The desire for experimentation, taking risk and “not even being afraid to fail” is felt at every moment of Arena, secondcreation of the collective Outro, directed by João Leão and Sílvio Vieira, the latter author of the show. Explain what is going on there, especially when said arena is in an old car workshop located in the heart of one of the residential neighborhoods of the parish of Arroios, it would be like unraveling part of the mystery that surrounds this scenic adventure, where nothing is predictable or neglects the effect of surprise.
However, without pointing out a path, we can reveal the existence of six creatures that move as an organic unit (which the author called Jan), although each plays a role in the collective. Routinely, they undertake a ritual movement, until one day, it will be shaken when, from inside water (literally), an alien character emerges in an astronaut suit.
In arena’s genesis was the premise that it would be a theatre show without a word. “When two years ago, even before the pandemic, we started working on the project it was thought that the pillar would be the translation of music into the theatrical scene. As the choreographer who translates music into gestures, here, the goal was to translate it into theatricality, that is, in images, situations, characters”, explains Sílvio Vieira.
Throughout the creative process, it was precisely from the music that the actors improvised, birthing the essentials of Arena’s situations. But, contrary to the scheduled, something essential happened: the show would not happen in the black box of a conventional stage, but in a garage. “When we got here, I asked the actors to look at the space, choose a corner and try to explore it,” recalls the author, stressing how the architecture of this old abandoned workshop, at 21A Rua Carlos José Barreiros, “entered the dramaturgy of the show itself, being impossible to transport what happens here to another place.”
Without imposing a narrative line or, as the author points out, “any political and ideological concept”, Arena is revealed as an artistic object of full freedom, “where what has been valued is experimentation and the search for beauty, or a certain poetry. As the dipositive is opened, any viewer can read as they see fit. And that’s something I like about a show,” Vieira recalls.
This scenic adventure that combines with great ingenuity and irreverence movement, sound, light and an imaginary whole claimed of silent cinema and the great names of comedy, such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd, is starring young actors Anabela Ribeiro, André Cabral, Catarina Rabaça, Inês Realista, Miguel Galamba, Miguel Ponte and Pedro Peças. In the course of the cultural association Outro, born in 2018, Arena is the successor of As trees let die the mostbeautiful branches, a show also written by Sílvio Vieira, premiered in 2020 at the Temps d’Images Festival.
1 – Monteiro-Mor Botanical Park
The park has a vast collection of botanical species. Here is the first araucaria heterophylla known in mainland Portugal. Among the existing fauna, birds and a colony of bats are worth noting.
http://www.museudotraje.gov.pt
Largo Júlio de Castilho – Lumiar, 1600-483 Lisbon
Tel. +351 217 543 920 (box office)
Museum and Botanical Park Hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 10 am to 1 pm and from 2 pm to 6 pm
Closed to the public: Monday, January 1, Easter Sunday, May 1, municipal holiday (June 13), 24 and 25 December.
2 – Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Garden
Built in the 60s of the twentieth century, it is one of the most representative gardens of modernism in Portugal. Inspired by the Portuguese landscape, its ecological and cultural dimension, it has undergone transformations over time. It developed into a dense and varied forest, including a lake and reflecting, as a whole, an idea of paradise. Several trails are proposed: from light and shade, from the lake, from the waterfront, from scents and views.
https://gulbenkian.pt/jardim/
Av. de Berna 45A, 1067-001 Lisbon
Phone: +351 217 823 000
Opening hours: Open every day from sunrise to sunset.
3 – Eduardo VII Park/Cold Greenhouse
Built in the 1st half of the XX century, is the largest park in the center of Lisbon. It has a central strip, covered with grass and Buxus, bordered by walks and green areas. To the northwest of the park is the Cold Greenhouse and, to the east, the Carlos Lopes Pavilion. To the north is a viewpoint with a wide view over Lisbon, the Tagus River, and the other bank.
https://informacoeseservicos.lisboa.pt/contactos/diretorio-da-cidade/parque-eduardo-vii
Eduardo VII Park. 1070-051 Lisbon
Park hours: 24 hours
Cold Greenhouse: Summer, from 10 am to 7 pm.
Closes on January 1, May 1 and December 25
http://estufafria.cm-lisboa.pt/
Tel. +351 218 170 996
4 – Lisbon Botanical Garden
Scientific garden, opened in 1878, is part of the National Museum of Natural History and Science. Among others, it has several tropical species natural from New Zealand, Australia, China, Japan and South America, a wide variety of palm trees originating from all continents, and cycads, currently rare and one of the ex-libris of the Garden.
http://www.museus.ulisboa.pt/jardim-botanico
Rua da Escola Politécnica, 58, 1250-102 Lisbon
Tel. +351 213 921 800
Schedule: Every day except January 1 and December 25.
