A LIVE POEM IN FREE FALL
A LIVE POEM IN FREE FALL(Digital narrative in 3 episodes)Production: Cia. Mungunzá de TeatroDirection: Luiz Fernando Marques LubiYear: 2020
*This piece was conceived during the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020, with the actors rehearsing and performing from their homes. The season took place on the Zoom platform with live broadcast on youtube.
SYNOPSIS
A man falls from the top of a building with 6 residents.
During the fall, when passing through the windows, it causes an earthquake inside each apartment, paralysing the lives of these residents in their personal traumatic universe.
Each window, a universe. With beginning, middle and end.
What unites the 6 windows? A body that falls and disappears in full fall.
Six points of view on this subjective event. Six subjective ways of facing this paralysis through a window frame.
Six ways to consume the fall (the pandemic). Six characters in their fantastic universes. Six actors trapped in their apartments and private lives. Six cut parts of a universal event.
20 thousands dead (until the premiere of this show) and a fall that never ends.
A man who can't finish packing a suitcase.
A man who cuddles abandonments.
A woman being sucked into her own belly.
A woman who expects a child that is not born, a love that does not return, a beanstalk that does not grow.
A girl who scripts death to be able to deal with life.
A man who watches himself being torn apart to fit in a suitcase; trying to get back to a love story that never was; being born at the age of 33, leaving traces of himself in the tears of babies; directing the scene of his own death.
And a man who falls.
What about us? Where are we in the midst of all this?
EPISODE 1:
THE SCREENWRITER OF YOUR LIFE AND THE MAN WHO LIVES IN THE COUCH
A girl who scripts the lives of people who are bored with themselves and transforms them in fantastic films. She scripts the father's death while consummating the body's fall. A man who never managed to finish his father's suitcase to send him away from home. To keep this father close, he built a universe inside a sofa where he tries to put on the clothes he couldn't put in the suitcase. In the same way that the man tries to wear parts of the body of the father who has passed away, the girl tries to wear her “grief” that crushes her.
EPISODE 2:
The Woman Who Gave Birth to Her Father and the Abandonment Maker.
A woman who became pregnant of unspoken words, un-lived dreams, unborn babies. A woman who got pregnant with “NO”s. A man who, in order to be, needs to wear the other's skin. He walks like a ghost through all the stories looking for his part in each one. He embodies the voids.
EPISODE 3:
THE WOMAN WHO WAITS AND THE ONE WHO SEES
A woman who became pregnant as a teenager and was never able to tell her father. That's why she bandaged her belly and didn't let the baby be born. She keeps the baby inside her like a shrine. The baby, by not being able to be born, starts talking inside the belly of another woman. The baby wants to tell the dead grandfather that he is trapped inside the belly. The baby asks the grandfather’s ghost for help. A man who is always abandoned by people, and for each abandonment, a crying baby appears. He cuddles his abandonments.
Each episode features the point of view of 2 residents of the building. The stories all intertwine, but it is cut and deepened in the immersion of two universes at a time.
HISTORY
The 1st Episode, "The Screenwriter of Your Life and The Man who lives in the couch", premiered on 08/16/20. It was presented through the platforms of SESC São Paulo, SESC Bom Retiro and on the networks of Cia. Mungunzá, part of them integrating the #PalcoPresente program of the Municipal Secretary of Culture of São Paulo. The complete series with three episodes was shown through Cia. Mungunza’s website in December 2021.
CREDITS
Concept and Script:
Verônica Gentilin Script Collaboration: Cia. Mungunzá de Teatro, Luis Fernando Marques and Flavio Barollo Direction: Luiz Fernando Marques Video-artist e live broadcast: Flavio Barollo e @casadazica Digital Performance: Cia. Mungunzá de Teatro, Flavio Barollo e Luis Fernando Marques Cast: Cia. Mungunzá de Teatro (Sandra Modesto, Verônica Gentilin, Virginia Iglesias, Leonardo Akio, Lucas Bêda, Marcos Felipe and Pedro das Oliveiras) Director of Photography: Bruno Rico Sound Track Compositor: Gustavo Sarzi Illustration/collage: Filipe Celestino Graphic Designer: Leonardo Akio Production: Cia. Mungunzá de Teatro
REVIEWS
"The first episode of the digital narrative begins with a similar detachment. In addition to the cast and crew, guests at a conference via Zoom are also on screen. It is a prologue that organically brings reflections on the present while it bonds the spectators with this new convention proposed by the online presentations. A theatrical piece that enters people's homes; a little piece of life that is shared. This is one of the great leaps of this re-creation: in A LIVE POEM IN FREE FALL we include everyone among those whose life was suspended in this endless fall of a body that cannot be seen. Neighbours, similar in anguish and paralysis. However, as soon as The Screenwriter of Your Life and The Man who lives in the couch effectively begins, the research of a new “language" conceived within the proposal of a digital staging emerges. Within Mungunzá's works, there is always an approach to the visual arts, considering the plasticity of the scenes drawn in friction with the narrative, usually epic. A LIVE POEM IN FREE FALL in a way radicalises this interface already present in the group's trajectory by proposing, in its first episode, what might be called an aesthetics of glitch. The interferences of the live platform operated by Barollo – in addition to the photography and audiovisual production of Bruno Rico and Pedro Augusto – are simultaneously noise and the driving element of the narrative”.
Amilton Azevedo (Ruína Acesa)
“I was ready for one, and when it was over, the second came and then the third. And it was a real free fall, without that special effects seatbelt.
It's beautiful! It's potent! It's traversing!
By the time the third was over, I was in a free fall. How, where, with whom, where did it start? Where did it start? When was it?
Mr. Esteves, I live on the ground floor, Mr. Esteves. On rainy Mondays I get emotional. I look at the sky, I look at the grey - which, sometimes, it also comes on Wednesdays - I look at this power falling from the sky and I'm dumbfounded, delighted with the fall.
Where was what has always been?
I leave here, even if it's from my own couch, enraptured. A lot of water. Lots of strength. Lots of potency. And, in the final silence, in those comments at the chat made by the strong people who managed to write at the end of it all, you find the air it takes to go back to the windows, to the falls, and ask, again, ‘Mr. Esteves, make it rain on a grey Monday! I live on the ground floor!”
Ana Elisa Matos (actress)
