have no idea how important it is to me, how much it lifts me up. Why should their opinion be important to me? They will have their opinions regardless of what I believe. My responsibility is to give myself to that moment, to make my beginning, my middle, my end.

For sure. I’m always with the presence of something is watching me. That’s why I believe in this idea that if I improvise and then compose, I will never compose in real time because I’m not working with the sense that there is an audience already, even if it’s an invisible audience. So that’s my core to work with people and with improvisation.  There is always this practice of being in communication with some presences, even if they may not be there.

For me what keeps drawing me is memory, it’s memory. And I think this is political because the moment you give space to something that is marginal, or interior or trapped, you are calling attention to that. But this also makes me feel responsible, because I don’t want to just send you in the audience my shit. I think you don’t deserve that. So we have some responsibility. So we make sure we put what is important with the light, or the music, me with my emotions or energies – we clean it all and unwrap it for the audience. It’s related to honouring.

I always think about the audience because we are doing it for them, though I try not to get too possessive about that. But in this particular piece it’s very important because our relationship with the audience is very present in the script and in the performance. The the idea was there from the beginning, that the audience is the third main character.

I always try to convince myself that I don’t think about the audience – but I know that’s not true. I think that the ghosts of the audience are always in your head. If I wasn’t thinking about the audience, maybe I wouldn’t have decided to do a performance. I would have just stopped at some critical point in my process when I ask: should I do something with this text or not? If I take the decision to do a performance, then the ghost of the audience are already there, even when I’m not thinking about them.

Then when it comes to technical decisions such as someone doing the lighting or the video – when these people come, then the ghost of the audience is not even a ghost anymore. It’s a presence, it’s real.

I think it’s right from the beginning. The first image I have is not of myself doing the work, but of myself seeing the work. When I envision the work it’s a bit like cinema, where the storyboard has already been set. In Carcaça I also had 11 or 12 other people also doing a lot of outside seeing. So even in the studio, where there was no audience, we were the audience for each other. It doesn’t always happen like that, but in this piece, yes. Of course, this inside audience is behind closed doors, it’s not just any audience. But the group was big enough to be a represent range of different people. 

Of course. Boca Fala Tropa deals with really personal issues, that I shared with the public. This was a delicate process, and I had many doubts. But my story of migration to Portugal is similar to that of other people who lived through those times, so I thought it was important to take it to the stage and share it with the public.

Cigarra: We really look for an interaction with the audience, because we are very moved by commotion. Here at PT23 we have an audience of curators, so we thought of something specific for them. When we do something for a different audience, we do something else. 

The audience really defines the work. We don’t create for ourselves.

Tita Maravilha: We wouldn’t want to either. If we didn’t have an audience, we’d go an open a bakery instead.

I think that when we really get into the creation of the work we forget that it’s work, it’s just something that you’re really involved in and surrounded by. But the moment that I present that work, it’s not mine any more. It’s for the people who are receiving it, and how they understand it. Maybe understanding is not the right word, but how they receive it and have an individual experience. That will not be my experience, and that knowledge is always present inside the creation process as well. It’s not that I am always thinking about how the audience will react to it. It’s more like: okay, how do we find this way of communicating in an open way that allows someone to enter and then to leave differently, with something changed. For me, that’s the most pleasurable thing.

For me, it affects the process throughout. I don’t know if that’s a good thing, honestly, but I’m always thinking about the audience, I can’t think about the show in a closed way. We are there to create an experience that will be lived by the people who perform and the audience that watches. So I’m interested in that experience being well-lived by those people.

The connection between the beginning and the end is a journey for the audience. We invade the dining area, and then people have the choice to follow us, to come and see and feel. There’s a moment when I say: ‘And you, my dears, you will be the witnesses of this crime against humanity.’

I am interested in messing with people’s emotions. I like people to laugh and think: why am I laughing at this? They can laugh and cry and feel like shit at the same time. At the beginning of the piece I say: ‘I hope you feel something, but you have to be available for that.’ Because sometimes that’s what I miss as a spectator: feeling more and learning less.

Yes, in this one I was really aware of the audience, because it’s the first time I had them on four sides. So you have to consider all the points of view. So I intended to create something like a circle. It’s very challenging to create a piece that has no front. And it’s also a kind of metaphor that there is no one truth: people see from different angles, and will describe different things, but it’s all real and true. We are just seeing them from a different perspective. That’s also something very strong here.

In other performances, when I know which venue I’m presenting in, I tend to work with the expectations of that theatre, even if I bend those expectations. Here, I was doing it in a freer way. It was during Covid and I wanted to test myself, and also the audience – to see if I could overload the audience with information. 

When we do large performances in big places and you just have two months, I’m like: go left, go right, do this, dot that. With this piece, I really wanted it to be a somatic thing, to be with the audience. If they laugh, I’ll give them something more. It’s really like I need to have this symbiosis with the audience.

In times of overproductivity you’re not allowed to be so near and so empathic. With the audience in this performance, I went back to basics. There’s no real design, just some projectors – and the set design is actually the set designer [who sits impassively on stage throughout]. Actually, I would love the audience to experience this in a museum space, or some place where people can go in and out and observe from any side.