Winter: 10 a.m. to 5 pm | Summer: 10 am to 8 pm
5 – Jardim do Príncipe Real
A romantic and English-inspired garden, it was built in the mid-19th century, around an ectogonal lake. It has several elements of stactand of the various tree species existing in the garden, stands out the large and secular cedar-of-Buçaco with more than 20 meters. The space has several equipment, including kiosks, terrace and playground. Underground is the Patriarchal Reservoir, belonging to the Water Museum.
https://informacoeseservicos.lisboa.pt/contactos/diretorio-da-cidade/jardim-franca-borges
Praça do Príncipe Real, 1250-096 Lisbon
Time: 24 hours
6 – Jardim da Estrela
The Guerra Junqueiro Garden, known as Jardim da Estrela, was inaugurated in 1852. Public garden, delimited by railing, was built in the style of English gardens, of romantic inspiration. Inhabited by diverse fauna, the garden has several exotic plants among its diverse vegetation, lakes, waterfalls, statuary, a viewpoint, and a bandstand among other buildings.
https://informacoeseservicos.lisboa.pt/contactos/diretorio-da-cidade/jardim-guerra-junqueiro
Praça da Estrela, 1200-667 Lisbon
Time: Every day, from 7 am to 12 pm
7 – Tropical Botanical Garden
This scientific garden was created in 1906 to support the teaching of tropical agronomy. It has relevant botanical collections with about 600 species, mainly of tropical and subtropical origin, especially rare species such as cycas and encephalartos. From the built heritage dating from the 17th century to the 20th century, the Casa do Fresco, the Calheta Palace and the Main Greenhouse are worth highlighting.
https://museus.ulisboa.pt/jardim-botanico-tropical
Largo dos Jerónimos, 1400-209 Lisbon
Tel. +351 213 921 808
Schedule: Every day except January 1 and December 25.
Winter: 10 a.m. to 5 pm | Summer: 10 am to 8 pm
8 – Ajuda Botanical Garden
Founded in 1768, it is the first Botanical Garden in Portugal. The architecture of the garden is of Renaissance model and the ornaments are of baroque influence. Organized on two terraces, it overlooks the Tagus River and is inhabited by peacocks and other birds. It has more than 1600 plants, including a dragon tree with more than 400 years.
http://www.isa.ulisboa.pt/jba
Calçada da Ajuda s/n, 1300-011 Lisbon
Tel. +351 213 653 157
Schedule: Weekdays, from 10 am to 5 pm. Weekends and public holidays from 10 am to 6 pm
Daylight saving time: Weekdays from 10 am to 6 pm. Weekends and holidays from 10 am to 8 pm
Closes on January 1 and December 25
Create “a place of love” to claim what is human, in a time of dehumanization, even more accelerated by a pandemic. This is the purpose of the third edition of BoCA,which begins in Lisbon, Almada and Faro in early September, extending until October 17.
More than a festival, this year 2021, BoCA seeks, in the words of artistic director John Romão, to keep “alive its mission in support of new languages, privilegiem the spaces ‘between’ – for example, between the performative and the visual – new commissions to Portuguese and foreign artists, in trans dialogue (therefore, transgender in all its meanings) implementing projects that propose a new awareness and models between artistic practices and sustainability.”
Goal to be realized through artistic projects signed by dozens of notable creators who seek to look at the world and question established narratives. And, taking into account “a program that combines different rhythms of projects and relationships with artists and institutions, relying on a transition of production and creation processes, integrated, plural and sustainable”, the biennial reinforces the presence of “short-term projects that reinforce the artistic and ethical commitment to artists and production structures , creations that extend in time and space through greater commitment to the short ephemerality of theater and performative, sustainable and long-term relationships with artists and projects, deepening of reflections and long-term processes that combine performivity, visuality, activism and neuroscience, a focus on the direct relationship and representativeness of local communities , artistic, associative and diverse sectors, whose active participation is involved in the creative development of projects to also start an interrelational ecosystem between art, sustainability and science through the project The Defense of Nature.”
This last purpose will be developed in what is a ten-year project, which, in a first stage, proposes, by December this year, to sponsor the planting of 7,000 trees of indigenous species, through the will of 7,000 artists/citizens. From an artistic point of view, this project already includes in this edition a series of performative actions in natural spaces of the three host cities entitled Quero Ver das Montanhas. Curated by Delfim Sardo and Sílvia Gomes, the various performances are starring artists such as Sara Bichão, Diana Policarpo, Dayana Lucas, Gustavo Sumpta, Gustavo Ciríaco, Musa Paradisiaca and the collective Berru.
Lisbon programming
As usual, boca does not settle in Lisbon, and if in previous editions it has “decentralized” the cities of the north of the country, this year crosses the Tagus, settles in Almada, and goes south, to the Algarve, to the city of Faro.
Throughout the capital, the start of the biennial begins with the first large-scale installation of Grada Kilomba, which extends along the river for 32 meters long, in the Coal Square of MAAT. Barco/The Boat proposes to launch “a new collective narrative in this same public space, built from the history of dehumanization, violence and genocide of African and indigenous peoples.”
