I work with movements, not words, which makes it increasingly difficult to write about my pieces. However, I often use words as a starting point, as a means and even as an end. I nearly always end up eliminating them from the performers’ mouths, or silencing the authors. Not this time: the words written by Gonçalo M. Tavares appear in the show, not to be spoken, but read out. The strength of their presence is therefore different – these are words that cannot be heard, but that nonetheless guide the viewer.
The Three Brothers is a project of will: working with a small cast, after various pieces with casts made up of over ten performers; working from a text by Gonçalo M. Tavares, an author whose universe I have always wanted to dive into; working on the here and now. Only I never imagined that the here and now would be this which we are currently experiencing. I challenged Gonçalo M. Tavares to write about “family matters” for the dancers Dinis Duarte, Paulo Mota and Valter Fernandes. We quickly concluded that it would be a family of three brothers and that the action would be about this present full of absence. For example, the absence of people who have since died and whom we were unable to say goodbye to. It wasn’t my desire to portray this reality-fiction that we live in, and perhaps that’s why I preferred to stay somehow in the past, when contact and touch were still possible for us. The Three Brothers speaks to us of family, of the past and of the present. We now live in an anomaly and not a new normality, and the family is the safest and most fragile thing we have. As Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
By Victor Hugo Pontes