Des-Vânia-ecer
With winter at the doors and after more than two weeks of plays, performances, workshops and seminars, Lisbon’s Alkantara Festival 2022 draws to a close, leaving behind a constellation of thought-provoking works that, just like Vânia Doutel Vaz’ The Elephant in the Room, were capable of opening up fields of meaning in our minds and forcing us to reconsider our role of spectators in the contemporary theatrical ecosystem.
Darkness. A purple carpet delimits the stage. The performer is already there, sitting on a chair in the rear, waiting for the audience to settle in, for the lights to softly grow, for a microphone to bloom in her hand, for words to start flowing and for alternatives to begin multiplying. «This show could have been different», admits the Portuguese-born Angolan dancer and choreographer Vânia Doutel Vaz, opening up to the public a whole array of performative possibilities that accompany us along a flower-clad, meta-theatrical discourse of both deep pungency and gravitas.
As a matter of fact, The Elephant in the Room, which premiered in Lisbon’s Teatro do Bairro Alto as part of the Alkantara Festival 2022 after two residencies in Paris’ La Fabrique Chaillot and in the Lusitanian Espaço Alkantara, is a solo in which the artist «shows what she is, what she could have been, and what she has decided not to be», thus disassembling the very idea of performance into its most essential parts so as to stimulate an exploration of privilege, artistic power structures and observer-observed relationships: how do we create and share an experience? How do we build an identity? What is expected of a performer and, when these expectations are not met, what are the consequences? «The saying “there’s an elephant in the room” is a relatively common expression. Can we picture what an elephant in the room is? A fully-grown elephant would quite likely put a hole through the roof. Even a baby elephant would have some trouble going unnoticed. […] What are these elephants that we try to ignore?».
By playing with words, identities and different somatic scores, Doutel Vaz sneaks into commonplaces only to come out from their interstices of sense with sarcasm, revealing the briefest doors of any other fracture, which she then expands like a secret heard for the first time. Even though The Elephant in the Room heavily relies on discourse to make its point, the body is never far behind, representing perhaps that one and only question that an answer can never extinguish. Indeed, by shedding petal after petal, the performer from Setubal reveals yet another possibility «for a plural and fragmented elephant», another syllable inside her hands that adds up to this proverbial «something that we cannot ignore».
And when the 70-minute-long, openly provocative artistic and political research of how meaning and identity are constructed within a performative framework comes to an end, it is a pleasure to discover that the once immaculate stage is now crossed by stranger, palpable echoes of «oscillating multiplicities and resilient possibilities» that escape any attempt of definition, thus leaving the audience with the utterly postdramatic responsibility and joy of interpreting whatever happened between these walls and seats and gaps.
The show was played within Alkantara Festival 2022
Teatro do Bairro Alto
rua Ten. Raul Cascais 1A – Lisbon
from Friday 25 to Sunday 27 November 2022
21:00the Alkantara Festival 2022 presents
O Elefante no Meio da Sala / The Elephant in the Room
by Vânia Doutel Vazconceived, created and performed by Vânia Doutel Vaz
dramaturgy Josefa Pereira
light and technical director Leticia Skrycky
sound Tiago Cerqueira
costumes Nina Botkay
stage space Leticia Skrycky in collaboration with Nina Botkay
photos Patrícia Black
residency collaborators Adriana João, Artur Pispalhas, Josefa Pereira, Luara Learth, Piny, Nina Botkay
produced by Alkantara
coproduced by Teatro do Bairro Alto, Teatro Municipal do Porto / DDD – Festival Dias da Dança, A Oficina / Centro Cultural Vila Flor Residencies Alkantara, Casa da Dança, O Espaço do Tempo, Estúdios Victor Córdon/OPART, La Fabrique Chaillot
thanks Rui Horta, Josseline Black, Ana Trincão, Giovanni Lourençoproject supported by the residency program “La Fabrique Chaillot” – Chaillot- Théâtre National de la Danse (Paris) and Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian
