Carregado
Mickaël de Oliveira’s theater has a special appetite for opposing ideas, theses and antitheses – exposing their defenders in derision – and for reinventing their syntheses. In Festa de 15 Anos, the Portuguese playwright teams up with his Brazilian counterpart Diego Bagagal to create a show that aims to rethink the dynamics and repercussions of neo-colonialist practices in our contemporary world. Out of necessity, a wealthy Portuguese family adopts a young Brazilian boy of indigenous descent and organizes a 15th birthday party for him, a quinceañera – a common social ritual in the Americas – a debutante ball to introduce him to Portuguese society, which will end up tinged with tragedy and horror. Crossing the private and the political, Festa de 15 Anos questions the legacies of colonization, its moral heritage, its fetishism of minorities, and reveals the difficulty of creating “syntheses that console and liberate us as individuals in a community”. In this allegory inspired by horror cinema, Mickaël de Oliveira expands on the work undertaken in Socrates Must Die (2018).