Around 500 typical and atypical figures will parade in the square imagined by Olga Roriz for a new choreography that opens on April 29, in Loulé, and will tour 13 cities in the country.
The characters are from different professions or everyday figures, such as the street sweeper, the baker, the madman, the girlfriend, the sportsman, the beauties, the secret agent, the homeless man, who enter into a role expanded by the creativity of the choreographer based on a play by Austrian playwright Peter Handke, from 1992.
“The time when we didn’t know anything about each other”, the original piece, was composed of 450 characters walking in a square transformed into a city, and that Olga Roriz saw in Portugal.
“I had seen this piece many years ago at a festival at the Dona Maria National Theater, and I remember feeling weird,” the choreographer recalled in an interview with the Lusa agency, noting that, at that time, she already liked the playwright. Peter Handke.
Then, the piece came to mind “with the force of this greatness, hundreds of characters”, adapted to the language of dance that is its nature, and now it is preparing to premiere on April 29, World Dance Day, in Cinema-theater. Louletano, in Loulé, in the Algarve.
Olga Roriz decided to move on to creation with the aim of placing the work in the modernity of a world that has changed since the 1990s: “The work has the writer’s vision of what was happening in front of him. When he wrote it, he was observing normal life in a “town square” in Italy.
“The trigger for the work was an afternoon several years ago. He had spent the whole day in a small square in Muggia, near Trieste. I sat on the terrace of a cafe and watched life go by. Every little thing became meaningful (without being symbolic). The smallest procedures seemed significant in the world,” wrote Peter Handke in 1992.
After 31 years, Olga Roriz reveals what has changed in the world, what happens this Saturday in that square, based on the confirmation that “what we know about others and about ourselves is an increasingly dark well, and it is urgent to open channels ”. to transformation, to the creation of utopia”.
“Obviously that is not our plaza. We are no longer going to hold meetings, socialize or do business in the square, which is now a place of passage”, observed the choreographer, although he added that the text “is totally timeless”.
With contemporaneity in mind, Olga Roriz applied for the copyright of the work, convinced that dance would provide “more openness to other readings than theater”.
“Being able to go beyond the imagination of words” enthused the author of works such as “The Rite of Spring”, “Before the Elephants Kill”, “Syndrome” and “Six Months Later”.
In “The hour when we knew nothing of each other”, born in the world of dance, “there are no words, no dialogue, but a giving body to the imagination”, Olga Roriz stressed to Lusa, referring that, when They gave him the copyright to make these adaptations, he only demanded that the structure, setting and content of the piece be respected.
Peter Handke – who received the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature – “gives freedom to those who are going to stage, to give their vision of the world, which can be the present moment, the past or projected into the future”, reiterated the creator.
Another aspect of the text that interested him was the way it gives “the opportunity to open the imagination to the creation of archetypes, or heroes of each one”.
“In the middle of the work, Handke begins to dream: he says that the biblical figure of Moses can exist in every corner, and that is his archetype,” Roriz said, adding that he personally chose the Minotaur, a creature of Greek origin. mythology, represented by a being with the head of a bull and the body of a man who lives trapped in a labyrinth on the island of Crete, Greece.
The creator says that she felt “great pleasure” in presenting contemporary characters that do not exist in the work, namely a gay parade, a demonstration, various types of brides, with a non-traditional image, and other figures whose identification is left to the public. discretion. viewer viewer imagination.
The show’s 500 or so characters, who run on and off the stage intensely and some very quickly, are played by a cast of just 28 people.
Seven are professional dancers –from the Olga Roriz Company and other guests, such as Gaya de Medeiros, Marta Jardim and Dinis Santos–, 13 are young dance students, and the rest were chosen in a ‘call’ open to the community for this show. , and that will be repeated in each city where the work is on tour.
Olga Roriz felt the need to open the show to the community, after having had similar experiences in works such as “Insónia”, to which she invited a dozen students from the National Dance Conservatory, and “Corpo em Cadeia”, with detainees from the Lino prison.
“I wanted to open the company outside of its own cast, to the community, and give other people the opportunity to feel, experience, listen and be with me and with the dancers,” he commented, referring, on the other hand, to the fact that the your company’s capacity does not support a larger team.
The 500 characters are born from a diverse wardrobe with more than 300 costumes and dozens of accessories from the Olga Roriz Company, the result of an accumulation of many other choreographies from 28 years of artistic activity, as well as donations.
“Throughout the work there are indications: if it is a man, a woman, what character. It was the first time that he did a job from start to finish with a lot of follow-up. I was guided, and it was very interesting. I wanted to do something like this again, ”she said, enthused about a“ very special drama, with an incredible dimension, which required a great effort from the company to respond to it ”.
The creator —with a career as a performer and choreographer that went through the Gulbenkian Ballet— will present the new work in 13 cities in the country in two years, always opening the show to the participation, in the cast, of a group of interested people.
“Selecting people and rehearsing them is very complex because they play many characters throughout the play,” he noted, noting that the cast is between 18 and 70 years old.
Questioned by Lusa about the need to deepen this opening to the community, Olga Roriz considers that when non-professional dancers participate in the shows, there is also an opening to new audiences.
“Family, friends, neighbors come to see the shows, which is very good to publicize the dance. This experience can be enriching for both parties ”, assesses the choreographer, born in 1955, in Viana do Castelo, and whose company has a repertoire of more than 30 pieces of her own.
“The time when we knew nothing about each other” will be presented this year, after its premiere, on May 12, 13, 14, 19, 20 and 21, at the São Luiz Municipal Theater, in Lisbon, on May 27 May at the Portalegre Center for Arts and Shows, on June 17 at the Bragança Municipal Theater, on October 14 at the Sá de Miranda Municipal Theater in Viana do Castelo, on October 27 at the Art Center of Ovar, on November 3, at the Casa das Artes — Vila Nova de Famalicão, and, on November 25, at the Teatro Aveirense, in Aveiro.
Olga Roriz was distinguished with the insignia of the Order of the Infante D. Henrique (2004), the Grand Prize of the Portuguese Society of Authors (2008), the Latinidad Award (2012) and the Honoris Causa doctorate for distinction in the Arts for the University of Aveiro (2017), among other distinctions.
Source: Observadora
