Lamento Imenso | Retrospectiva is a project that will mark, in a more critical than celebrating manner, the 20th anniversary of Vou A Tua Casa/I Go To Your House (2003-06), a series of performances in unusual places, and the educational, curatorial, academic and gastronomic sub-projects that came after it. Throughout the next 3 years (2023-26), I will prepare and organize a diptych of retrospective publications around those projects. In parallel, I will devise a new stage work, elaborating on a memorial post-Vou A Tua Casa narrative through the (queer) exercise of failure. In opposition to a merely celebrating discourse, I intend to talk about everything that has gone wrong, creating an epistolary narrative where notions of intimacy, privacy, representation, co-participation, documentation, memory, authorship, commitment, domesticity, relationality, objectuality/residuality, reality/fiction, art/life and auto/bio/graphy, among others, thoroughly tackled by Vou A Tua Casa, will co-inhabit a new tensional storyline, revealing and amplifying the universal matters that bring closer and/or turn away artists, artworks and audiences. Formally, the new performance will be based on a semi-autobiographic text, inspired by an archive of memories and a process of exchanging of correspondence with new observers, but also the artists and thinkers that have been following my practice over the course of the last two decades. It is a performance in the form of a lament, inspired by the fragile, poetic experience behind hundreds of personal and intransmissible encounters performed with spectators and other agents. I went to your house, you came to mine, and we also met on the way to each other’s places; time has come for us to meet again, but this time in neutral territory, asking again why we are here and what are the things we have to tell each other. Do we still remember? This retrospective performance (and the books that complement it) will aim to answer the inevitable question: can Vou A Tua Casa (and, ultimately, its author) make amends with the theatre stage that it tragically rejected two decades ago?
Credits
Script, dramaturgy and performance
Rogério Nuno Costa
Collaboration
Susana Mendes Silva
Light and video design
João Pedro Fonseca
Music
João Pedro Costa
Graphic design and illustration
Jani Nummela
Co-production
Festival Citemor
Co-production Residency
O Espaço do Tempo
Support
Teatro Académico Gil Vicente, Teatro Praga, Galeria Municipal de Arte de Almada, Inestética Companhia Teatral/Programa Artistas no Palácio, Câmara Municipal de Vila Franca de Xira, Circular – Festival de Artes Performativas de Vila do Conde, Festival Paragem, New Theatre Helsinki, Svenska Teatern, Post Theatre Collective.
Performance artist, theatre director, writer, researcher, pedagogue and curator based in Helsinki and Porto. His cross-disciplinary projects explore the fields of theatre, dance, visual arts, literature and philosophy, with a special interest in the creation of objects that intersect art and research (lecture-performances) and other hybrid formats. Academic background in Communication Sciences, Art History and Contemporary Culture. Collaborates with many artists and companies, taking the roles of artistic consultant, dramaturgist, editor, co-director and performer: Teatro Praga, Estrutura, Ballet Contemporâneo do Norte, Lúcia Sigalho, Mariana Tengner Barros, Susana Mendes Silva, Patrícia Portela, Sónia Baptista, Parasita, among others. Has been teaching in independent art schools and lecturing in academic institutions such as Escola Superior de Artes e Design (Caldas da Rainha), ArtEZ University of the Arts (Arnhem) and Minho University (Guimarães), where he has coordinated a theatre/performance seminar within the Theatre programme (2014-2020). Collaborator of the Performance Studies Research Group at the Centre for Humanistic Studies (Braga) and Artist Pedagogy Research at University of the Arts (Helsinki). Has been writing experimental essays and other texts for his own independent publications and in collaboration with many editorial projects: Artinsite, Flanzine, Cadernos da Dança, Intermagazine, Retina, Gerador, Sinais de Cena, ViCCA Journal (Aalto University), Cuidados Intensivos (Circular Festival), Re-Thinking Dance/E-motional (Gabriela Tudor Foundation), Coleção Olhares, A Sala, Recurso (Estrutura), Histories of Dance (Teatro Municipal do Porto) and Coreia newspaper (Parasita). His work has been produced, co-produced and supported by: Advancing Performing Arts Project, Festival Temps d’Images, Alkantara, Centro Cultural de Belém, Binaural, Circular Festival, Teatro Viriato, Nomad Dance Academy, Tanzfabrik, Gabriela Tudor Foundation, Teatro Municipal do Porto, Museu de Serralves, Museu Coleção Berardo, Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, Festival Citemor, Là-Bas, m-cult, Aalto University, Museum of Impossible Forms, New Theatre Helsinki, Transforma, Atelier Real, Dancekiosk, D. Maria II National Theatre, among others. Currently, an Associated Artist at O Espaço do Tempo (Montemor-o-Novo). Member of Globe Art Point (Helsinki). Guest artist-researcher in the EU-funded project STAGES – Sustainable Theatre Alliance for a Green Environmental Shift (2023-25). Starting in 1999, his work has already been shown in Portugal, France, UK, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Croatia, Finland, Romania, USA and Canada.