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ODISSEIA (ou o desaparecimento do público)THE ODYSSEY (or the disappearance of the audience)

A creation by Cia. Hiato – 2018 São Paulo (BR)

Inspired by Homer’s The Odyssey

Directed by Leonardo MoreiraWritten by Aura Cunha Aline Filócomo Fernanda Stefanski Leonardo Moreira

Luciana Paes Maria Amélia Farah Paula Picarelli Thiago Amaral

Cast Aline Filócomo Aura Cunha Fernanda Stefanski Luciana Paes Maria Amélia FarahPaula Picarelli Thiago Amaral

Co-Direction Luciana Paes Assistant Director Aura Cunha Dramaturgy Mariana Delfini Set & Lighting Design Marisa Bentivegna Costume Design Chris Aizner

Sound and Music by Miguel Caldas Audiovisual Director and Graphic Design Laerte Késsimos Assistant Set Design & Video Operator Cezar Renzi

Press (BR) Pombo Correio Assessoria de Imprensa Photos by Ligia JardimProduction Direction Aura Cunha Production Management Yumi Ogino

International Promotion Ligne Directe Judith Martin | Jonathan Offereins

Producers Cia. Hiato and Elephante Produções Artísticas

Co-producers Fomento ao Teatro – Prefeitura Municipal de São Paulo ProAC – Governo do Estado de São Paulo

Onassis Cultural Centre - AthensGrand Theatre Groningen

Sesc São Paulo (in progress)

Place of Production São Paulo/Brazil – Groningen / Netherlands

Wolrd Premiere May 2018 – Onassis Cultural centre / Athens/ Greece

Duration 270 minutes (including 2 intermission with 20 min)

Language Portuguese and English (with subtitles in english and/or a local language)




2018 creation and touring schedule (in progress)

2018 - 15th and 16th of MayWorld Premiere | Fast Forward Festival, Athens (GR)

2018 June-JulySeason at SESC, São Paulo (BR)

Season of repertoire 2 month and 5 shows to celebrate 10 years of Cia. Hiato

CACHORRO MORTO (Dad dog)FICAO (Fiction)02 FICOES (2 Fictions)O JARDIM (The Garden)ESCURO (Darkness)

2018 November / December Sesc São Paulo (BR)

Contacts

Cia Hiato Artistic direction - Leonardo Moreira

[email protected] production - Aura Cunha

[email protected]

International production and distributionLigne Directe Judith Martin & Jonathan Offereins

[email protected]




“In the old daysthe myths were the stories we used to explain ourselves.But how can we explain the way we hate ourselves,the things we’ve made ourselves into,the way we break ourselves in two,the way we overcomplicate ourselves?

But we are still mythical.We are still permanently trapped somewhere between the heroic and the pitiful.We are still godly;that’s what makes us so monstrous.But it feels like we’ve forgotten we’re much more than the sum of allthe things that belong to us.

(...)

There’s always been heroesand there’s always been villainsand the stakes may have changedbut really there’s no difference.There’s always been greed and heartbreak and ambitionand bravery and love and trespass and contrition – we’re the same beings that began, still livingin all of our fury and foulness and friction,everyday odysseys, dreams and decisions...

The stories are there if you listen.The stories are here,the stories are youand your fearand your hopeis as oldas the language of smoke,the language of blood,the language oflanguishing love.The Gods are all here.Because the gods are in us.”

Kate Tempest




Synopsys

Greek culture gave birth to The Odyssey, the story that “founded” nostalgia: Odysseus, the storyteller of his own adventures and flaws, has fought for ten years in Trojan War against his will. Trying to go back home, he was made hostage by the Sea for a decade more. In 2018, Cia. Hiato also completes a decade as a theater collective in São Paulo, Brazil. “The Odys-sey” (or the disappearance of the audience), to be premiered on May 2018, is their seventh play, based on Homer’s narrative and associated with personal experiences of the actors (following and subverting the research developed by the group so far). It is the arrival point of a long journey back; a desire of homecoming; a simple and human tale told through a complex structure; but mainly it is an attempt to think of ourselves as ancient fragments of a future archeology.

