'If you tell him everything how can you suffer' - Editing Grec Festival 2011

'If you tell him everything how can you suffer'
Choreography and Dance by Rita Vilhena
Choreography assistance -- Amaranta Velarde Gonzalez

The piece was made to bring alive a fiction character.
Amélia is a house wife, or maybe she is the cleaner of a hotel room or a private house. She is a woman that spends lots of time inside a room with very few house objects, like a TV and a vacuum cleaner.
The choreographer remembers how in most of Portuguese homes the TV was always on. Sometimes people would give attention to it sometimes, the TV worked like a sounds cape.
Rita Vilhena has grown up with her father, his wife, two brothers and a sister. They were a family with four children.
There was a lady coming everyday to take care of the house, the food, and partly the children too. Rita remembers that the lady changed every six years, or something like that. The fist she can remember was Paulina. She was young, yearly twenties. During the period she worked in their house she got married with a fisher man and she gave birth to her first child. It was as if she was part of the family.
From the earliest 90s, TV won importance over the radio in the house hole. The domestic lady would have continuously the TV on. We can speculate that ladies who stay alone in the house long for company. I suppose TV gives the feeling of companionship.
Rita decided to use this reference and use the film 'A Women under influence' from Jonh Cassavetes, with Gena Rowlands as the main role. She used it as sounds cape and interactive partner. She uses the sound of the TV like one could use a music band to create a specific atmosphere. And she uses the content of the film to interact with; for example she synchronizes actions with the voice coming from the TV, or borrows Gena Rowlands character from the screen and metamorphoses it on a queer dance.
Amélia, the character on stage, doesn't reveal the images of Cassavetes. Amélia is in control of the film has much she is in control of what she creates in her room. The stage is clearly her living rom. The vacuum cleaner is there because Amélia cleans. She cleans the house. She cleans herself. She sucks demons and angles from her imaginary and embodies them. Amélia uses the vacuum cleaner to exorcise her desires for lust, pain; metamorphose herself and ideally, to elevate herself to a higher self of being (or the room, not sure yet...)

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Performance
• Dance
• Physical Dance