Performance contains elements of nudity
A performance to piece together
Original idea, Choreography, Dramaturgy and Costumes: Lander Patrick
Performed by Jonas Lopes and Lander Patrick
Lighting Design: Lander Patrick and Rui Daniel
Technical Director: Rui Daniel
Artistic Consultant Tomaz Simatovic
Production: Clara Antunes
Coproduced by: Festival Materiais Diversos
Touring Materiais Diversos
Duration: 45 min
This is not a love story
This is not a love story is a reference to René Magritte’s painting Ceci n’est pas une pipe (1929). Much like Magritte’s painting contradicts its title, the relationship we see on stage in Eggshells comes into direct conflict with this description of the piece. Each audience member is asked to choose between what they see and what they read.
Eggshells is defined by this tension. In the first part of the piece, two blindfolded men execute precise movements, rhythmic in nature, musical. The sounds of the body act as a metronome. The choreography determines music and silence, keeps time, guides the dramaturgy of the piece. Caresses and provocation. Claiming territory, testing ground. Giving and receiving. Going forward to take what was once yours to have.
The risk of the two performing losing themselves in the choreography is very real. Performers and audience come together around this challenge: a virtuoso shot in the dark. An occasional missed slap or misstep in the first 25-minute sequence of staccato movements is consented and reminds the audience that they are human, after all.
Real communication in a surreal context.
As the piece progresses, the two men perform their relationship as if it were a storyboard. We are increasingly mesmerized as the energy between the performers grows. The vocabulary of sounds expands to a complex composition of variations, rhythms and children’s games. There is room for moments of naïveté and perverse suggestions. The communication continues through the silence. In the absence of sound, we experience the repercussions of all the sound that came before, and that which is still to come. And now they dance quietly…
Choreographer’s note
Eggshells was born from the need to explore transcendent, telepathic communication, as the epitome of an intimate relationship between two people. I consciously try not to direct possible interpretations, providing, above all, a real experience that offers a new dimension of dialogue. A break from hectic everyday life, this piece immerses the audience in the silence and in the music of communicating bodies. It stands as a time, in a formal space, where social relations and their expressions are rethought: theater as a microcosm of society.