Kidnapped

Departing from the idea of theater as a tool for depicting and influencing notions of reality, Rodrigo’s latest research reflects upon an assumed contemporary reality (or realism), born from the Post-Modern Era, which has evolved over the past six decades under the sway of the Neoliberal Regime and the misleading promises of free market, individual subjectivity, and privatization of life, leaving us with a landscape marked by collective hallucinations that challenge established understanding of truth, casting a pervasive shadow of doubt on our collective beliefs.

In this context, the project metaphorizes that in our illusory world of neoliberal "freedom," we are all kidnapped. Kidnapped by ideologies, identities, technologies, political systems, predatory relationships, capital, structural inequalities... In other words, we are kidnapped by the rooted subconscious of colonialism and capitalism, caught between the concrete – and daily – absurdity of globalized macro-politics and the abstract – often elitist – desire for solutions in the micropolitical realm.

To navigate through it, Rodrigo is delving into an overflow of several contemporary topics and translating it into theatrical language, to produce a theater piece that can be compared to a mixtape: an affective and multilayered compilation of distinct scenes/tracks/topics. Think of it as a form of "variety theater" that will, through the composition of theater, video, music, propaganda, and tragedy, reveal fragments of political realities and their consequent realism, while simultaneously provoking within the audience a palpable sense of urgency, encouraging them to "awaken" from both secularized and contemporary hypnosis.