FEDERICA CUCCIA

Project, organization, research, production by: Marta Jardim, Federica Cuccia & Zé Bernardino

Directed by: Federica Cuccia

With: Marta Jardim & Zé Bernardino

From the play: Los que hablan, by Pablo Rosal

Translation: Zé Bernardino
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Supported by: Creative Europe – Culture Moves Europe · Elba del Vicino · Goethe Institut (Lisboa)

THE SHOW IS OPEN FOR BOOKING

SPACE AND TECHNICAL REQUIREMENT

The performance space is fully adaptable: it can be set up on stages, multipurpose spaces, or outdoor areas. In the respect of environment, we reduce at minImum our impact: staging is composed by two chairs, daylight or a basic lighting grid or two mobile led projectors, total darkness is not necessary. Depending on space, optional: general voice amplification. No music, no effects.

TEAM

The work team is composed of two female and one male creators, performers and interdisciplinary researchers: Federica Cuccia (Palermo, Italy/Madrid – Spain), Marta Jardim (Portalegre/Portugal) and Zé Bernardino (Lisboa/Portugal). All the members of the company originally come from peripheral places and actively supported social and environmental issues and marginal collectives throughout their artistic activity. The collective works from an artistic and philosophical standpoint centered on the performative act as an act of imagination that transforms the performance space, the audience and the social sphere. We bring together our tools, skills and vocations in writing, acting, contemporary clowning, dance, music and multimedia languages, creating a common hybrid language.

Through performance, we seek to build with the audience a moment of attention, encounter, understanding and utopia.

STAGING NOTE

Two characters meet to talk in an empty space. Two chairs. The stage can be in any place, any time. Just, right now, it’s here.

How to start a conversation? From this search they fall into a void. From the void into which we  as an audience fall with them, from the fracture, is born a cosmogony of dialogues that are embodied in new possible characters, are interrupted, alternate with new voids and cyclically rise again.

The staging of the performance “Those Who Speak” emerges as a process of listening. As creators, we chose to investigate the significance of dialogue and listening as fundamental tools for building a sense of community and an attention to the environment. We explore and create new aesthetic possibilities between the body and the spoken word, non-verbal, gesture and dance.

The text proposes an encounter with emptiness. We witness the celebration of a feast of doubt, with all the possibilities of misunderstanding, suspension and interruption. The encounter between different languages amplifies this fracture by its very nature: tumbles and inter-linguistic games allow us to delve deeply in the rarefied and undefined terrain suggested by the author: to move away from recognizable identity affirmations and approach a primitive, pre-verbal, sensitive mutual understanding between the performers and the audience. There is a void, an abyss that is created when arguments collapse. And it is from that abyss that new worlds can be built. It is from the void, from this beautiful thing of not knowing, from a body that searches that a community can be created. We propose to the audience a time to endure this void, this current of air that is created when we renounce occupying physical and sound space: we step aside, we make room for the necessary silence and the sufficient amplitude to be attentive, united with the voice of the others. Step aside, as humans, as citizens, to create the chance of a more respectful future.

At a time when we all have the possibility to express ourselves but, at the same time, feel that we have no voice, we try to to rediscover how to recover communication and return the lost voice to all those who feel unheard. In a world confused by an excess of information, we trust in the possibility of creating a new, different dialogue, of creating bridges of language between the spoken word and emotional movement, a new grammar of understanding.