Before

Pedro Penim

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Many cities or countries have a distinct malaise. They are places that could be Portugal, so sunk in a painful Saudade of the past, and where every tension of the present is only the tip of an iceberg that is explained in successive retreats that can go to the origin of the species. This nostalgia is often presented as a diagnosis, a denial of a painful present opposed to the desire to return to a glorious past:

 

- The city of Istanbul often plunges into a state the Turks call Üzün: a kind of acute, collective melancholy that comes with rain and the cold wind coming from the East and devouring everything. The beauty of the city and the Bosphorus, the great mosques, the splendid mansions, the marble fountains are only a reminder of the difference between the miserable life and the happy triumphs of the Ottoman past, renewing every day the desire to face loss and embrace The spiritual disease.

 

- The heart of Trieste stopped beating in 1914 when the bodies of the archdukes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were transported there after they were murdered in Sarajevo. Since then the port city has been renamed Tristesse and dragged into a dying limb, lost between the eastern extremity of Latinity and the southern border of Germanism and swallowed by Slavic territory, a place without a clear definition of territory, a threshold of worlds Dead.

 

- Wales means "the place of Others". This was the name given by the invaders when the country became the first colony of the British Empire in 1285, making those who already were there, strangers in their own land (for those who speak Gaelic the country is called Cymru). Since then Wales has been thrown to the margins of History and the Welshmen experience a state they call Hiraeth, a deep and familiar incompleteness, a disease that misses a home to which one can not return. A house, a person or a story that may have never existed.

 

- Lana Del Rey has defined a map of Los Angeles hurt and discolored by the sun, through her ghostly and tragically romantic voice. This Summertime Sadness coined by the songstress serves the city in all seasons, but exudes a melancholy remembrance of the past that beach and surf weather accentuates. It is a ghost town that should have succeeded Paris and New York as the World Capital of the 21st Century, but where decades of pop culture junk refuse to pay attention to the passage of time.

 

By invitation of DEVIR (and in collaboration with  Encontros de Novas Dramaturgias de Coimbra and with Teatro Praga) Pedro Penim creates a performance that began with a residence in the village of São Brás de Alportel in Algarve (once called gharb al-'andalus) and that will be developed during 2017.

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Credits

a project by Pedro Penim

text and directing - Pedro Penim

performance - Frederico Serpa e Pedro Penim

lighting - Rui Monteiro

general assistance and executive production - Bernardo de Lacerda

production assistance - Teatro Praga / Bruno Reis

co-production DeVIR/CAPa (a commission from Festival “encontros do DeVIR”)

project developed in collaboration with Encontros de Novas Dramaturgias (teatro Académico Gil Vicente), Festival "Temps d'images and Teatro Praga

acknowledgements - Valentim Pereira, Patrícia Reis, Custódio Cavaco, Graça Passos, Emanuel Sanches, Gonçalo Duarte Gomes, Custódia Reis

Teatro de Praga is a structure supported by Secretaria de Estado da Cultura / Direcção-Geral das Artes

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Bio Pedro Zegre Penim

Stage director and performer. Born in 1975. BA in Theatre from Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema, Lisbon. MA in Arts and Cultural Management at ISCTE-IUL.He is a founding member and the artistic director of Teatro Praga (www.teatropraga.com), the company with which he has won several awards and prizes in Theatre (Golden Globe theatre award 2015, SPA authors 2012 award for the best Portuguese play of the year with “Israel”, the Teatro SIC 12 years prize 2005, Acarte Prize 2003, the 2003 Teatro na Década award). His work as a stage director and actor extends to the areas of writing, translation and education (Centre International de Formation en Arts du Spectacle - Brussels; SP Escola de Teatro - São Paulo, Brazil; Salt Galata and Kumabaraci 50–Istanbul, Turkey; Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema–Lisbon; Escola Superior de Música e Artes do Espetáculo–Porto; Balleteatro - Porto, among others) and he has had his works presented in the most prestigious theatres in Portugal and well as in other countries such as France, Italy, Brazil, UK, China, Germany, Spain, Slovakia, Turkey, Israel, Slovenia and Hungary. He was a guest director at Capitals / Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian at Capitals in Discussion - Lisbon, curated by Jan Ritsema and Bojana Cvejić, and on the project It Will Be What We Make It (composed by an international group of theoreticians and artists), at the and was recently a juror at the multidisciplinary festival Danse Élargie (Théâtre de La Ville, Paris). Outside Teatro Praga he worked with names such as Forced Entertainment - UK (Quizoola!) Tg. Stan - Belgium (Point Blank), Tim Etchells - UK (The Quiet Volume, Festival Alkantara) and Portuguese directors Ricardo Pais, Antonino Solmer, José Wallenstein, Nuno Carinhas, a.o.

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