Interview
Cláudia Dias & Idoia Zabaleta
November
2022
Wed
9
Over seven years, Cláudia Dias created a piece for each day of the week. Each show corresponds to an encounter with another artistic discipline, making a connection between artists, chronologies, countries and politics. In collaboration with different people, she entered a boxing match, opened a black hole, postponed the end of the world, united lines that were separated, gave new uses to worn out words. We spoke with the creator and with Idoia Zabaleta (co-creator of the play Quinta-feira: Abracadabra and key element involved in the Sete Anos Sete Escolas project and the book Domingo) about Sete Anos Sete Peças [Seven Years Seven Pieces]. A cycle that also includes several conversations, a project developed with secondary school students and a collection of seven books. Between the 14th and 26th of November, Cláudia Dias' universe occupies the various spaces of Teatro Campo Alegre.
All the pieces in Sete Anos Sete Peças [Seven Years Seven Pieces] project are crossed by an urgency of building collectives. Can we see the project as a metaphor for the construction of democracy itself?
Cláudia Dias: This project, Sete Anos Sete Peças, definitely emerged from this idea of finding and building the collective. All my previous works were solos, because I was also in a phase of discovery of my own universe. In fact, with this project, I took a very first leap in this direction of collectives’ building process and also in the relationship with the social, political and economic context of Portugal — we’re talking about a period from 2016 until now. And if we look back, we are talking about years of a crisis, not only economic, but also political and social, where issues related to democracy — and I would say, perhaps, those less evident — were present. I felt this need, as an artist, to make my own statement about it. One of these most invisible questions was the narrative about the absence of a future. Our political leaders spoke of the lack of a future and an alternative. I realised this narrative was too violent for the people and I really wanted to start a project with the opposite message, conveying this possibility: futures are always at our hand and we always have the power to build them. We are the builders of the future. We don't need to have someone telling us how we're going to build our future. Therefore, it is an artistic project, obviously, but very impregnated with this force of collective building, of creating democratic relations, but, above all, of building the future.
How does the creative process relate to this urgency and with democratic practices, particularly in the dialogue with different artistic languages and different artists? How does Cláudia as artist dialogues with Cláudia as citizen?
Cláudia Dias: This project also started from a very specific direction: getting out of myself and going in the direction of the other – meeting the other. The whole device of the different pieces is based in idea of waiting, where two people meet face-to-face for the first time. Someone makes a gesture and then a whole process of creation is opened. I think this is a democratic gesture: to have two people, face-to-face, equally, creating from what each other brings, without any hierarchical creator-co-creator or creator-interpreter relation. It is an egalitarian device if you will. The piece results from what happens on that first date. This desire to go and meet the other resulted in meeting many others. Some of them with whom I already had complicity relationships, namely Idoia Zabaleta, with whom I had already worked on other projects. Idoia invited me to teach some workshops in the Basque Country and we also did a large project on artistic creation, via workshop, in this cornered part of the peninsula. Other people are, for example, Jaime Neves, who comes from muay thai, and was an interesting discovery, considering he is someone who comes from outside the artistic area; or Igor Gandra, who comes from another field more connected to the theatre of objects and puppetry, a field that I've wanted to work with for a long time; or Luca Bellezze, who comes from clown and street theatrical practice, a world completely different from mine; or others, such as António Jorge Gonçalves, who played an important role in the Sete Anos Sete Livros [Seven Years Seven Books] project, as well as the musicians, Vasco Vaz and Miguel Pedro, who come from music and were part of the last piece, Sexta-feira: o fim do mundo...ou então não [Friday: the end of the world...or not].