Homer’s poem is about a complicated man. That man plots his return home, slaughters the suitors vying to marry his wife, and reestablishes himself as the head of his household. However, the poem’s protagonist Odysseus is absent in the play. The audience is the one who takes this absent role. So the audience is a foreign guest listening to contem-porary stories, is a migrant. But the audience might also be a political and military leader, a strategist, a poet, a loving husband and father, an adulterer, a homeless person, an athlete, a disabled cripple, a soldier with a traumatic past, a pirate, a thief and liar, a fugitive, a colonial invader, a home owner, a sailor, a construction worker, a mass murderer, or a war hero.

Cia. Hiato’s The Odyssey is primarily about other people. The group divided the poem in seven investigations that correspond to a certain character in the Odyssey: Telemachus, his abandoned son; Penelope, his waiting wife; the nymph Calypso, who offered him her immortality and endless love; the witch Circe, who guided him until the world of the dead; Odysseus’s many shipmates who died before they could make it home; the countless slaves in Odysseus’s house, many of whom are never named; the goddess Athena, who architected a war on his behalf. Different characters and actors tell their own inset and personal stories – some true, some false, dreams, memories and doubts. Similar to the poem, the play weaves and unweaves a multilayered narrative that is both simple and artful in its patterning and composition. Immersing ourselves in the stories we tell may help us reconsider both the origins of Western literature and our infinitely complex contem-porary world – the plight of a people who have forgotten their myths and must remember that all we have here is all that we’ve always had. We are still mythical.

Grasping the small, tragi-comical details of modern day life intertwined with the Greek Ancient way of dealing with the human condition the experience of Cia Hiato’s The Odyssey is an intimate sharing between actors and audience of powerful feelings as love, sadness and anger. A mix between an interactive experiment and a theatrical play. No boundaries between ordinary life and mythology. Actors and audience build together a play that tries to answer: what are the stories we tell? Why do we tell them? Who are you when our eyes turn to you? Who will we see if we look at it? How many absences are we able to live with? What ghosts are with us? What ideas or utopias have disappeared from your life? What wars do we survive? Where is it impossible to return?




Prologue - Xenia

The Odyssey’s concerns – with loyalty, families, migrants, consumerism, colonialism, violence, war, poverty, identity, rhetoric and love – are in many ways deeply familiar. The poem is con-cerned, above all, with the duties and dangers involved in welcoming foreigners into one’s home: a very contemporary subject. The Odyssey suggests that we should offer hospitability to any “kind of visitor, even uninvited guests, strangers, and homeless beggars. Those who traveled to an unfamiliar land used the norms and expectations of xenia to form bonds with people who might otherwise have treated them as too ragged and dirty to deserve a welcome, or as too dangerous to accept into their home. Conversely, the promotion of Greek xenia as a quasi-universal and quasi-ethical concept can be used as imaginative justification for robbing, killing, enslaving, or colonizing those who are reluctant to welcome group of possible bandits or pirates into their home. The Odyssey shows us both sides of this complex concept, which hovers in an uneasy space between ethics and etiquette.”¹

In Cia. Hiato’s Odyssey, the audience is received by the actors as guests, friends, enemies and foreigners. After they eat, drink and sing they can listen to the story the actors will tell. This introduction wants to enable contemporary audience to welcome and host this foreign poem, with all the right degrees of warmth, curiosity, openness and suspicion.

“There is a stranger outside your house. He is old, ragged, and dirty. He is tired. He has been wandering homeless, for a long time, perhaps many years. Invite him inside. You do not know his name. He may be a thief. He may be a murderer. He may be a god. He may remind you of your husband, your father, or yourself. Do not ask questions. Wait. Let him sit on a comfortable chair and warm himself beside your fire. Bring him some food, the best you have, and a cup of wine. Let him eat and drink until he is satisfied. Be patient. When he is finished, he will tell his story. Listen carefully. It may not be as you expect.”

¹ Emily Wilson.




Act I Telemachus or the disappeared father.

How many Odysseys does The Odyssey contain? The Telemachia at the beginning of the poem is really the search for a story that does not exist, the story that will become The Odyssey. Simi-lar to the Greek poem, the dramaturgy starts with Telemachus looking for his father Odysseus. Snatching the edges between individual stories and collective responsibility, we see on stage the group’s producer Aura Cunha reuniting the audience (as Telemachus reunites the City’s As-sembly) to tell herself a personal story about a “very complicated man”: her disappeared father.

