Diptych: “Matamatá” and "Life is not useful or It is what it is"

The Diptych project Matamatá and Life is not useful or It is what it is, a trio and a solo respectively, is a deployment of a personal research on the marvellous.

© Bruno Freire
© Bruno Freire

What if Descartes or Bento Espinosa had arrived at the tropical rainforest? Matamatá begins with this speculation. The background of the dance piece is the fictional idea of a philosopher confronted with another landscape, putting his thoughts under scrutiny. In the tropic the reality is already marvellous, there is an abundant profusion of life, more than a thousand embryos of gestures, where the heat fails the thoughts, where everything we eat and touch constantly reminds us we are our bodies.

During this residency, accompanied by three dancers, we’ll work on whispering, singing, and eating while dancing the narrative poem Catatau by Paulo Leminski, a tropicalist and barrocodelyc poet known for his James Joyce style, in which the fiction of Descartes' travel to Brazil is narrated. The intention is to become words, words, worlds.

Regarding the title, it should be noted that it has a few different meanings: Matamatá is a "clumsy constructed chelonian of hideous aspect. It looks like some beast from a fantastical fauna, created by a whimsical god”, as described by science communicator Eurico Santos in the first half of the XX century. A carnivorous turtle with a flat and triangular head, living in lagoons and calm water areas of the Amazon, subject to an ecological crime by aquarium collectors in Europe and US who import it illegally. It’s also the name of a tropical tree. In English, matamata is a headland, a narrow piece of land that projects from a coastline into the sea, a peninsula. Mata in Portuguese is another way of saying forest, but it is also the imperative verb to kill (to kill = matar); and mata-mata is also the last moment of the football game when a goal is enough to end the match (editor's note: sudden death).

We are about to lose a global match, and we are probably the last generation that can resist to avoid a major climate catastrophe; there is no one else, only us. Facing the zeitgeist of our time, as a choreographic artist I ask myself: how will we find joy and pleasure in order not to fall into melancholic and eco-climatic anguish? How do we make a dance to postpone the end of a world?

We'll start from bodily fabulations to perhaps make the audience's thoughts dance.

By: Bruno Freire (BE/BR) — Dancers: under construction — Body practice: Thiago Antunes (BE/BR) — Sound design: Ricardo Vincenzo (BR) — Light design: Estelle Gautier (FR) — Production Entropie Production (BE) — Coproduction: Charleroi danse, centre chorégraphique de Wallonie – Bruxelles, Théâtre de la Balsamine — With the support of: Bourse à la recherche - Charleroi danse, centre chorégraphique de Wallonie – Bruxelles, Bourse à l’expérimentation - Service de la Danse de la Fédération Wallonie – Bruxelles, Festival International BAM (Siby/Bamako - Mali), Santarcangelo Festival (Italy), workspaceBrussels, BUDA (Kortrijk)? La Cigalière (Sérignan- France).

Artist

Residencies

29.11.2022 - 04.12.2022

Kaaistudio's

14.11.2022 - 20.11.2022

Kaaistudio's