The Magdalena Project

[helen]

MagDaLENa
oppressed women’s body & theatre

Magdalena is a theatrical experience addressed to women interested in or/and practitioners of Theatre of the Oppressed. We are going to explore paths of esthetic expression and narratives starting from women body: mirror of desires, vehicle of emotions, witness of human. At the last century and beginning of the new one, woman body passed through radical changes both in physical existence and symbolic realm. The workshop concerns either real and subjective relations (of autonomy, health, emancipation, discrimination and oppression) as well as mediated and fictional representation of woman body (new symbols of happiness, expectations, seductions and current obsessions).

Female body, rather than male body, has played as a real battleground among ancestral patriarchal habits and protection of fundamental human rights. Such a condition implies wounds, contradictions and a huge array of meanings.

What is it
This experience is part of the Residence Prize of Italian theatre director Alessandra Vannucci in Centro Teatro do Oprimido (CTO-Rio de Janeiro), conceded by Brazilian Government through the Culture Ministry - Funarte as a “Prêmio de Interações Estéticas – Residências em Pontos de Cultura”. As CTO is active in all national territory as well as in African lusofone countries, this prize will be realized in 2010 through 4 main theatre laboratories with women interested in theme or TO practitioners, in Crato (brasilian northeast), Rio de Janeiro, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique in coalition with institutional and private local partners. Alessandra Vannucci is a well-known artist acting in Brasil and Italy (sites leoesdecirco.com.br, teatrocargo.it) with a long practice in TO method and Augusto Boal, mentor with whom she worked in France, Italy and Brazil. She’s actually applying to a theoric-practical research about performing art and violence against women’s body. All the Magdalena process will be accompanied by Barbara Santos, “curinga” or specialist practitioner of TO, supervisor of “Teatro do Oprimido de Ponto a Ponto” for CTO-Rio and realized in partnership with TO groups in Brazil and Africa.

Ending the process, in may 2010, Magdalena will realize a seminar (“Madalena ocupa a Lapa”) calling all participant and public for a two-days occupation of a huge square in Rio de Janeiro, with debates, work-arts exhibitions, performance festival with all women partners and participants, dance and music. At this time will be presented a review (Metaxis) and a video-documentary (Madalena) about the experience.

Concept
Almost everything can be transformed in aesthetic material. Starting from “scenic objects” (music, images, histories, statistics, proverbs, slogans, gestures and movements) created by women participants, we’re going to build up a flow of conflicting actions in order to reveal gender power relations both in private and public life. Accordingly, the aim of workshop will therefore consist in a performance, rather than in a conventional play, in a multiplication of art’s production means (artistic consciousness) rather than in a single product (art-piece). Insofar as it allows the meeting between artists and public, theatre is a profitable territory for discussing gender predicament through specific artistic means: by enacting, within a unique movement, materials and symbolic form of oppression and lived emotions, it suggests strategies of transformation. The aim is women empowerment in a renewed self-consciousness of female gender, in our time of crises and contradictions but as well of research of non-oppressed models of citizenship as peace oportunities: “reinventing Magdalene”.

Magdalena Lab
Alessandra Vannucci, Barbara Santos

http://ctorio.org.br/novosite/2010/01/madalena-o-teatro-das-oprimidas/

Alessandra Vannucci
alevannucci@gmail.com
mob brasil +552182363765
mob italy +393335746098
skype alevannucci

Barbara Santos
Supervisor
barbarasantos@ctorio.org.br
Centro de Teatro do Oprimido • CTO • Teatro do Oprimido de Ponto a Ponto
Av. Mem de Sá, 31 – Lapa, Rio de Janeiro / RJ – BRASIL • CEP 20.230-150
+ 55 21 2232-5826 / 2215-0503 • www.ctorio.org.br • ctorio@ctorio.org.br