In the beginning of the Odyssey we do not find Odysseus. Instead, we listen to his son, Telema-chus - the one who wants to find his disappeared father. Aura’s father has left the family during her early adolescence and never returned as well – his body was discovered dead years later (buried as an indigent). In the same way that Odysseus’ son, Aura only knows him from what’s said about him. Since then, she’s been looking for him and now shares with the audience a very private letter.

In this introduction, the audience gets to know what kind of travel this will be: sometimes emo-tional and familiar, sometimes political and social, but mostly very intimate.




Calypso or the disappearance of love

Of the ten years of exile, Odysseus spent seven of them hostage and lover in the island of the goddess Calypso, who, in love with him, would not let him leave her island. Odysseus lived in Calypso’s cave “an easy life”. However, between the delights of the foreigner’s life and the risk of returning home, he chose the return. To the exploration of the unknown (the adventure), he preferred the apotheosis of the unknown (return). Homer glorified nostalgia with a laurel wreath and established a moral hierarchy between sentiments. Calypso loved Odysseus, shared her bed with him longer than Penelope, his wife. However, Penelope’s pain is exalted and Calypso’s crying is ignored.

Using material recorded during her virtual relationship with a foreigner (a Chilean artist) and interactive procedures with audience, Luciana Paes proposes a scenic experiment that deals with the disappearance of affection.

This chant has been developed with Grand Theatre support, in Groningen (Netherlands). Fol-lowing, you can find a review of the working in process presented there:https://www.theaterkrant.nl/recensie/fiction-luciana/cia-hiato/



https://www.theaterkrant.nl/recensie/fiction-luciana/cia-hiato/


Act II

Circe or the disappearance of eroticism

Some theorists claim that female eroticism is as important than the male one, if not more, in the Odyssey. “Women in the poem are very fascinating because their portraits tend to over-lap and resonate.” Circe, the sorceress, the witch, resembles Helena (“the woman who is the cause of a war”) in her capacity for seduction and drug dealing. The exploration of the sexual roles of man and woman are present in every corner. We know The Odyssey is hardly a femi-nist text, but Maria Amelia Farah’s approach to it is far incisive, carving out a feminine form that confounds the structure of the masculine quest narrative. Initially, Circe appears as the earthly feminine and Odysseus as the conquering hero, at odds in an unambiguous conflict. However, as the interaction with the audience goes on and Circe surrenders to sexual union, Maria Amelia uses her personal experience to implicate Circe in the violent the history of male conquest. She does not propose solutions or ignore the centuries of misogyny that cloud the Circe myth. Instead she writes a Circe who exists in a world that favors the conquerors, whose lust for Odysseus implicates her in a system that has left her mired in centuries of mud.

Athena or the disappearance of the war

Another attractive facet of the epic poem is the persuasive portrait it draws of a world beyond the human. The Odyssey begins with an Assembly (format that presupposes dialogue as well as this play) and the adventures of Odysseus lead the gods to a new understanding of their limitations. In this sense, it is also a work on the responsibility of the collective about human acts and their relation to divinity - fragile, flawed and incomplete.

From her traumatic experience within a religious sect, actress Paula Picarelli investigates altered states of consciousness as a failed attempt to reach the divine and how politics and religion organize themselves in a dangerous way. Framed as a contemporary lecture about the war, Paula juxtaposes a divine and an ordinary situation. Or else, how civilization and hatred are profoundly related. It’s by no mere chance that the first word of Homer’s Iliad is “Cholera.”




Penelope or an unending return

Aline Filócomo receives us in Ithaca. through Penelope’s odyssey. She says: “This is the worst place to be in the Odyssey. Here we only wait and say good-bye.”

A lot has been said about the shroud of Penelope while she waits for Odysseus to return: Penelope is making time come back when she undoes every night what she previously wove. Penelope is also the mother who protects her son and defends her kingdom, is declared “wid-ow” of an alive husband (very similar situation for those women who can’t bury her beloved ones after a war, by the absence of a body), needs to deal and control her suitors, is the one who tests and doubts Odysseus’ identity.