Meanwhile, at the National Museum of Ancient Art, German artist Anne Imhof presents the video installation Untitled (Wave) in the Alberta Chapel, a place previously inhabited only by women in seclusion; and at Palácio Pimenta, rapper Capicua debuts as a theater author and directs actor Tiago Barbosa in The Junk,“an emotional dissertation that departs from the story of a man who stands alone, in the long months of confinement, surrounded by inert matter, rubble and memories.”
Regarding theater premieres, the BoCA brought to Lisbon the renowned American filmmaker Gus Van Sant, who presents, from September 23, in the Garrett Room of the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, his first stage creation with a fully Portuguese artistic team. Andy is a musical that “reconstructs the past of an Andy Warhol in early career, through a fictional narrative constructed from real facts and memories, but also from imagination.”
Lisbon will also be the “stage” of The Third Reich, a performative video installation of what is one of the biggest names in European theater, the Italian Romeo Castellucci (National Coach Museum, 9 and 10 September); performance/installation Overlapses, Riddles & Spells, by Andreia Santana (CCB, September 9-12); of the dream videos of Polish Agnieszka Polska present in The New Sun (Patriarchal Reserve, September 13 to October 17) – she will also be at Casa da Cerca in Almada with another video installation, I Am the Mouth; or Passages, nomadic project of the choreographer Noé Soulier, which explores the relationship between the movement of bodies and the places where they inscribe their actions, and in Lisbon, takes place in the rooms of the National Museum of Ancient Art (September 17 and 18), establishing a dialogue between dancers and sculptural objects.
Another of the highlights of this BoCA is the project signed by filmmaker Pedro Costa with the Tagus Musicians. The Daughters of Fire joins cinema, music and theater to tell the saga of three young Cape Verdean sisters who, arriving at a European port, after another devastating eruption of the Volcano of Fire, go wandering, hand in hand, evoking their secret fears through music and singing. This long-adod show is presented on Capitol Hill on September 17 and 18.
In the Lisbon programming, projects of pairs such as António Poppe and La Familia Gitana, Tânia Carvalho and Matthieu Ehrlacher, Gabriel Ferrandini and Hugo Canoilas, Joana Castro and Mauritius Neves are also included; the lasting performances of Miles Greenberg or Carlos Azeredo Mesquita; and two unreleased films by New Yorker Khalik Allah. The full schedule for the three BoCA cities can be found here.
Valério Romão
Valério Romão spent a large part of his professional life working on computer science. The writer, who graduated in philosophy, became a translator thanks to his passion for reading and writing and “the desire to see in Portuguese a certain text that has not yet been translated. Trying to do what other translators did before me, to incorporate the voice of a certain author in Portuguese culture, making him or her known.” Born in France, where he lived until he was 10, he has a natural ability to translate from French, but he also translates from English – “with the help of a dictionary.” He translates a lot of unpublished poetry. “These are translations that I keep in my drawer and that I do for pleasure, and which I eventually show to a publisher. I am translating the book La main hantée, by the Canadian poet Louise Dupré, who writes in French. I admire her poetry, which I discovered in a French bookstore. I sent her a message saying that I would love to translate the book, adding that I couldn’t pay for the copyright because no publisher would bear the cost. Publishing poetry in Portugal is something you do with print runs of 100 copies and without money. She was very pleased. She said she wasn’t in poetry for the money and was delighted with the idea of an author entering a bookstore, reading her book, and then wanting to translate it and making it known.” Valério Romão’s most recent translation, James Baldwin’s O Quarto de Giovanni (Giovanni’s Room), “was a serendipitous opportunity offered by the publisher for which I had already translated Houellebecq. It was an honor because he is a tremendous author, not only for his literary value, but for all his contributions to the fight for human rights, especially of blacks and homosexuals. It is a very risky book from the 50s, beautifully written by a black homosexual man, with no speech ambiguity at all. Baldwin is one of those authors that make you think, ‘I wish I had met this guy!’ He has amazing courage and clear-sightedness.” As for the work, Romão states that the language in the book is not particularly complex: “A bit in the vein of Hemingway, an expatriate, short sentences, but with a different topic and a different emotional density.” Asked if it is difficult to transpose this simplicity of style into a translation, he says: “It depends on whether the apparent simplicity of the author is just another effect or not. In Baldwin’s case, there is great honesty in the way he writes.” And he concludes with a grievance: “Translators are very poorly paid in Portugal. If you consider the time it requires, the quality you demand from yourself, what you actually get after paying you taxes – this is something you do only for the love of it, or because you don’t know how to do anything else.”