Idoia Zabaleta: I am pleased to participate in this fascinating project, with Cláudia on Quinta-feira: Abracadabra [Thursday: Abracadabra]. I got Thursday, that day of the week which is quite cheerful because it's almost weekend (laughs). We premiered this piece in 2019 in the Basque Country, and in 2020 it was presented in Portugal. Abracadabra refers to the ability to evoke action and power. The piece is about that: two women who tell stories. Once again there was a woman who meets another woman and tells her: "Give me something!”; and the other replies: "Take it all!". It's a play that tells stories. It summons the word and its ability to mobilize bodies. There is a in the words we say and embody. As Cláudia said, we met almost a decade ago at a workshop in Barcelona. When I saw her work, I realized that I wanted to work with her in the kind of approach to artistic practice that she proposed with a group of colleagues, with whom she developed a methodology of composition in real time. I knew clearly that I wanted to work with her in the Basque Country so that she could share in this context, where I work, this approach to artistic practice in order to foster and generate ideas in the [local artistic] tissue. Starting it from a possibility of collective practice, to work together, to be able to work together, through a way of non-being necessarily in agreement; of dissent; of a critical and self-critical positioning; and, from a place of distance.
Cláudia and her colleagues developed this methodology, a very clear system of working from this place of distance, even without fully agreeing on what was being defended, on the operation of the materials they were working with, but which still produced meaning.
This interested me in particular and, from there, we began our relationship, through this working methodology. And, well, I must say that [Cláudia] is a person with whom I have learned a lot regarding the rigor of artistic practice, in an understanding that it is the materials, the things that are being produced, that have a potential for action and of summoning meaning, more than what may or may not interest each one of us.
In Quinta-feira: Abracadabra, this happens in a certain way in the relationship between us and with the rest of the team. There are more people, we've never been alone. It was very beautiful to see that, despite a very similar way of understanding things, this is more evident in the quite obvious difference between these two women; in the difference of the stories that crosses them, but that are able to produce meaning despite/starting from this difference.
On November 26th, the results of the project Sete Anos Sete Escolas [Seven Years Seven Schools] developed with students from two professional schools of Porto will be presented. Can you share with us how this project has been built, collectively? Do you feel that it has contributed to a capacity building, an emancipation, even, of the participants as citizens?
Cláudia Dias: Sete Anos Sete Escolas project has been developed since the end of 2016. In the first two years, the project took place only in the city of Almada, in public schools. From 2018, it began to be implemented in the city of Porto. It is a project that aims to provide tools to students from public schools - whether professional, regular, or other formats - via artistic practices. We're not in school to train artists, that's not our goal. Our goal is to work with these young people to give them tools as citizens, enabling them towards a critical, conscious, alert thinking; to be capable of decoding and reading the various messages of daily life and the various existing media. To be by themselves defenders of democracy, in order to understand what the democratic system is; the importance of their participation and the risk of their resignation, especially in the global context we are living in, in which neo-fascisms are again knocking on our door. That's the big goal. In the context of this cycle [Sete Anos Sete Peças], which we now present at Teatro Campo Alegre, we are working in a condensed time frame with these students. We are working with students from different classes from both the Professional School of Campanhã and the Professional School Bento de Jesus Caraça. We started from the contents of Quinta-feira: Abracadabra and what we will watch on the 26th of November is the result of this work. Here, in Porto, we are not working with these schools to make a play with the students, but rather to transmit tools of contemporary artistic practices to create their own artistic object, which will be presented. This is our goal, which I think is very ambitious. We will contribute to bringing students closer to school, their context and training with, I would call it, contact or connection tools to different areas, where I feel that there is a disconnection. I feel that, in our scale, we can contribute to its effectiveness.
Idoia Zabaleta: In this case, we are working on Quinta-feira: Abracadabra. But there isn’t two women evoking a series of words, but sixteen young students. Therefore, if the words evoked by the women in the play would be, for example, "work" or "joy", the words that these sixteen young students evoke are "sadness" or "tiredness". I have less experience working with schools and this is something that is impacting me: to see these words evoked by young people between the age of 15 and 19, brought in as a need to be heard, perhaps. On the other hand, something that is impacting me is how much the buildings, the institutions, the spaces where we work configure the bodies that, in turn, configure the type of learning. This relationship with space, sound, building, material resources is something that comes to me very clearly in this project.
