Inside Words
Rui Catalão
“Character”, in English, can mean both personality, and a portrayal of a person in a work of fiction. If we imagine a solo titled “My Character”, the conditions are created for a part that may be a psychological portrait in first person (“who I am”), but that also denounces the fictional device (“who I represent”). In Portuguese, personality and character, as being and acting, are antithetical terms. The aim of this work is to blend the line that separates them.
In his first solo appearance, Rui Catalão searches for himself in a dense maze of narratives. Talking about his life as a writer, he explains how movement and body language came to replace the written word as a means of expression. More than a set of intertwined stories, Inside words becomes a fascinating house of mirrors distorting the frontiers between narrator and character, biography and fiction, private and public.?INSIDE WORDS is the result of ten years working with dancers. The idea for the piece started in Romania, where Rui Catalão lived for three years, with most of the material collected while participating in “Miercurea Lejera”, a weekly program hosted by dancers Edia Gabia and Maria Baroncea, in CNDB (Centrul National al Dabsului, Bucuresti). The work addresses his progressive detachment from spoken word as his main working tool, and what happens with the body during that change. Isolation/communication, hiding/revealing, these are some of the opposites with which he aspires to resurface some of the art and contemporary thinking dilemmas that survived to the end of modernism. He explores the connection between truth and fiction, between personality and role character and what is acceptable as private and as public.
?author and interpreter: Rui Catalão | light design: Eduardo Pinto | photography: Patrícia Almeida | project management: Tânia Guerreiro | production: PI - Produções Independentes | co-productors: Centrul National al Dansului din Bucuresti, Atelier Real, Galeria Zé dos Bois and PerFormas
project financed by Secretaria de Estado da Cultura/DGArtes
Full vídeo: http://www.vimeo.com/16887512