Margarida Vale do Gato
Margarida has a degree in Modern Languages and Cultures, but her encounter with translation began before she went to college. At the age of thirteen she moved with her family to California, where she stayed while her father was doing his master’s degree. “I already loved languages back then. I used to wonder how people thought in different languages. I enrolled in a local school, and after a few months I started dreaming in English. This brightened up my days, which were a bit lonely because it’s not easy to move to another country at that age. I knew I would be coming back to Portugal soon, so I also started learning French. But it was very rudimentary, so I invested in self-learning by listening to Jacques Brel. My very first translations were of Brel’s lyrics. I soon realized that this was an activity in which I felt really comfortable.” She does not translate from French at this point, unless it is a poem – “not because it’s easier, but because there’s a concentration in words that requires a different kind of attention, one that does not involve the language’s everyday use. To translate novels you constantly have to watch TV shows, which I don’t particularly like, or movies, which I watch more often. Or you have to constantly go to countries where the language is spoken, in the variant you translate from, otherwise things will sort of freeze. Literature is a mechanism of language innovation where you can follow the latest rumors.” Margarida is preparing an anthology of Beat poetry with Nuno Marques and will now bring us a book by Marianne Moore, O Pangolim e Outros Poemas (The Pangolin and Other Poems), which is “the only proposal I ever made to the publisher. I really wanted to translate this book. I am a professor of American Literature and what I like about modernism is authors who experiment. In terms of poetry, I really like to risk understanding the experience through translation. Marianne Moore is a poet who combines curiosity for small lives (the pangolin, a creature that has been greatly abused by our pandemic, or a nectarine and a strawberry, for instance) with the awareness that the act of knowing depends upon previous representations – but of which she seeks to present a different angle through the cadence of language. As an author, she offers a degree of attention to the represented object that goes beyond the realm of the self. My poetry tends to be personal and to play with autobiography in a way that I continue to pursue because I find it interesting, but which she rejects.” With regards to translation, she believes that “it’s very difficult to work with certain kinds of systematization because some texts afford greater literality, which is important to retain their style and strangeness. On other occasions, you have to adapt them. So when it comes to consistency in translation, we should be suspicious of it. We must risk contradicting ourselves, because the unity of the text is something that translation inherently denies.”
Miguel Martins
A non-practicing archaeologist, Miguel Martins started being invited by publishers to work as a translator by virtue of being a poet. Although he also works as a critic for Gulbenkian’s Colóquio/Letras magazine, translation pays most of his bills. He translates from French, English and Spanish and has translated a booklet from Italian – Luigi Russolo’s Manifesto da Música Futurista (better known in English as The Art of Noises), which “was something I did out of love, and it was slower than it would be if I had a real command of the language. I translate all kinds of stuff to make a living, horrible books, self-help books, and so on. Every now and then I get to translate really good things, like Forster or Lorca’s Mariana Pineda, as well as a lot of poetry for literary magazines. Regarding his latest translation – E. M. Forster’s A Máquina Pára e Outros Contos (The Machine Stops and Other Stories), a collection of texts written over a period of 20 years – Miguel Martins says: “To motivate readers I would basically talk about the short story mentioned in the title, a truly fantastic text, written a hundred years ago, which predicts with surprising accuracy many aspects of the current world and its dystopian traits – communication through machines only, people feeling distant from one another, an internet of sorts, and things such as likes on Facebook.” Regarding the job of a translator, he states that “Command of the source language is much less important for a good translation (with more or less work you get there) than command of the target language. At the end of the day, what people read must be written in good Portuguese. That’s why I think that, whenever possible, literary translations should be done by authors. But besides that, translation also implies culture and all sorts of references – historical, scientific, artistic, political. This is where many translations fail. And it is for this reason – although there are some exceptions – that I have serious doubts about the possibility of being a great translator at a young age. Professional translators never know what kind of work they will get next, so this culture should be as comprehensive as possible, notwithstanding the research required in each case. You can’t make a living solely by translating good things. The rates in Portugal are the same whether you’re translating Shakespeare or a Spice Girls biography. But while I can translate 15 pages a day from a crappy book, with a Shakespeare work I will probably not be able to do more than seven lines. Translators who only translate really interesting things either have other sources of income or can’t make ends meet. For me, the problem with this work are the interruptions, the gaps between this translation and the next. If I were working all the time – which is not desirable, as it is very exhausting from a mental point of view, and also because sometimes I need to break free from the style and language of an author before moving on to the next one – it would be a relatively well paid job.”