What world is still to be built with Sábado [Saturday] and Domingo [Sunday]? And which clues can the homonymous books presented on 19th November, at Teatro Campo Alegre, provide? Why did you decide to edit the book collection Sete Anos Sete Livros [Seven Years Seven Books] as part of this project?
Cláudia Dias: The idea for the creation of this satellite project to the main project, Sete Anos Sete Livros, came up from realizing that the texts produced in the context of contemporary dance are not as valued as the texts produced in the context of contemporary theatre, for example. And that's why I launched this challenge to Tiago Rodrigues, artistic director of the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II at the time, to launch this collection. The texts produced in the context of these five pieces would be edited, but added to an illustration work, by António Jorge Gonçalves, to allow this text not to be imprisoned within a book for future memory; and to become something else, through this dialogue with illustration. We've edited five books - of the five pieces - and now Sábado and Domingo are different. Sábado is a look at the Sete Anos Sete Peças project. It seemed to the team involved in the project –all the educators, but also the sociologists whom we worked with – that it was important to stop, look and reflect on everything that had happened in the project, opening it in other ways for the future and putting it in dialogue with other projects. Domingo was a look at the whole project, starting from the photographs that Karas – in his persona Gabriel Orlando – was taking in our tour. He was pointing the camera to the cities where we presented the project, which were several, but also, to our relations outside the context of the performances. From this material, we collected some photographs and wrote some texts on this material, in which Idoia also participated.
Idoia Zabaleta: Yes, I was invited to participate in the process of the book Domingo, which refers to the resting day of the week, where productivity is elsewhere, is off the pitch. And it's what this book is like, "off the field." It's about the process of creating this whole project. Parallel to these photographs, we did the job of choosing a word that would be summoned in these images and then go to work on how that word had different meanings, like a game! Depending on the perspective, the meaning changes and produces several meanings.
Cláudia Dias: This book also contains a text by Catarina Pires about a series of conversations we promoted at São Luiz Teatro Municipal (Lisbon) last year. We talked to people from various areas, such as economics and journalism, not about the project and the pieces themselves, but about the topics and issues raised. Therefore, there is also this “umbrella-text” about the mentioned talks that took place in São Luiz.
All the pieces in Sete Anos Sete Peças [Seven Years Seven Pieces] project are crossed by an urgency of building collectives. Can we see the project as a metaphor for the construction of democracy itself?
Cláudia Dias: This project, Sete Anos Sete Peças, definitely emerged from this idea of finding and building the collective. All my previous works were solos, because I was also in a phase of discovery of my own universe. In fact, with this project, I took a very first leap in this direction of collectives’ building process and also in the relationship with the social, political and economic context of Portugal — we’re talking about a period from 2016 until now. And if we look back, we are talking about years of a crisis, not only economic, but also political and social, where issues related to democracy — and I would say, perhaps, those less evident — were present. I felt this need, as an artist, to make my own statement about it. One of these most invisible questions was the narrative about the absence of a future. Our political leaders spoke of the lack of a future and an alternative. I realised this narrative was too violent for the people and I really wanted to start a project with the opposite message, conveying this possibility: futures are always at our hand and we always have the power to build them. We are the builders of the future. We don't need to have someone telling us how we're going to build our future. Therefore, it is an artistic project, obviously, but very impregnated with this force of collective building, of creating democratic relations, but, above all, of building the future.
How does the creative process relate to this urgency and with democratic practices, particularly in the dialogue with different artistic languages and different artists? How does Cláudia as artist dialogues with Cláudia as citizen?
