My dad would say that we have moments of action and moments of stillness. He says we should learn to respect these moments sit back and observe... and during those times it is more productive to pause than to knock your head against the wall.

I have been reading, I have been writing and trying out visuals on my computer. I have been developing a performance and imagining how it can work. I have been trying to bring together the ideas of my research and performance. I have been looking at video poetry, at performance through Peter Brooks' "The Empty Space" and at actions through the use of studio spaces... I do not stop, but when I try to talk about it, it fades into the air. It does not go through.

Now, I am running away from graphic design practice. I do want to use it, but more as a reference, as something that I have within me as tool, but I do not want to go back into the pure, static words. If it was just this, I would not have come so far.

I want to look at text. I love poetry. I love words. I love the drawing of words, its symbols, its richness, its sound. And I want to use its sound. And I want to use it visually. And I want to give it another rhythm, which is not just the rhythm they have forever had on paper, on a page of a book, a static page of a book. Does it seem too much? It is not too much. It is looking at the materiality of the word, the deliverance of the word in space and adding onto it another materiality, a materiality it can gather from the context and the space it occupies. This is the focus of my research. How can words gain a new materiality in space, in a performance space. How can we use their values, their phisicality and add to it with the other means that performance, projection and the 3D space allow.

In the performance I want to look into giving life to these words. Into giving it a new rhythm that can interact with an actor. Not just as a background to help or contradict the narrative. Not as the thoughts of a character projected on a screen as he goes on with his thing. I want it to be the actual character. That the words may interact with another character, who in his turn will deliver lines and actions. I want the poetry that builds a character to come through through words that have no spokesman. Typographic poems in place of the actor.

When referring Melo e Castro's Video poems Eduardo Kats writes (please forgive any translation problems).
"The Central focus of Video-poetry is the time and its multiple forms of manipulation, like the retention by the memory, the duration, the brief permanence, the abrupt cut, the compression, the acceleration, the interuption, the slow passing, and so many other forms that, connected to sintetic colours, electronic sounds, oscillators, and other equipment, establish new parameters for the poetic art."

INVISIBLE

the idea of using calvino for a performance is the ground, the first important element. The book should be the first level of the building, the first and essencial piece torwards the development of a performance. The reason for Calvino is the play with words, his writing, that always takes us somewhere else but always reminds us of the vehicle: letters, words, symbols, reading. Another reason is the invisible, the way he manages to grab what cannot be seen, his exploration of the senses and usage of metaphors to convey images of places, atmospheres and relationships. He works on simple or sometimes complex descriptions, which always evoke and reveal a variety of extremely deep and significant relationships. His writing is a web of beautiful words illuminating beatiful and often sad images.

Since the idea is not to use Calvino's text directly on the performance, maybe fragments of it, but to explore the ideas in it without tying our study to the text I have been trying to grasp the invisible of places. To write about those things we sense but cannot be seen, things which can only be seen through our minds eyes. This practice also gives me the possibility to play with language. For example, is it possible to make a mental picture of a foreign place through a list of things that inhabit it, but listed in its own language, so that sounds particualr to the place should fill the space and invade the audience's senses?

LANGUAGE

Now my study has shifted in a very positive way. I am looking at verbal language in performance. Language interacting with images, words creating image, the interaction of languages, words invading the senses and fooling reason. I am seeking for different ways of exploring verbal language in performance. How does it start? How to use a text, build something from a text and deconstruct, copy and paste words and images. Like in the waves, breaking it all apart, images, texts, scales, all into fragments... what else can be done with these elements? How far can we go?

"araras vermelhas e jandaias... era o papagaio trobeta era o papagaio curraleiro era o periquito cutapado era o xarã o peito roxo o ajuru curau o ajuru curica arari ararica araraúna araraí araguaí arara-taua maracanã maitaca arara-piranga catorra teriba camiranga anaca anapura canindés tuins periquitos...."
- Macunaíma, Mario de Andrade

On the road again, this time, I hope, in the right way.

If my work this year could be described as an object I would say it is a pendulum. In the begining it was a fixed idea of using poetry and image in translation, translating words, experimenting the usage of a different language to build the same images, the same multiple images contained in one word through visuals, through colours and shapes. Then in an attempt to find something new, different from my old work I came close to abandon the images which were not contained within the variety of textual elements. For a while it was all about reinforcing the visuals of graphic text and pointing at the rich surface of the verbal language... and this shift marked my difficulty in finding a focus, so I was thrown by questions into extreme and different directions.
Now,
I hope to have settled in the middle, basing my research on the usage of language in performance. The use of verbal language as a tool and how it can interact with images to be yet more powerful. I am not abandoning any of my previous questions, in my research I intend to embrace them.

For my final performance I have been thinking of bringing out the invisible. To express, through the use of language, places not as they are seen but for what they communicate through the smells, the movement of people, the links between them, the beliefs of those who inhabit the place. The idea of capturing the invisible manifestation of a place and translating it into words and images is the starting point of the final performance, it is as the first note to a music, from where all rhythm, texture and sequence of sounds will derive, and it is based in the invisible cities. The final performance will be an encounter and through this encounter I hope to let my reserch questions flow, find their forms and shapes and spill onto the audience as a river would.