2021
APOKÁLYPSIS brings the triangular encounter-confrontation between the apocalyptic thinking of the Jewish-Christian tradition, the Shakespearean characters Hamlet and Ophelia and a contemporary global scenario of socio-political and ecological catastrophic threats. Faced with these out-of-axis realities, each ground articulates, through film and the body, the existential tension “between being and non-being” and presents poetic ‘revelations’ (apocalypses) experienced on the threshold between denial and affirmation of life. As a whole, the APOKÁLYPSIS project emphasizes through a plurimedial approach – dance, theater, literature, painting, film – the creative and ethical function of the arts in the face of a historical situation that calls into question the very conditions of life on Earth.
APOKÁLYPSIS is composed of three films based theater-choreographic solos:
Ophelia [Te]Chthonics, (30 min), starring Brazilian actress and dancer Mônica Cristina Bernardes, stages a dive into the industrial exploration of the depths of the Earth, a planet reduced to a fossil resource by a capitalist ideology of techno-scientific progress.
Hamlet in Necropolis (40 min), with the Mozambican dancer Jorge Ndlozy, is a rite of redeeming the death of victims of the Covid-19 pandemic, and a poetic protest against a disastrous government health policy.
Ophelia in Ansenuza (35 min), with Argentine painter-performer Candelaria Silvestro, evokes the uniqueness, beauty and delicacy of a South American ecosystem in danger of destruction: the Mar Chiquita lagoon (Mar de Ansenuza) and, with it, the its most emblematic inhabitant, the flamingo.
The theater-choreographic performances, directed by Maura Baiocchi and with texts by the German author and director Wolfgang Pannek, move at the interface between the body, audiovisual arts, poetry and philosophy.
APOKÁLYPSIS is Taanteatro Companhia’s cultural counterpart to the Proac Expresso Lei Aldir Blanc – for History in Dance Award (2020).