Cláudia Dias: This project also started from a very specific direction: getting out of myself and going in the direction of the other – meeting the other. The whole device of the different pieces is based in idea of waiting, where two people meet face-to-face for the first time. Someone makes a gesture and then a whole process of creation is opened. I think this is a democratic gesture: to have two people, face-to-face, equally, creating from what each other brings, without any hierarchical creator-co-creator or creator-interpreter relation. It is an egalitarian device if you will. The piece results from what happens on that first date. This desire to go and meet the other resulted in meeting many others. Some of them with whom I already had complicity relationships, namely Idoia Zabaleta, with whom I had already worked on other projects. Idoia invited me to teach some workshops in the Basque Country and we also did a large project on artistic creation, via workshop, in this cornered part of the peninsula. Other people are, for example, Jaime Neves, who comes from muay thai, and was an interesting discovery, considering he is someone who comes from outside the artistic area; or Igor Gandra, who comes from another field more connected to the theatre of objects and puppetry, a field that I've wanted to work with for a long time; or Luca Bellezze, who comes from clown and street theatrical practice, a world completely different from mine; or others, such as António Jorge Gonçalves, who played an important role in the Sete Anos Sete Livros [Seven Years Seven Books] project, as well as the musicians, Vasco Vaz and Miguel Pedro, who come from music and were part of the last piece, Sexta-feira: o fim do mundo...ou então não [Friday: the end of the world...or not].
Idoia Zabaleta: I am pleased to participate in this fascinating project, with Cláudia on Quinta-feira: Abracadabra [Thursday: Abracadabra]. I got Thursday, that day of the week which is quite cheerful because it's almost weekend (laughs). We premiered this piece in 2019 in the Basque Country, and in 2020 it was presented in Portugal. Abracadabra refers to the ability to evoke action and power. The piece is about that: two women who tell stories. Once again there was a woman who meets another woman and tells her: "Give me something!”; and the other replies: "Take it all!". It's a play that tells stories. It summons the word and its ability to mobilize bodies. There is a in the words we say and embody. As Cláudia said, we met almost a decade ago at a workshop in Barcelona. When I saw her work, I realized that I wanted to work with her in the kind of approach to artistic practice that she proposed with a group of colleagues, with whom she developed a methodology of composition in real time. I knew clearly that I wanted to work with her in the Basque Country so that she could share in this context, where I work, this approach to artistic practice in order to foster and generate ideas in the [local artistic] tissue. Starting it from a possibility of collective practice, to work together, to be able to work together, through a way of non-being necessarily in agreement; of dissent; of a critical and self-critical positioning; and, from a place of distance.
Cláudia and her colleagues developed this methodology, a very clear system of working from this place of distance, even without fully agreeing on what was being defended, on the operation of the materials they were working with, but which still produced meaning.
This interested me in particular and, from there, we began our relationship, through this working methodology. And, well, I must say that [Cláudia] is a person with whom I have learned a lot regarding the rigor of artistic practice, in an understanding that it is the materials, the things that are being produced, that have a potential for action and of summoning meaning, more than what may or may not interest each one of us.
In Quinta-feira: Abracadabra, this happens in a certain way in the relationship between us and with the rest of the team. There are more people, we've never been alone. It was very beautiful to see that, despite a very similar way of understanding things, this is more evident in the quite obvious difference between these two women; in the difference of the stories that crosses them, but that are able to produce meaning despite/starting from this difference.
On November 26th, the results of the project Sete Anos Sete Escolas [Seven Years Seven Schools] developed with students from two professional schools of Porto will be presented. Can you share with us how this project has been built, collectively? Do you feel that it has contributed to a capacity building, an emancipation, even, of the participants as citizens?
