Alex Cassal & Paula Diogo

In 2100, the world may have lost half of its languages: of the 7000 currently spoken, 50% are not expected to survive by the end of the century. As they head to extinction, they carry with them stories, knowledge, identities, differences. In Portugal, the Portuguese Sign Language, Minderico, Aragonês, Barranquenho and Mirandês, among others, are in jeopardy. During the creation of “A Menor Língua do Mundo” [The World’s Smallest Language], the team travelled across several regions, arranging meetings between a cross-disciplinary group of artists and people who still bear the memory and usage of some of those languages: Minderico, Mirandês and Barranquenho. The aim was to look into what those languages can and wish to say today. We pictured a troupe crossing several territories of a post-apocalyptical future, stubbornly presenting a variety show with what they had gathered in their journey: jokes and songs, burlesque choreographies and epic poems, scholarly references and tamed animals.


Alex Cassal was born in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1967. He has a degree in history from the State University of Rio de Janeiro. He is a theatre director, playwright and actor. He is part of the Brazilian group Foguetes Maravilha, which has staged plays such as “Ele precisa começar” [He Needs to Begin], “Ninguém falou que seria fácil” [Nobody Said It Would Be Easy] and “Síndrome de Chimpanzé” [Chimpanzee Syndrome]. He worked with artists such as Enrique Diaz, Gustavo Ciríaco, Alice Ripoll, Dani Lima, Michelle Moura and the Dimenti group in Brazil, and with Tiago Rodrigues, Cláudia Gaiolas, Paula Diogo, Marco Paiva and Sofia Dias & Vítor Roriz in Portugal.

Paula Diogo was born in Lisbon, in 1977. She has a bachelor’s degree from the Lisbon Theatre and Film School and a master’s degree in performing arts from the Iceland Academy of the Arts, which she completed with scholarships from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the GDA Foundation. She co-founded Teatro Praga (1995-2008), TRUTA (2003-2010) and the production company O Pato Profissional (2003-2010), where she created and performed, and whose production she coordinated. In 2009, she started developing Má-Criação with an informal group of artists, focusing on performance and theatre collaborative projects. In recent years, they have regularly worked with artists Alfredo Martins, Cláudia Gaiolas, Alex Cassal and Alexander Kelly, seeking to bring together creators of different artistic and geographical origins.
 

• SEPTEMBER • 28 — 29 
Co-Presentation
With Festival Materiais Diversos