A Viagem

Season | Technical File | Photos

2009

One of our main searches inside the theatric practice is to investigate this powerful, and still, at the same time, unknown place of communication with the audience. Trying to address this issue and leaving a bit of our conventional making, we conceived A Viagem  – a sensorial trajectory between actor and spectator. Non original idea, just close the eyes to see better. But still, opening an imaginary space inside the own spectator, trying to create an intimate moment, a personal and human bond with the actor, anyway, a spectacle where the spectacular passes internally inside each one. We summoned actors (of the most sensitive) and spectators (of the most curious) to let themselves be taken by these stories that, we are sure, will drive you toward a universe full of beautiful and tasty things: your own imagination.

This staging proposal was conceived by the French director Léa Dant, first developed with her French company, and then in 2001 with actors from São Paulo. The result of the work was only presented in Festival Internacional de São José do Rio Preto – PR. Giovana Soar that was her assistant and interpreter in the Brazilian montage, proposed a reassembly of this scenic proposal in Curitiba.

The spectacle consists in proposing to the spectator a sensorial trip. Blindfolded, a spectator is conducted by an actor that narrates his/her story. The actor that creates his /her dramaturgy (including lines, movements and sensorial stimuli) integrally constructs this small piece of a story. In this trajectory the actor provides to the coadjuvant spectator of his/her story an active participation, proposing to live his/her story, expectations, emotions. Through sensorial stimuli translated by touch, speech, music, among other stimuli like smells, objects and flavors. This trip has rules of technical and dramatic workings; all the stories passes through similar stages, are conduced by the same soundtrack, happen simultaneously in a same space and end in a rupture moment.

The sense of rupture, abandonment, separation will be experienced here, physically, by this public-partner.

A Viagem tries to establish a new place of communication with the audience, a new look to “see” the actor, even that blindfolded. The attempt to take from the theater what it has of visual (and ordinary, in the literal sense) and to amplify its codes and its access to the spectator, which makes theater amplifies its possibility of communication. This is only possible with the spectator’s permission and with the availability to join this game.

The sensitivity is what moves us, and to create an affective bound between actor-audience is one of our goals. In this spectacle, it is not allowed to film, nor to photograph, even less to be “watched”, to ensure the intimacy and the total surrender of the audience.

This spectacle (nothing spectacular) doesn’t fit in the interactivity (in the way this is usually employed), it goes beyond. In a subtle manner, inside the boundaries and wishes of each one of the spectators, with a lot of common sense, technique, improvement and poetry, this spectacle translates itself much more as an encounter.

Encounter, the perfect translation for the theatric event.