Esta hora de espanto

For Esta hora de espanto, Tiago Mesquita Carvalho writes: ‘The river of history flows by and everyone dives into it to get to where it leads. The old world is still drenched in the last rays of the setting sun and although the words sing, the ruin grows, the night advances.’

This piece, in the tone of a choreodrama, takes up the body as and in the landscape, something that runs through much of my work, to summon up limiting and radical images of a foreseeable future of catastrophe. It is also the landscape at the limit of its transformation that interests us, particularly in the radical of catastrophes and the apocalyptic. In Ballast (2015), under a strange sky, the bodies occupied a place, generating their routine and their connections. In this choreographic piece, the movements of the bodies, together with the scenic device, created the theatrical place: a changing place, a place that is made of memory. In Esta hora de espanto some of these notions are once again materialised through the body and the text, a fiction written by Tiago Mesquita Carvalho. Based on the images of catastrophes, the questions of the body and its limits, of figuration and disfigurement in dance are revisited. Fear, a vague understanding of things, unpredictability and the radical nature of catastrophes are all present in this tale where the characters reveal and destroy themselves.

Né Barros