Hugo Maia
“I started learning Arabic very casually. I had spent holidays in Morocco and I was curious about the language. We understand Spanish, we speak English, but we do not understand the language of a neighboring country which we perceive as being totally different.” Hugo Maia then enrolled in a free Arabic course at Faculdade de Letras and read a lot about the history of the Arab world and the Islamic presence in Portugal. As he was the best student in class, he got a scholarship for a summer crash course in Tunisia. “I realized that in order to learn Arabic, I would have to do it in an Arab country. It was the best way to learn both standard Arabic and colloquial Arabic, so I decided to enroll in the annual crash course in Tunis. In fact, I’m a graduate in anthropology, and I interrupted my degree in 2001/02 to take this course. I’m not an expert in literature. First and foremost, I consider myself a reader. Sometimes I would compare translations from Arabic to French, so I took an interest in translation theory. I realized that there were practically no direct translations from Arabic in Portugal. In 2006 I submitted some translation projects to several publishers, which were refused. Which was fortunate, as my knowledge was not that great. Arabic is not a particularly difficult language, but it is very complex from a sociolinguistic point of view – it has what we call a very pronounced diglossia. There is a standard form of Arabic, which is the same in all Arab countries, and a colloquial form, which is different in every country and even in every region. The differences between the various colloquial Arabic languages are as great as those between Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian. I usually say that in order to learn Arabic well you have to know two languages – standard Arabic and at least one colloquial Arabic language. In the meantime, I lived in Morocco for five years, where I learned colloquial Moroccan Arabic, which helped me translate One Thousand and One Nights, a work that includes many colloquial Arab idioms from the Levant, Syria and Egypt, although these are very different.” When Hugo entered a bookshop in Tunis and discovered Jaoulet Baina Hanet Al Bahr Al Abyadh Al Motawasset (translated in Portuguese as Périplo pelos Bares do Mediterrâneo, which could be translated as A Tour of Mediterranean Bars), he did not know that Ali Duaji was regarded as the founding father of the Tunisian short story. He was fascinated by the author’s irony and sarcasm, which in the 1930s “satirized the new bourgeois classes that were working hand in glove with the political power of the French protectorate, resulting in that very confusing mixture of customs.” But according to him, his latest translation is first and foremost a very peculiar travel account. “A tour of the bars of Europe and Asia that ignores traditional tourist attractions such as museums.” He says he can relate with that and even gives a “shameful” example: he lived for a month right next to the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam and never once visited it. “And I love the painter. I’ve seen his paintings at the Musée d’Orsay!”
Paulo Faria
After graduating in Biology, the writer and literary translator Paulo Faria spent some time teaching that subject, but it was “clearly” not what he liked. His grandfather was a language teacher at Colégio Militar and taught him English and French at a very young age. His never lost his passion for literature, which he explored as a self-taught person, and when the opportunity to work on literary translation arose, he did not bail out. He translates from French, but mostly from English. He has translated Emily Brontë, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, but he points out that when people mention this aspect of his life, they usually refer to him as “the translator of Cormac McCarthy” – an author he particularly admires and from whom he has translated twelve books. “I translated three of them twice from scratch because I found the result of the first translations really annoying when I happened to read them a few years later: Blood Meridian, The Orchard Keeper and Child of God.” The Portuguese Society of Authors presented him with the International Literary Translation Award in 2015 for his translation of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities , and perhaps because of that his name is usually associated with the great classics. His most recent translation is also of a Dickens work – The Mystery of Edwin Drood. This is Dicken’s final novel, and it was left unfinished because the author died while writing it. Because of that, it has “this bizarre thing of being a crime novel in which the mystery remains unsolved. The mystery mentioned in the title thus becomes a double mystery.” Paulo mentions Dire Quasi la Stessa Cosa, a text in which “Umberto Eco argues that a translation can never say the same thing, but if the translator is good it can say almost the same thing. Eco defines translation as an interpretation based on a negotiation. I agree with him. When you are translating an author like Dickens, you must understand what his coevals felt when reading that text – which was natural for them, although not everyone spoke like that – and then try to create a natural artificiality. We cannot replicate the language of that era in Portuguese, nor does a contemporary reader want that. A good translation should reach out to the reader without distorting the original. It’s precisely because of this that translations get old. Every generation translates Dickens or Victor Hugo because our world is no longer their world, but it is not the world of translations from the 1940s either. As an author, when I write a novel, I don’t think about the readers. But as a translator, I always do.
It’s the big surprise of this August: Lisbon will actually be hosting the FIMFA,. The International Puppetry and Animated Forms Festival, which usually happens in May. However, due to the constraints resulting from the pandemic, the event was canceled. But Luís Vieira and Rute Ribeiro, artistic directors of the theater company A Tarumba and FIMFA Lx, decided that they would not give up and, weaving their network of collaboration with various artists of puppetry and objects, as well as with some venues in the capital, set up a “lightning fast program” with eight great shows of great international names such as Agnès Limbos and Oligor y Microscopía, and Portuguese names like André Murraças, Companhia Pia, Teatro de Ferro, Formiga Atómica and, of course, A Tarumba.
“Even knowing that we are sailing by sight and living with a suspended future, we want this to be the August of our de-confinement, ” explains Luís Vieira, stressing that the Descon’FIMFA intends to give a sign of confidence to the public and show that “it is possible to return to the theaters safely, complying with all the required sanitary rules.” To “restore the harmonious coexistence, an essential condition for the theater, between artists and the public”, the festival presents shows “with very small audiences and several adaptations on the scene that, although they do not compromise the creative concept, ensure the need to restore the confidence of the spectators in theaters and on stage. ”
The theater of objects to think about our time
In the festival program, Shaday Larios, from Oligor y Microscopía, is quoted: “our objects can speak for us, when we are no longer here. Either when we refuse to speak, or due to many other absences. So why couldn’t we speak for them? ” This idea serves as a kind of hat for the alignment of the Descon’FIMFA which, as Luís Vieira points out, “finds in the manipulation of objects the formal unity”, which makes this edition of the festival something absolutely “unprecedented” in the very concept of FIMFA. Through these shows, they are “the objects that gain prominence and connect us to the emotion and humanity that surrounds them.”
