Bitef

The group climb was a vision that in the past accompanied me during the construction of a production. Over the years the image of the mountain has changed. Now, at the outset of a production, I see the edge of a great volcano, a mountain with a great black abyss. And I throw myself inside. You also throw yourselves after me and we fall into the darkness and I don't know if I'll be able to save you, be able to save myself. Which certainties accompany us in our fall, in the emptiness leading up to our next production? The poetry of Henrik Norbrandt accompanies us. The destiny of Guilhermino Barbosa accompanies us, the peasant who covered 25,000 kilometers on foot and embodied the words of Prestes: we have not won, but we have not been defeated. It is the story of a wayfarer. Homo viator. He reminds me of another man, in another millenium, who set out to find his true identity, his own origins - Oedipus. I know that Barbosa will be buried as myths are buried: to rise again. That's why myths die, in order to return to a new life. I see Barbosa being buried by mythical figures - Medea, Daedalus, Cassandra, Orpheus, Oedipus, Odysseus, Sysiphus and I see him rising again, like a moon that drips blood. But the drops of blood are the notes of a song of revolt that people believed would never be sung again. And the notes cross time and space beyond a horizon hidden by ever higher mountains of cut-off hands. Translation: David Korish and Judy Barba

Mythos (1998)

A performance about the value and death of the myth. The protagonists of the ancient myths - Medea, Cassandra, Daedalus, Orpheus - meet him in order to arrange a ceremony, the Great Funeral of History, which is thus transformed into myth. They prepare to bury the last representative of the twentieth-century dream of Revolution. And make it immortal. The wake takes place in Colonus, in Canudos, in Kronstad, on the remote shore of an ocean, at the end of a millenium. During the vigil, the mythical characters relive the dark night of history, the lies and the horrors which made them eternal: the incestuous and murderous son of the couple who ruled hebes; the slaughtered children of Medea; the rape of Cassandra, the clairvoyant; the shadowy kingdom of death and the head of Orpheus singing as it floats downstream; the deadly wings of Daedalus, the inventor of flight. While the petulant Odysseus comments with doubts and mocking remarks on the blind vitality of the living. What is myth for us today, and what could it be? An archetype? A voice from the unconscious? A tale full of wisdom? A dark and dazzling clot of contradictions? A value to be desecrated? Nothing? The darkest enigma shows itself through the contradictory survival of the myth, the enigma of its absence-presence. Where does a myth hide? Where do we bury it? How do we keep it alive?