Photo: Rodrigo Valero Puertas

Lights on Doesn’t Mean We’re Home
António Pedro Lopes & Monica Gillette
PT/USA
PERFORMANCE

Espaço A Bruxa Teatro, Évora
September 23rd, 9.30PM
M/12A
5€ / 3€ (studants)

A performance by - Monica Gillette & Antonio Pedro Lopes
Executive porduction - Joana Martins
Collaboration on dramaturgy - Rita Natálio
Light design - Alexandre Coelho
Costumes - Guilherme Garrido
Photography - Rodrigo Valero Puertas, Olga Belchior
Artistic residencies - RE-AL, Balleteatro, Teatro Micaelense, Forum Prisma-Mexico, Devir/CAPA, La Caldera
Financial support - Fundação Caloust Gulbenkian
Residency support - DGAIE - Direitos dos Artistas
Journeys support - Instituto Camões
Thanks to - Rita Almiro, Laura Lamas, Marta Vieira, Romana Moreiras, Gianna & Conrad Smart, Ana Lúcia Cruz, National Theater of Manheim, Tommy Noonan, Inês Mariana Moitas, João Fiadeiro, O Espaço do Tempo, Francisco Lopes, Diana Gillette, Primeiro Andar
Co-production - Escrita na Paisagem, Teatro Micaelense

In Lights on Doesn’t Mean We’re Home António Pedro Lopes (PT) and Monica Gillette (USA) re:invent, again and again, their identities, as subjects and as a couple, articulating their autobiographic material – individual and joint experiences – with fictional and fictionalized elements.

Lopes and Gillette began their re:creative artistic process taking cinema as starting point. Their first step was to watch some couples in film – happy and complicated relationships, friendships, love, accomplices in crime or against social patterns. The duo disassembles these couples, analyze them closely, and then re:constructs them, re:constructing themselves. The couple inserts in themselves aspects from the couples of they watched on film, simultaneously lending them some of their own personal features.

Lopes and Gillette re:live the fiction, re:inventing it and, above all,  re:inventing themselves constantly. In this process, the duo unfolds the act of re:constructing their biographies adopting numerous perspectives – individual, their life in common, family... – resorting a variety of documenting media and techniques – film, photography, writing. The couple has visited their hometowns – Azores and California –, they met each other’s mothers and accessed the “achives” of each other’s families, and they took a diversity of sites as venues to re:enact their ficcionalized-biographies/biographed-fictions. The outcome of this process of re:creation-documenting are not approached as fixed or finalized object, but as material to be re:worked on, keeping the creative process alive.
Finally, this process will culminate in a performance based on the documentation that has been produced and collected, as well as in a publication: two modes of re:play/re:criation of the archive that has been built up during the artistic research and creation.

Nomads, Lopes and Gillette cross, again and again, the distance between narrating a ficcionalized-reality (or a real-fiction) and the possibility of inscribing (or re:inscribing) it on their bodies, between creating documentation and documenting fiction. Occasionally, a “passenger” keeps the couple company in their journey. This is a creator from an artistic discipline other than performance, who joins the duo in a shared temporary experience, producing an artistic object which materializes his/her perspective about the their work. The participation of the “artists-passengers” develops in two formats: to create artistic objects which constitutes one more perspective about the couple’s work (documentation), as well as material to nurture their research/re:creation; also, some of this artists will collaborate with Lopes and Gillette on the creation of their final performance (costumes, scenography, sound and light designs...).

Between fiction and reality, how do António Pedro Lopes e Monica Gillette and present themselves? Lopes, performer and performance creator, was born in Azores. Today he thinks of himself as a nomad; he works abroad with a number of choreographers, and he collaborates regularly with Marianne Baillot, Guilherme Garrido, Tommy Noonan, and Monica Gillette. He taught performance research workshops throughout Europe in various contexts and institutions. He is a founding member of the international network Sweet & Tender, sharing its artistic direction in 2008. He was responsible for curating Conclusions for the Future, in Espaço do Tempo.

Monica Gillette is from California, where she trained as classic dancer. She pursued her studies in contemporary dance in New York and in Europe. She toured all around the world presenting her work and working with other choreographers. More recently she has been involved in collaborative projects with António Pedro Lopes and Tommy Noonan, as well as the international network Sweet & Tender Collaborations. She also worked on montage and edition of Hollywood films, as well as on the TV shows "Sopranos" and "Crime & Punishment". Today she articulates her background in dance and film to create films to shows, as well as directing short-films, which have been already presented in international festivals.