Project Resume
Lampedusa is a project based on Documentary Theatre premises, and starts with a meditation towards the recent and continuous news about wrecked clandestine boats at the paradisiacal Italian island, also known as “Gate of Europe”. This project is structured in a dramaturgy that elects a reflection about concepts as Identity and Frontiers, and rebuilds several perspectives from the European Union and other authorities about this case, starting with the welcome and ending with the refuse of these refugees and immigrants’ presence. It is trough the artistic creation that we resume the necessary questions and metaphors as a trigger to debate this theme.
Our gaze on the Lampedusa Island and this theme in specific, will make us reflect about the questions that we, Portuguese, European and Mediterranean, also put when we are confronted with Immigration, with the unbalanced society that surround us and, above all, when we face the reports that narrate the hard moments these people have for crossing a frontier, being in the sea or land. This is the biggest issue, undoubtedly universal, that crosses the entire creative process. Therefore, our performance must live from maps. The maps as essential hypertexts, transforming the cartography in an important focus of our dramaturgy. The frontiers of Italy, Mediterranean Sea, Europe, Africa, Iberian Peninsula. Where do we stand? Where are we? Who are we? What rights do we have or lose when we cross a continent? The sea as a battleground.
We do not impose a point of view and, on the contrary, we chose to expose the biggest number of possible perspectives, it depends on the spectator to feel or not inside the Other’s Skin, experiencing other sides. We work with emotional mixtures and contractions within the actor’s bodies, objects, scene and projected images. The feeling of wanting to embrace all (to receive), or to destruct everything (to refuse). Lampedusa lives from life, the text is the body and the bodies are the texts, being the body language and the search of common and universal signs being the primacy in this performance.
For all this, Lampedusa is as much political as documental, working between the poetry and its reverse, because only like this, it can be of everyone’s matter.
About the present and based in a Devising Theatre, this is a collaborative work, a work in progress, a constant reflection and experiment. We use the video as a contrast to our bodies and words. We prefer the silence to the words. The music is the atmosphere of an inner contradiction. We use speeches only in the end, screaming and calling for a conclusion that may never end. This is the fact told by a Lampedusian Woman: if this is the government that represents me, then I am not Italian.
SYNOPSIS
"I do not know how many of us were there, perhaps 280, 300. There were 40 women, eight of them Somalis, like me.", said Asha Omer, pregnant, aged 21, who was saved because her husband grabbed her by the hair.
"I do not know how many of us were there, perhaps 280, 300. There were 40 women, eight of them Somalis, like me.", said Asha Omer, pregnant, aged 21, who was saved because her husband grabbed her by the hair.
Since January 2011, more than 40,000 illegal immigrants won the shores of Lampedusa fleeing war and poverty. They arrive in small boats crammed with people, without water or food, at this island of southern Italy with only 5000 inhabitants. The reactions triggered facing the increase of news about shipwrecks, the resulting death toll, repatriations, incredible stories of survival, constitutes our working materials, necessarily informed by a critical vision inside a Europe that shines in the eyes of the citizens from Africa. Crossing different narratives about the island (including our own travel diary in Lampedusa), we propose a performative reflection about some tangential concepts to this theme: identity, territory and borders.
For more information in english, please contact: geral@utopiateatro.com