The first two shows of the festival are very representative of the formal and conceptual capacity of the theater of objects to create imagery or describe memories. They are both created by Jomi Oligor (Hermanos Oligor, Spain) and Shaday Larios (Microscopía Teatro, Mexico), two artists who have worked together since they realized they were walking parallel paths.
The first, opening show of this Descon’FIMFA, is an absolute debut in Portugal and is titled La Melancolia del Turista, a corrosive approach to mass tourism that no longer exists and “to the mental constructions of paradise that the tourist seeks, but can never find”. The second, The Machine of Soledad, is an incredible story told from love letters written in the early twentieth century, found inside a suitcase in Mexico, which now returns to FIMFA, five years after passing through the festival and receiving enthusiastic acclaim from the public.
The festival closes in early September with the return to Lisbon of an artist who is considered to be “the pope of the theater of objects”, Agnès Limbos, and the Belgian company Gare Centrale. Ressacs it is an exercise in humorous criticism of the consumer society and the excesses of capitalism as it follows the odyssey of a bankrupt couple “on the brink of a nervous breakdown” after, being affected by the crisis of the sub prime, drift offshore on a small boat. As Luís Vieira points out, it is yet another show “full of irony and ingenuity by a great master of European theater.”
The Portuguese presence
Long-time partner of FIMFA, André Murraças is one of the most interesting amongst the current creators of Portuguese theater and his creations are no strangers to using the technique of object manipulation. In this Descon’FIMFA, an absolute debut: The Pink Triangle. The play marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, invoking the dark experience in the Nazi concentration camps of homosexual Jews.
Also a longtime accomplice of the Lisbon festival, from Gaia comes the most recent creation of Igor Gandra and his Iron Theater. A Faraway Thing it is the first phase of a film-performance, made in collaboration with the composer Carlos Guedes, where “it seeks to understand a series of peculiar events carried out by a group of emancipated objects.”
The festival’s program also includes returns to the stage of the magnificent The walk of elephants, by Miguel Fragata and Inês Barahona (Formiga Atómica), and by the bewildering “blonds” of Luís Vieira and Rute Ribeiro (A Tarumba) with This is not Gogol’s nose, but it could be… with a touch of Jacques Prévert..
Finally, a special highlight for the street theater of the PIA company, a project based in Pinhal Novo, on the south shore of the Tagus, which opens (finally!) in Lisbon, after, over its 18 years, having traveled with its giants to countless European, Asian and South American countries. In Between Worlds, large puppets take us through, with sensitivity and imagination, an area somewhere between life and death. An unmissable spectacle for the whole family that can be experienced at Castelo de São Jorge.
THE Descon’FIMFA Lx It takes place between August 5th and September 5th, with most shows to be shown at Teatro do Bairro, with the public able to take advantage of the purchase of vouchers for several sessions at a reduced price. Everything for descon’FIMFAwith proper safety measures and, of course, with theater of excellence.
At the first edition of Fair Saturday Lisboa, about 40 locations across the city hosted more than 75 cultural events for all audiences. This massive participation benefited about 45 social projects, selected by the participating organizations.
In 2020 the festival’s organizers want to once again offer a “day with a positive social impact, emphasizing the importance of developing a more just and humane society”. To this end, registrations for the second edition of this charity festival – to be held simultaneously in various cities around the world on November 28 – are already open.
Artists, organizations, institutions and socio-cultural projects can apply on the event’s official website by choosing the cause they want to support. For more information and inquiries, Fair Saturday Lisboa 2020 suggests emailing the address lisboa@fairsaturday.org.
Galeria de Arte Urbana (Urban Art Gallery – GAU), through this project, #DiariosdeArteUrbanachallenged artists to share their creative processes and art pieces they have developed since March, during the period of social isolation.
In this way, their work continues to be seen by everyone, but instead of being seen and appreciated on walls and places of artistic intervention in Lisbon, they can be seen on GAU’s web site and on its official Facebook and Instagrampages. To prove that artistic expression has no limits, the Agenda Cultural de Lisboa has spoken to five artists who tell us, in their own words, how it felt to work at home for someone who normally works on the street and on a different scale.
Vitó Julião
www.vitojuliao.com
Working from home during this period was not that strange for me, as I dedicate some time to develop projects in my studio. However, it allowed me to dedicate more time to personal projects, to reinvent myself and to give a bit of my work to the community. During this period, I made a free coloring book available to keep adults and children busy, and created a Paper Toy, also free, at the request of the Instituto Português do Desporto e Juventude. In addition, I also made several Art Prints, which I have made available in my online store , to counteract the reduction of commissioned works.
