Interview
Renata Portas / Público Reservado
June
2023
Thu
15
Not one, but two premieres: from Thursday to Sunday (June 15th to 18th), we dive into the universe of Howard Barker at Teatro Campo Alegre. Público Reservado puts two plays by the British playwright in dialogue: “Judith” and “Dead Hands”. Renata Portas tells us about “BARKERX2”, made of desire and politics, power and provocation.
The tongue (in the promotional image of the performance) can be at the origin of all the conflicts. What if we didn't have or use it?
If we didn't have it? The tongue, the theatre that I do, is a theatre of language, inhabited by languages. The tongue is not the reason for the conflict, or rather, it enhances interaction and will always cause conflict in the interesting sense of the word. Why? Because conceptually, and that's why I say that my theatre is a theatre of language inhabited by tongues, I don't believe in communication, I don't believe in reaction, I don't believe in one-way streets. And that's why I believe that conflict, which is something that curiously we try to avoid today... I think we live in a society that is very afraid of conflict, there are too many emojis if you ask me, there are too many drawings, the expression "do you want me to spell it out for you?" literally went to how many emojis you want to translate my emotion. That is to say, there is a distrust of the word, there is a distrust of the verb, and yet I believe that the verb is the first thing to give rise to the world. No wonder the Bible says “In the beginning was the word”. And obviously this is all a lot more intricate than what I'm saying right now. We might not use it... By the way, there's a playwright that I keep quoting, who is my favorite playwright (not Barker, it's Novarina) who says that in the future we will be mute. We will not be mutants, but mute... Man will be only with "m" mute, he will not be a man, that is, he will be stripped of words and language. And I think that's kind of a blessing and a bad fortune at the same time.
Because also what separates us in this world we live in and that we are always thinking about different species? And if there are hierarchies or not? What sets us apart from others? I would say very little, but two essential things: the construction of thought and the visibility of that thought through language. Therefore, it [the tongue] can be armor, a tool, it can be used as an ax or as a bridge. This question of conflict or not depends on our own nature and the way we face words. Because words like conflict, discussion, violence, barbarism are out of use, including those things associated with the construction of words like "barbarian"... And yet, one must assume that they have a place and that they can also be potentially generous for us as a civilization.
Why Howard Barker and these two plays specifically (Judith and Dead Hands)?
Barker is an author I discovered as a very young spectator. I remember being around 16 or 17 years old and seeing not one, but several performances by Rogério de Carvalho, who even today continues to function as a kind of master... He is someone I greatly appreciate, someone with whom I don't have a close relationship, but I have an affective relationship as a spectator and that left a deep impression on me. And, at the time, with [the company] As Boas Raparigas, he staged a series of Barkers. I think the first one I saw was "Wounds to the Face". And since then, that has marked me because of the theatre of catastrophe, which is Barker's aesthetic. For this potentially virulent, violent world. For this language that bleeds, for this absurd fetishism where everything hurts, where the world is a constant wound. And, obviously, also for its beauty... It's very beautiful, it's a very beautiful wound. Pain is also possibly very beautiful, we know that. The most represented image of Christ is the Via-Sacra, it is Christ on the cross. Why? There could be so many others and, nevertheless, we are attracted by that image, by that torture. And, therefore, Barker was already someone I had this desire, this drive to stage when I was a girl, when I discovered that I wanted to do theater. And I only started doing it many years later. And then, of course, there are these things along the way, there are a series of coincidences, a series of fortunes... Finding the right team, finding a partner, as in this case Teatro Municipal do Porto. And I thought, I want to do a diptych. I like it, anyone who knows me knows that I like extensions, I like long pieces, I really like that. I think it's increasingly difficult, increasingly rare. But it is very important to enter a theater and suspend yourself in time, suspend yourself from our reality, not in the sense of illusion. But, in a sense of emotion of "now I'm going to give myself up and I'm going to go through here whatever they proposed to me". And I think that extension, [Milan] Kundera was already talking about, provides this. Brevity has other advantages, but not this one.
