WILD – SELVAGEM / ALMADA FESTIVAL
Francesco Chiaro in Persinsala 12 Julho 2022 | notícia online
THE ETHNOLOGY OF US
From the dry lands of central Sardinia to the northern desolate mountains of Trás-os-Montes, the 39th edition of the Almada Festival brings to Portugal the “cacodemonia” of transnational pagan rituals, shining a crepuscular light onto the latent animality we strive so hard to get rid of, all the while letting it define our every, Wild, move.
Back in 1984, the Almada Festival was just a simple, am-dram “Festa de Teatro” located in the once heavily industrialised -and now under gentrification- namesake city of Almada, mainly presenting small yet prominent local theatre companies. Thirty-eight years later, the Festival has now become a landmark in the Portuguese summer thespian scene, with a strong inclination towards both international horizons and Lusitanian productions. For its 39th edition, the current artistic director Rodrigo Francisco cherry-picked 20 plays bridging nine countries and two continents, calling out to artists such as Robert Wilson, Thomas Ostermeir and Wim Vandekeybus in order to offer an open and self-aware outlook on the contemporary state of performing arts.
It is in this context that on the fifth and sixth day of festival, the Municipal Theatre Joaquim Benite hosted a rather peculiar play by Portuguese film and theatre director Marco Martins, called Selvagem (Wild). Walking the fine line between fiction and facts, Martins, together with the Lisbon-based transdisciplinary artist Patrícia Portela, follows an oneiric path towards the re-discovery and re-definition of the ancestral power of masks, here linked to the rural and harsh reality of backcountry Sardinia and Portugal. The choice of these two geographically distant but culturally close worlds -not at all arbitrary- draws fully from a long and scrupulous ethnologic study that the director himself conducted around the ritualistic use of these guises in “pagan” cults arising from both natural occurrences (solstices and equinoxes) and the human need for discernment.
Used to work with non-professional thespians, Martins selected a motley crew of shepherds, farmers and horse breeders from Orotelli, Ottana and Ula Tirso (central Sardinia), as well as from Baçal and Podence (Trás-os-Montes area of northern Portugal), two hinterland realities in which «progress and technique have yet to become the strongest deities around», thus leaving space for a non-secularised society in which “wild” practices still take place and men still “impersonate” Bears, Goats, Devils or quasi Fates. Far from being a sterile show of academic stiffness, however, Selvagem is mostly a reflection on identity and its «multiplications and intersections», hence offering both the scientific base and the mythopoetic tension of masks’ identity-producing powers and possibilities.
Detached from the “mechanization” of animals and plants imposed by capitalism, where these living beings become «products capable of being shaped and transformed according to the consumption needs», the protagonists of the play reminisce on their daily toils and past sufferings before donning their man-made escape routes and exploding in a bestial cathartic release that is repeated over and over again, as if stuck in a never-ending representation of their cyclical and ancestrally-rhythmed lives. The struggle between rationality and mythical thought is real, and Marco Martins makes a wonderful work of showcasing it not only verbally, but also visually and acoustically.
Indeed, something is unhinged in Fernando Brízio’s set design: the sky, a hanging block of reinforced concrete, is a host for shrivelled trees and abrupt dustfalls that cover the hand-ploughed soil, along with its barren inhabitants, who are shook by Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Castor et Pollux arias (kindly offered by Miguel Abras), thus bridging Ancient Greece, masks and pastoralism with the “divine” prowess of the horse-breeding and boxing Dioscuri twins. In this polyphony of cross-references and superimpositions, lines get blurred and categories pour into one another, overturning the “unnatural” order of Men’s ontologies and leaving behind a Wild world in which the «inherent complexities» of identities -were not embraced- are merely musealised before foundering into the inextinguishable Mystery of our perceived reality.
The show was played at
Municipal Theatre Joaquim Benite
Av. Prof. Egas Moniz – Almada (Lisbon)
Saturday 09 and Sunday 10 2022
21:30 and 16:00
the Festival Almada presents
Wild – Selvagem
by Marco Martins
from an original idea of Renzo Barsotti
text by Marco Martins and Patrícia Portela
director Marco Martins
performed by Luís Meneses, Marco Fois, Marco Zedde, Maurizio Masones, Rafael Costa, Riccardo Spanu and Rubens Ortu
sound design Miguel Abras
set design Fernando Brízio
other masks Charles Fréger
light design Nuno Meira
sound editing and operation Sérgio Milhano
movements Vânia Rovisco
set up ArtWorks
co-produced by Culturgest, Teatro Municipal do Porto, Teatro Municipal de Bragança, Rota Clandestina, Teatro di Sardegna