Chegadas
Teatro do Vestido
PT
Theater

Artistic Residency
Between August 15th and 28th

Presentation
August 28th, 9.30PM

M/12A
Free entrance

Direction - Joana Craveiro
Creation, performance, texts - Joana Craveiro, Rosinda Costa, Inês Rosado
Dramaturgy - Teatro do Vestido
Installation - Gonçalo Alegria
Direction assistant - Lara Portela
Production - Sandra Carneiro
Co-Production - Festival Escrita na Paisagem

Supports - CP, Comboios de Portugal; Sociedade Guilherme Cossoul

The presentation of Chegadas in Évora is supported by REFER

Project funded by Ministério da Cultura/DG Artes

Teatro do Vestido (TdV) has been collaborating with the Festival Escrita na Paisagem since 2006, in a increasingly stronger artistic and institutional relationship. This year, the company brings to the festival the premiere of the performance Chegadas (Arrivals), the outcome of a project the company started developing during an artistic residence at the Festival, in 2009.

After spending so much time writing and re:performing the act of leaving, TdV came to realize that at the end they always achieve in staying. If you look up in the literary production, the action of leaving (and the urgency that goes with it) is far much documented. So TdV heads upstream and starts a research around the oddity of the arrival. The first step was in 2009, in an artistic residency at Escrita na Paisagem, and having in mind the festival’s main theme of that year: “Body”. TdV developed an artistic research based on site-specific work of observation and documentation. Their aim was to perceive how the act of arriving is inscribed in one’s body: the sensation of a body coming into a new (or old) place, the relationship with the “true” and “genuine” inhabitants, the life of tourists, the nomadism of the gypsy people, and the nomadism of the artists themselves, as their work lead them to wander around Évora, all soaked up in Alentejo’s restless heat of August. This material was all gathered, worked upon and reshaped into a new play, the 14th creation of TdV.

Chegadas is a documental theatre play, where documental observation is mixed with the implication of those who have been observing. It is a tale about a peculiar experience – arriving –, told and re:presented by travellers-actors. It is also a project that surfaces how re:play, being re:petition, is always-already an act of re:novation. The act of arriving is inscribed in one’s body and one is constantly performing it again and again, although differently. To arrive is always-already to re:turn, even when one does not know the sites and the people that inhabit them. One is always arriving to somewhere, from someplace else. And one is always changing at each arrival.

Teatro do Vestido is coming once more to the Festival, to Alentejo; this arrival, as well as the creative process and outcomes the company will perform will be as much familiar as surprising and unexpected.

Teatro do Vestido is a multidisciplinary arts collective founded in 2001. It is commited to the creation of theatre and installation pieces that explore new creative processes and particularly that constitute an original dramaturgy.

TdV challenges a strong relationship with the performative space, emphatizing it, and at the same time sets a participatory relationship with the audience. The aesthetic approachs of TdV has been leading the company to work in diverse contexts: national and international, rural and urban. In 2006 and 2007 TdV developed its activity in the Psychiatric Hospital Júlio de Matos (Lisbon) conceiving and materializing creative projects, dramatic lectures, and a pedagogic project. Since 2007 the company does not have a permanent space to work.

TdV’s work is acknowledged for the originality, experimentation and research implicated in their projects, for the reflexion about present times that has been considered particularly fitting both by the audience and the press. Lately, TdV has been focusing on its pedagogic projects (Zonas) offering a program that aims the education of autonomous and responsible actors, as well as of educating a new audience and raising a permanent discussion about art and the world we live in.