In other words, Barker was a very old will and then I thought I would make a diptych. "Judith" was the text that interested me the most years ago... The story interested me, the story that everyone knows from the Old Testament. I was interested in the representation of the feminine point of view, because some current representations of the feminine also bother me sometimes. I was interested because it was a well-known story, because it had thousands of pictorial representations, all absolutely extraordinary or almost all... And I wanted to cross a tragedy, I really wanted to throw myself into tragedy. Because I often take texts that are not tragedies and I'm always working on them from a tragic point of view. For me everything is tragic... Being here breathing and looking at you is already tragic (laughs). It is always difficult to inhabit the world. And "Judith" offered me this: to emerge in a tragedy and think about the tragedy contemporaneously, which is also a difficult movement. "Dead Hands" is something else... It continues with this power of death, which is always there. It takes place at a wake, the father has just died and this woman is in charge of the two brothers. But, at the same time, it is about submission, about desire, about how what seems most desirable to us is sometimes our downfall, our defeat. And there's this absolutely extraordinary character — the FF — who is a verbiage, a language monster, all of him a language that collapses for 2h20. And therefore this is absolutely extraordinary. More than the points that unite two dramaturgies, they were the things that interested me as an obsessive director and that also interest me in other dramaturgies.
What can the performance gain by submitting itself to investigation and provocation?
There are performances that only have things to gain. These are two very interesting things... There is always investigation, an internal investigation and then there is an external investigation. I'm a theory bug. In fact, Público Reservado comprises two academics and a director. So there's a lot of this idea: we don't separate, we make staging notebooks, we make materials, we ask for some translations, we ask for critical texts, we are very available for criticism, whether internal (we are almost all Marxists, except one which is conservative, even in that we are democrats), or external too, of course. And provocation is always welcome. I think I do quite provocative work. And sometimes it's enough to be provocative to extend the time, for example. This is already a provocation... Sometimes, it is not the graphic, or sometimes it is not what is expected, but proposing what is no longer talked about, or that is not interesting to talk about, or that is disappearing. I think I walk on ruins, I think that my theatre takes place naturally, but I know that I walk on ruins. There are fewer and fewer bridges, fewer and fewer stones in my path... But I'm jumping from puddle to puddle, and provocations are all welcome.
The tongue (in the promotional image of the performance) can be at the origin of all the conflicts. What if we didn't have or use it?
If we didn't have it? The tongue, the theatre that I do, is a theatre of language, inhabited by languages. The tongue is not the reason for the conflict, or rather, it enhances interaction and will always cause conflict in the interesting sense of the word. Why? Because conceptually, and that's why I say that my theatre is a theatre of language inhabited by tongues, I don't believe in communication, I don't believe in reaction, I don't believe in one-way streets. And that's why I believe that conflict, which is something that curiously we try to avoid today... I think we live in a society that is very afraid of conflict, there are too many emojis if you ask me, there are too many drawings, the expression "do you want me to spell it out for you?" literally went to how many emojis you want to translate my emotion. That is to say, there is a distrust of the word, there is a distrust of the verb, and yet I believe that the verb is the first thing to give rise to the world. No wonder the Bible says “In the beginning was the word”. And obviously this is all a lot more intricate than what I'm saying right now. We might not use it... By the way, there's a playwright that I keep quoting, who is my favorite playwright (not Barker, it's Novarina) who says that in the future we will be mute. We will not be mutants, but mute... Man will be only with "m" mute, he will not be a man, that is, he will be stripped of words and language. And I think that's kind of a blessing and a bad fortune at the same time.
Because also what separates us in this world we live in and that we are always thinking about different species? And if there are hierarchies or not? What sets us apart from others? I would say very little, but two essential things: the construction of thought and the visibility of that thought through language. Therefore, it [the tongue] can be armor, a tool, it can be used as an ax or as a bridge. This question of conflict or not depends on our own nature and the way we face words. Because words like conflict, discussion, violence, barbarism are out of use, including those things associated with the construction of words like "barbarian"... And yet, one must assume that they have a place and that they can also be potentially generous for us as a civilization.