Cláudia Dias: Sete Anos Sete Escolas project has been developed since the end of 2016. In the first two years, the project took place only in the city of Almada, in public schools. From 2018, it began to be implemented in the city of Porto. It is a project that aims to provide tools to students from public schools - whether professional, regular, or other formats - via artistic practices. We're not in school to train artists, that's not our goal. Our goal is to work with these young people to give them tools as citizens, enabling them towards a critical, conscious, alert thinking; to be capable of decoding and reading the various messages of daily life and the various existing media. To be by themselves defenders of democracy, in order to understand what the democratic system is; the importance of their participation and the risk of their resignation, especially in the global context we are living in, in which neo-fascisms are again knocking on our door. That's the big goal. In the context of this cycle [Sete Anos Sete Peças], which we now present at Teatro Campo Alegre, we are working in a condensed time frame with these students. We are working with students from different classes from both the Professional School of Campanhã and the Professional School Bento de Jesus Caraça. We started from the contents of Quinta-feira: Abracadabra and what we will watch on the 26th of November is the result of this work. Here, in Porto, we are not working with these schools to make a play with the students, but rather to transmit tools of contemporary artistic practices to create their own artistic object, which will be presented. This is our goal, which I think is very ambitious. We will contribute to bringing students closer to school, their context and training with, I would call it, contact or connection tools to different areas, where I feel that there is a disconnection. I feel that, in our scale, we can contribute to its effectiveness.
Idoia Zabaleta: In this case, we are working on Quinta-feira: Abracadabra. But there isn’t two women evoking a series of words, but sixteen young students. Therefore, if the words evoked by the women in the play would be, for example, "work" or "joy", the words that these sixteen young students evoke are "sadness" or "tiredness". I have less experience working with schools and this is something that is impacting me: to see these words evoked by young people between the age of 15 and 19, brought in as a need to be heard, perhaps. On the other hand, something that is impacting me is how much the buildings, the institutions, the spaces where we work configure the bodies that, in turn, configure the type of learning. This relationship with space, sound, building, material resources is something that comes to me very clearly in this project.
What world is still to be built with Sábado [Saturday] and Domingo [Sunday]? And which clues can the homonymous books presented on 19th November, at Teatro Campo Alegre, provide? Why did you decide to edit the book collection Sete Anos Sete Livros [Seven Years Seven Books] as part of this project?
Cláudia Dias: The idea for the creation of this satellite project to the main project, Sete Anos Sete Livros, came up from realizing that the texts produced in the context of contemporary dance are not as valued as the texts produced in the context of contemporary theatre, for example. And that's why I launched this challenge to Tiago Rodrigues, artistic director of the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II at the time, to launch this collection. The texts produced in the context of these five pieces would be edited, but added to an illustration work, by António Jorge Gonçalves, to allow this text not to be imprisoned within a book for future memory; and to become something else, through this dialogue with illustration. We've edited five books - of the five pieces - and now Sábado and Domingo are different. Sábado is a look at the Sete Anos Sete Peças project. It seemed to the team involved in the project –all the educators, but also the sociologists whom we worked with – that it was important to stop, look and reflect on everything that had happened in the project, opening it in other ways for the future and putting it in dialogue with other projects. Domingo was a look at the whole project, starting from the photographs that Karas – in his persona Gabriel Orlando – was taking in our tour. He was pointing the camera to the cities where we presented the project, which were several, but also, to our relations outside the context of the performances. From this material, we collected some photographs and wrote some texts on this material, in which Idoia also participated.
Idoia Zabaleta: Yes, I was invited to participate in the process of the book Domingo, which refers to the resting day of the week, where productivity is elsewhere, is off the pitch. And it's what this book is like, "off the field." It's about the process of creating this whole project. Parallel to these photographs, we did the job of choosing a word that would be summoned in these images and then go to work on how that word had different meanings, like a game! Depending on the perspective, the meaning changes and produces several meanings.
Cláudia Dias: This book also contains a text by Catarina Pires about a series of conversations we promoted at São Luiz Teatro Municipal (Lisbon) last year. We talked to people from various areas, such as economics and journalism, not about the project and the pieces themselves, but about the topics and issues raised. Therefore, there is also this “umbrella-text” about the mentioned talks that took place in São Luiz.
© DR
