PARTE UM When I first approached theatre I did it with an almost mythical conception of the actor’s craft and vocation, hoping to unleash the latent potentialities and experiences that human beings have unused and unknown, in the depth of what is not demanded in the daily course of socialized life. I felt theatre as a systematic exploration of unrevealed darkness, the way to build immaterial dreams into becoming alive in the concreteness of solid flesh and voice. A place of utter excess and utter simplicity where life would appear with the physical roughness and subtlety brought by all that derives it´s meaning from a symbiotic relation with silence and with what is silenced.This conception serves now as an unreachable horizon that still guides and points the direction of the eye, and of the hand, and of the mouth. Later, the aspect of theatre as the conference of mankind reflecting mankind’s behaviours also stood as vital. The procession of behaviours hidden in the daily routines showing a very seducing beauty linked with the gradual fading away of all that lives, all that is not grandiloquent or huge, but as simple as the passing by of non returning moments.The web of theatre is weaved on the timely flow of our lives, is presented among that timely flow, and so, as all the performative arts, is the greatest paradox, the arts of the instant do not survive the instant, except in memories, dreams and means of experience deprived from the primal freshness of the current instant living communication between human beings.The fact that these approaches to the performative arts are still as valid as they once where is for me the most important fact in my autobiography and for the purpose of this autobiography now.To discover the ways of being moved by the seemingly ridiculous, the seemingly trivial, the seemingly unimportant, is one of the essences of the performative practice. Also, to find out the needs of Joy and the needs of Sadness, to find out the central points from where expression must arise and must be. So, the story table of what one has done, commonly known as biography, is not of my interest and is much more easily expressed in the standard curriculum.Autobiography means the description of one’s own life, made by the one who lives that life and can not be from that life separated. It is a counting and a choosing of which beads to place in the collar, referring to an examination of what has been. The interest of such a work, and perhaps most of all in the performative reality, resides solely in the ability to forget it in the effort of constantly tracing and understanding (under standing) the manifestations and flows of the immediate presence, that witch accounts for the living now recovered and regained.The spider that weaves the web is the same spider that eats the web that has been, literally, produced inside her belly. The labyrinth of Crete was said to have no ceiling, Ariadne´s (Arachne) thread was leaving it’s foot prints in a ground exposed to all weather changes, to know where to go those who carry the thread will find it better to keep focusing in the ground, crawling or walking, running or standing still, dancing or jumping, all at once and all apart.The Valentinian Gnostics spoke of entities called Syzygys, that stood for the union of complete oppositions creating a new reality that would never be known by the formalized description of it’s parts, or by the genealogical storytelling of their conception, in spite of the constant re-enacting of this conception in pleasant full physical terms by some rather literal and humorous Gnostic practitioners.A Syzygy is the sexual union between Daimons and Angels creating a new entity that is neither, and that overcomes either, and that is only experienced in living and becoming. Such are the performative arts, such is theatre, such are human beings, such is what is relevant in biography.The sabbatic tradition, as well as the tantrics, speaks of three states of consciousness, pointing to a fourth that breeds the fifth (the so called magical quintessence of the alchemists, or the Azoth), these states are waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep. The fourth is the crossroads where they all become one in the present moment, opening the so called gates of eternal now, the mythical performance time, the place of going, of just going and just coming. Such is the theatre that breeds from the crossroads.
A NUISIS ZOBOP — Associação cultural de criação, investigação e formação no domínio das artes performativas. Tem por objectivo promover, de forma sistemática e abrangente, a investigação, a formação e a criação no domínio das artes performativas. Entende-se por investigação o desenvolvimento e consolidação de novos processos de trabalho do performer, por formação a apreensão sistemática de novos modos de estar e agir, e por criação, criar. Estes três vectores não são vistos como estanques entre si mas como possuindo uma complementaridade essencial, de um modo deliberado. Constituem-se ainda como objectivos: o estudo crítico da evolução das artes performativas como instrumento para vitalizar a prática criativa no presente, entre a tradição e o risco; a recriação aplicada da actividade do performer enquanto alguém que age, agindo no que diz respeito á direcção, actuação, e criação; a programação e concretização de criações originais e de acções de pedagogia e investigação aplicada; a exploração de outras formas artísticas na sua especificidade técnica e essencial, integrando a compreensão da sua diferença precisa na prática performativa ; a criação e edição de textos que, pela sua natureza, processo e modo de produção, âmbito ou finalidade, e principalmente qualidade, se enquadrem nos objectivos; a compreensão de que a arte é uma resposta necessária entre um imenso rio de perguntas que nunca se resolvem em definitivo, e que nunca se resolvem senão agora.
