From – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Direction – Luís Araújo
Dramaturgy – Luís Araújo and Nuno Cardoso
Set design – Tiago Pinhal Costa
Lighting design – Rui Monteiro
Sound design – Pedro Augusto
Costumes – Sara Pazos
Multimedia – Luís Araújo and Sara Pazos
Photography – Sara Pazos
Acting – Nuno Cardoso
Co-production – Ao Cabo Teatro, Centro Cultural Vila Flor, Centro de Arte de Ovar, Theatro Circo , M/12 years
Don’t try to desacralize fear demystify arrogance limit yourself to living your slow days without turning your own life into a noisy or annoying spectacle for others no one will pay you back in kind, but that shouldn’t matter to you, or almost nothing, when life gains enough entity you can throw everything else overboard.
Camilo José Cela, Ofício de Trevas 5 (1973)
The Underground Man is not a “representative” man who consents to and adopts determinism. Nor is he an anomaly, an exception. In a strict, scientific, productivity-oriented society, such a man exists to create a counterpoint, to present different answers to the same questions.
In the mechanical society of the 19th century, this anti-humanist would be metaphorically, and perhaps actually, in an uninhabitable underground, a dark, windowless place, with no audience to hear him. Reading this book today, I felt like offering him the opportunities of the 21st century: offering him the space and mechanisms used by the prophets of life coaching,
of entrepreneurship and motivational speaking, by those who pretend or believe they have answers, salvation, the gurus of cheap humanism, the “charismatic” men who fill auditoriums and hotel lounges to do team building, to tell crowds willing to believe anything generalities like “if you can dream it, you can do it”, who get rich at autograph sessions for the 10th edition of their 10th book, those who flood the Internet with product presentations, lectures and testimonies that border on religious experience.
But a text this thick doesn’t fit into a powerpoint, it doesn’t lend itself to explanation without a struggle, and so, despite the aggressive gestures of someone who really wants to be understood, it’s all inertia. The speaker is forced into an artificial dynamism that contradicts what is being said. And this struggle between what is said and the model in which it is said gives rise to a frustrating friction that makes all this effort inglorious. Which, in the end, is all that is said.
When I chose the subtitle The end of ends is to do nothing for this Underground, I remembered an interview I read years ago in which Leon Lederman was asked what he thought was the most complete equation, the one that best explained the world. His answer was one of the simplest: F = ma, force equals mass times acceleration, i.e. if you push a body, it will react.
you push a body, it reacts by moving and the greater the force applied, the greater the reaction. It remains to be seen whether this Underground Man refuses to move or whether others refuse to touch him.
Nietzsche killed God and Foucault killed man. What are we left with?
For Underground Man, whatever it is, it can’t be said that it’s a very interesting show.