Telmo Alcobia
www.telmoalcobia.com
I am part of a group, POGO, which had to cancel group work, as well as the exhibition I was planning. So, since art, in my understanding, is about real life, during my isolation I watched how people reacted to these facts and emotions, interpretations, extrapolations, and conspiracies. I reduced expenses to a minimum and concentrated on what I could control. I drew in a way that was possible, in my tiny house, I drew to materialize these ideas, like a transformative diary of all this, creating a series of works entitled Desenhos de Quarentena (Quarantine Drawings), based on albums and songs that kept me company during this season.
Tamara Alves
www.tamaraalves.com
Ozearv
www.instagram.com/ozearv
UtOPiA
www.utopia-arts.com
In the quarantine nothing changed my professional routine, since I do a lot of work in the studio for several collectors at mundo.Na. In fact, I had far more orders during this period. I realized that people, as they could not leave their homes, felt the need to obtain art works as an investment and for pleasure. In fact, I had a lot of requests that I could not fulfill. In other words, I ended up painting twice more than usual, sending out more than 50 canvases to different countries in Europe and the rest of the world. In addition, all shipments were safe and fast.
The collaboration resulted from the pandemic crisis and consists of sharing events online between the Argentine and Portuguese capitals. The initiative was launched the Buenos Aires City Council, whose official sitewill create an international content sharing network for the Culture at Homesection.
Starting in June, the Lisboa Agenda Cultural website will host this collaboration between the two city councils by sharing the content made available online by the city of Buenos Aires.
In January, the Coliseu will host eight shows of Madonna and Campo Pequeno will be the stage for the concerts of James Arthur and Keane. Next month, Devendra Banhart will perform twice at Capitólio and Aula Magna will welcome the Tindersticks..
In March, the Americans Cock Robin will perform at the Coliseu for a nostalgic audience. April will bring Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, and Bon Iver to the Altice Arena. And May will be a month of great shows: the British Michael Kiwanuka will perform at Campo Pequeno, the German band Alphaville will be at the Coliseu, and Harry Styles will be at Altice Arena.
In June, it will be the time to see James Blunt again at Campo Pequeno. And in July, choosing promises to be difficult: Altice Arena welcomes Kiss, Aerosmith, and Lenny Kravitz. In November, the phenomenon André Rieu will return to Altice Arena.
Outside Lisbon, more specifically, at Passeio Marítimo de Algés, and before the arrival of NOS Alive which stars Kendrick Lamar,,Taylor Swift,, Billie Eilish, and Faith No More, May 20 is the starting date of the second phase of the European tour of the Not In This Lifetime Tour of Guns N’ Roses..
On the day that marks the 5th anniversary of Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen’s death, one of the most beautiful panoramic viewpoints in Lisbon was named after her. A monument was erected at the location, a bust sculpture of Sophia, a replica of the original in bronze, carved in the 50s by António Duarte (1912-1998). Sophia very rarely talked about Lisbon in her poetry. Having an appreciation to great natural spaces – the sea, the mountains and the plains – she sometimes expressed her dislike for the life “enclosed” between the “walls of the houses and buildings” of the city. As in the rightly titled poem: “City”:
(…)
“Knowing that you take my life in you ,
And that you drag through the shadows of the walls,
My soul that was promised,
To the white waves and the green forests.“
On the monument, a plaque evokes one of those rare poems, titled “Lisbon”, which opens her book “Navigations”. In 1977, Sophia was invited to take part in the celebration of Camões Day in Macau. While flying over the East for the first time, she thought of the men who had arrived there 500 years before, not knowing what we know today.
“Theynavigated without the map theymade.”
The trip to Macao triggered a reflection on what it would have been like for Portuguese sailors to reach the brave new world: all the colors being revealed, the smells, sounds – all the amazement and the vertigo of finding that distant and fascinating reality.
Lisbon thus emerges as the symbolic starting point of the Age of Exploration, the familiar place that was left behind for the uncertainty of the new world. Lisbon was a great path to the sea.
(…)
“As the wide sea to the west expands
Lisbon oscillates like a big boat“
In the center of the garden, a bronze figurative statue by an unknown author, entitled “Mother and Son”, evokes the maternal relationship. Possibly influenced by “Flora” by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, a depiction of the goddess of flowers and spring. This statue with its winged figures suggests a Hellenistic representation related to Greek culture and ancient Greek mythology. It is therefore the ideal place to remember Sophia’s passionate relationship with Greece.
The first contact with the Greek civilization came when a very young Sophia discovered Homer. She was immediately dazzled by Greek things, by the Odyssey in particular, and immediately developed a strong attraction for the Greek deities. In her first books, “Day of the Sea” (1947) and “CoraI” (1950), she shows her fascination with Dionysus and Apollo, Greek gods representing the impulses of nature.
Sophia already loved Greece, and held a fascination for its sea, its islands, its light and colors. And in the 60s, she made contact with them physically. She first visited Greece in 1963 with Agustina Bessa Luís. Since then, whenever she could, she would return. She returned with friends, with her husband, with her children, and with her grandchildren, perhaps in search of “a divine and multiple conscience,” evoked in one of her “first Greek poems”: “Evohé Bakkhos.”.