Why Howard Barker and these two plays specifically (Judith and Dead Hands)?
Barker is an author I discovered as a very young spectator. I remember being around 16 or 17 years old and seeing not one, but several performances by Rogério de Carvalho, who even today continues to function as a kind of master... He is someone I greatly appreciate, someone with whom I don't have a close relationship, but I have an affective relationship as a spectator and that left a deep impression on me. And, at the time, with [the company] As Boas Raparigas, he staged a series of Barkers. I think the first one I saw was "Wounds to the Face". And since then, that has marked me because of the theatre of catastrophe, which is Barker's aesthetic. For this potentially virulent, violent world. For this language that bleeds, for this absurd fetishism where everything hurts, where the world is a constant wound. And, obviously, also for its beauty... It's very beautiful, it's a very beautiful wound. Pain is also possibly very beautiful, we know that. The most represented image of Christ is the Via-Sacra, it is Christ on the cross. Why? There could be so many others and, nevertheless, we are attracted by that image, by that torture. And, therefore, Barker was already someone I had this desire, this drive to stage when I was a girl, when I discovered that I wanted to do theater. And I only started doing it many years later. And then, of course, there are these things along the way, there are a series of coincidences, a series of fortunes... Finding the right team, finding a partner, as in this case Teatro Municipal do Porto. And I thought, I want to do a diptych. I like it, anyone who knows me knows that I like extensions, I like long pieces, I really like that. I think it's increasingly difficult, increasingly rare. But it is very important to enter a theater and suspend yourself in time, suspend yourself from our reality, not in the sense of illusion. But, in a sense of emotion of "now I'm going to give myself up and I'm going to go through here whatever they proposed to me". And I think that extension, [Milan] Kundera was already talking about, provides this. Brevity has other advantages, but not this one.
In other words, Barker was a very old will and then I thought I would make a diptych. "Judith" was the text that interested me the most years ago... The story interested me, the story that everyone knows from the Old Testament. I was interested in the representation of the feminine point of view, because some current representations of the feminine also bother me sometimes. I was interested because it was a well-known story, because it had thousands of pictorial representations, all absolutely extraordinary or almost all... And I wanted to cross a tragedy, I really wanted to throw myself into tragedy. Because I often take texts that are not tragedies and I'm always working on them from a tragic point of view. For me everything is tragic... Being here breathing and looking at you is already tragic (laughs). It is always difficult to inhabit the world. And "Judith" offered me this: to emerge in a tragedy and think about the tragedy contemporaneously, which is also a difficult movement. "Dead Hands" is something else... It continues with this power of death, which is always there. It takes place at a wake, the father has just died and this woman is in charge of the two brothers. But, at the same time, it is about submission, about desire, about how what seems most desirable to us is sometimes our downfall, our defeat. And there's this absolutely extraordinary character — the FF — who is a verbiage, a language monster, all of him a language that collapses for 2h20. And therefore this is absolutely extraordinary. More than the points that unite two dramaturgies, they were the things that interested me as an obsessive director and that also interest me in other dramaturgies.
What can the performance gain by submitting itself to investigation and provocation?
There are performances that only have things to gain. These are two very interesting things... There is always investigation, an internal investigation and then there is an external investigation. I'm a theory bug. In fact, Público Reservado comprises two academics and a director. So there's a lot of this idea: we don't separate, we make staging notebooks, we make materials, we ask for some translations, we ask for critical texts, we are very available for criticism, whether internal (we are almost all Marxists, except one which is conservative, even in that we are democrats), or external too, of course. And provocation is always welcome. I think I do quite provocative work. And sometimes it's enough to be provocative to extend the time, for example. This is already a provocation... Sometimes, it is not the graphic, or sometimes it is not what is expected, but proposing what is no longer talked about, or that is not interesting to talk about, or that is disappearing. I think I walk on ruins, I think that my theatre takes place naturally, but I know that I walk on ruins. There are fewer and fewer bridges, fewer and fewer stones in my path... But I'm jumping from puddle to puddle, and provocations are all welcome.
© João Peixoto
