HALF BODY . 2015
Carregado
MEIO CORPO
a show by RICARDO PAIS | free version of Igual ao Mundo by JACINTO LUCAS PIRES | by ENSEMBLE – SOCIEDADE DE ACTORES
Directed by Ricardo Pais
Set design Pedro Tudela
Music Ricardo Pinto
Lighting design Rui Simão
Costumes Bernardo Monteiro
Sound design Joel Azevedo
Assistant director Manuel Tur
Performed by Emília Silvestre, Jorge Pinto, João Castro, Luís Araújo, Simão Do Vale, António Parra and Ricardo Pinto
Co-production Ensemble, CCB Foundation, São João National Theatre and Viriato Theatre
Meio Corpo is the name of the new production by the Ensemble – Sociedade de Atores. After their collaboration on Hamlet (a play that premiered at Teatro Viriato in 2002), the company and the director are exploring Meio Corpo as “an amusement” or, to sound a little more French, a “heterotopia”, only possible with a cast and director who have crossed paths in many other works.
Created from a play initially commissioned by the Ensemble from Jacinto Lucas Pires, this show is a new scenic adventure based on Ricardo Pais’ free version of the commissioned original. A dream is staged that is both old-fashioned and high-tech: between the words “glued to the skin” that a mysterious Big Sister tries to leave no room for any discretion and the presumptions of a literature stolen from everyone’s imagination by an Author-event-manager-and-animator-of-writings, a game of metaphysical bitch-blindness and permissiveness is played, in a “Cocktail” with obligatory dark clothes, grand piano, techno music and other special effects. As João Carneiro wrote in the Expresso newspaper at the time of the premiere at the CCB, “Based on a text by Jacinto Lucas Pires, Ricardo Pais and the Ensemble have created a parable about the truth of art”.
It was on stage at the Teatro Carlos Alberto, in Porto, between September 18 and October 4 and will next be performed at the Teatro Académico Gil Vicente, in Coimbra, on October 22.