On November 27, 1946, Sophia married Francisco Sousa Tavares, in Porto. In 1951, Sophia, her husband, and their three children, moved to Lisbon and started living at number 57, 1st floor, in Travessa das Mónicas. Francisco ran for sub-inspector of labor at the Ministry of Corporations.
Once she was at home, she wrote a postcard to her mother:
“I am in a state of grace! I arrived today. I spent this week opening and unwrapping the things you sent me. They are so beautiful. They match the place so well. I have everything that I need! The house is beautiful! (…)”
In the poem “The Houses”,she writes:
“There is always a fantastic god in the houses
Where I live, and around my steps
I feel the great angels whose wings
contain all the wind of spaces.“
At Sophia’s house, there were always guests. Everything was a topic of discussion. Freedom was lived before it existed. Salazar starts to hear about Francisco Sousa Tavares, when his activism in the monarchical movement became more active.
In 1958, both gave their support to Humberto Delgado’s campaign, which results in the dismissal of Francisco Sousa Tavares from the civil service.
It is in the 1960s that the political struggle and indignation against the dictatorial regime is revealed in Sophia’s poetry. In the “Sixth Book” the most direct poems of criticism and opposition to the regime are present, one of them is: “Old vulture”, obviously addressed to Salazar:
“The old vulture is wise and smooths its feathers,
Rot pleases him and his speeches
have the gift of making souls smaller. “
This book led the Portuguese Writers Society to award Sophia the Poetry Grand Prix.
In the early 70’s, she would dedicate beautiful poems to Che Guevara and Catarina Eufémia (comparing the peasant girl from Alentejo to Antigone due to their search for justice). In the extraordinary poem titled “Camões and Tença”, she establishes a painful parallel between 16th century Portugal, which did not recognize its greatest poet, and the contemporary country:
(…)
“This country kills you slowly ;
The country you called and you don’t answer;
The country you name and are not born .”
(…)
Next to the Panteão dos Bragança, we evoke Sophia’s aristocratic descent and relationship with her surroundings.
On the maternal side, her great-grandfather was Henry Burnay, of Belgian descent, and the 1st Earl of Burnay, a title granted by King Louis I. Her grandfather was Tomaz de Mello Breyner, the 4th Earl of Mafra, was appointed Royal Chamber Physician by King Carlos I. It is to him, who taught her how to memorize poems by Camões and Antero, that Sophia owes her true initiation into poetry.
Sophia was born in Porto, Rua António Cardoso. Very close, in Campo Alegre, her paternal grandparents’ house was a farm with a huge romantic garden with several greenhouses of exotic plants, numerous fruit trees and lakes. A “fabulous territory” where enchanted worlds easily emerged, is the origin of the stories that Sophia would write for children.
In 1962, when she published “Exemplary Tales”, some of these narratives were understood as fierce criticisms of the world to which Sophia belonged by birth and class. The tale “Monica’s Portrait” satirizes the National Women’s Movements, which constituted the support structure of Salazar’s regime. Shocked, some friends of Sophia even questioned her about this text: “How could you, even more since it is a world you know from the inside?” Sophia replied, “This world you speak of, which I know from the inside, has no inside, only outside.”
“When I die I will return to search for
the moments I didn’t live by the sea“
The wonderful view over the Tagus pouring out into the ocean is the starting point for the evocation of the sea as a convergence with Sophia’s poetry.
The first sea that emerged in Sophia’s life was the Atlantic. The sea of Granja beach, where Sophia spent an enchanting summer in a rather small house situated on the dunes right above the sea. She would go straight to the beach, and spend hours bathing in the natural pools that, at low tide, surfaced on the south side of the beach. Sophia wrote numerous poems in Granja:
“White house on the huge seafront,
With your garden of sand and sea flowers,
And your intact silence in which you sleep,
The miracle of things that were mine.“
As she wrote in Greece after discovering the intense blue of the sea and in the Algarve, on Dona Ana beach where the similarities with Greece were evident.
“This is the dawn I expected
All day a clean start,
Where we emerge from night and silence,
And free we inhabit the substance of time.”
In this poem, Sophia talks about the Carnation Revolution of April 25th, 1974, “The whole and clean initial day.” A few days later, on May 1st, thousands of protesters took to the streets. In a meeting at the Writers’ Association to prepare the demonstration and phrases for the parade, Sophia suggested “Poetry is on the street.” Maria Helena Vieira da Silva immortalized that phrase in a poster she painted.
Sophia was a deputy for the Socialist Party in the Constituent Assembly and bequeathed us her most beautiful definition of socialism: “Socialism must be an Aristocracy for All,” a way for everyone to reach the same realms that only the aristocrats and the privileged accessed since it was the environment in which they were born.
Sophia died in Lisbon on July 2, 2004. She was moved to Panteão Nacional on the 10th anniversary of her death. She wrote in the poem “I Will Return”:
“I will return to the poem as the homeland to the house ,
Like the old childhood I lost out of carelessness
To obstinately seek the substance of everything
And scream with passion under a thousand lights.“
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