Aline uses Penelope mythology (and the approach given to her by James Joyce) to investi-gate interactive procedures with the audience. She and the audience deal with Penelope as a frustrating character – it’s not entirely clear why she doesn’t simply send the suitors away or marry one of them, and the poem offers limited access to her thoughts and feelings. The opacity of Penelope is one of the aspects of the poem she wants to trouble audience and make them uncomfortable related to modern gender stereotypes. How Aline is/talks about Penelope gives a clear sense of what the structures of thought and the structures of society are that have enabled to read The Odyssey as a defense of a male dominant society, a defense of its own hero and his triumph over everybody else, but it also seems to provide these avenues for realizing what’s so horrible about this narrative, what’s missing about this narrative.




Act III

Odysseus or the disappeared one

How to survive after a war? Motivated by a recent personal experience of violence (that ended with the death of a close friend), the actor Thiago Amaral approaches the forms of survival of Odysseus as soon as he arrives home. The only man in the cast, Thiago proposes a rehearsal to the audience: they will dance together the journey lived by Odysseus (and by themselves). Using his experience with collective dances and performative acts, Thiago guides the audience to the stage in a collective act that questions how to act in public is a humanely reveling and transformative experience. We must not forget that Odysseus’ jour-ney is not a voyage out but a return journey. So we need to ask ourselves for a moment, just what kind of future are we facing? In fact, the future that Odysseus is looking to is also in reality his past.




No one

On his return, Odysseus confronts a Cyclops and sets up a plan which is the absolute nega-tion of heroism: he calls himself No one, the opposite of the hero who, in moments of fierce fighting, like to proudly yells his name; as soon as he arrives in his native land, Odysseus does not recognize where he is and, dressed as a beggar, is invisible to all those who surround him; when he arrives at the court of the Phaecians, Odysseus listens to a blind bard just like Hom-er who is singing the adventures of Odysseus and the hero bursts into tears and decides to start narrating himself his story; he visits the Hades to interrogate Tiresias, and Tiresias tells him the rest of his story. Fernanda Stefanski ends the Odyssey with a banquet between actors and the audience that, now, occupy the stage together. Their personal views of the Odyssey are shared and reveal the morals of its time and place, and invites us to consider how different they are from our own, and how similar. To tell a story that only you can tell – that’s what’s about.

The Odyssey (or the disappearance of the audience) wants to examine how we group to-gether (and especially in a social space that is theater), how we organize and care for the bodies that share with us the same space or those that surround us. In other words, the audience has disappeared: to see and be seen, to hear and be heard, to be an audience or an actor. There are no boundaries between any of those pairs.




Cia. Hiato is

Aline Filócomo | Aura Cunha | Fernanda Stefanski | Leonardo Moreira | Luciana PaesMaria Amélia Farah | Marisa Bentivegna | Paula Picarelli | Thiago Amaral | Yumi Ogino

A Brazilian collective on an Odyssey - 10 Years of Creation

Cia Hiato, the group founded by the director and playwright Leonardo Moreira, is considered one of the most promising and talented theatre collectives in Brazil. Moreira gathered a group of actors with whom he started working from the hiatus between fiction and reality. Over the years they created a body of work winning several prices in Brazil.

Cachorro Morto (2008), was nominated for two FEMSA Awards (Best Play and Best Sce-nography). Escuro (2009) received three Shell Awards in 2011 – Best Playwright, Best Sce-nography and Best Costume. In 2012, O Jardim, his third work, was nominated for 19 of Brazil’s leading awards and won a.o. the Shell Award 2012 – Best Playwright. O Jardim was named the best play of recent years by several critics. International touring followed with a Dutch touring festival curated by Frie Leysen and presentations at Under the Radar, New York; Onassis Centre, Athens; HAU, Berlin; Mousonturm, Frankfurt; Hellerau, Dresden; Fest-Wochen, Austria; etc. Ficção (2012), consisting of six one-hour monologues by each one of the core actors of the company and was invited to Theater Der Welt in 2012 and later part of Projeto Brasil touring Germany in 2016. In 2014 on invitation of KunstenFestivalDesArts the group produced 2 Fictions (2014) that was presented at the festival and later in Brazil. The last work, Amadores (2017), was nominated as Outstanding Direction at the São Pau-lo’s Arts Critics Association (APCA) and named one of the best pieces to be seen in Brazil by different media. In 2018 the company celebrates its 10 years of existence with the pres-entation of several works of the company in Sao Paolo as well as with the premiere of their seventh production The Odyssey.



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