Lígia Soares

2008 BIRDS AND WIND

2008-06-13T02:46:00.000-07:00

In my works, where the fields of dance and theatre normally get into tight competition, I sometimes start from writing in order to, subsequently, create and stage the movement; some other times, I start from the creation of movement or actions and eventually write a piece.

This time, I started by sitting and writing.

And from the desire of seeing one day this text becoming a theatre play, I sat in front of the computer as if in front of the public.Disturbed by the expectation this idea originated in me, I wrote: I can stand to sit before you, but I owe that to my skills of abstraction.(...)

BIRDS AND WIND is a project for a solo performance that seeks to annulate the representation, in the sense that all the events on stage are real consequences of a process raised by a network of expectations. Though the expectation here is of pure form and doesn’t actually “expect” anything, being exclusively a powerful instigator of speech.

conception/ text/ interpretation: Lígia Soares music: excerpt of Musique pour Cordes, Percussion et Celesta, Béla Bartók , Detroit Symphony,A. Dorati.

This piece premiered in Berlin at the HAU 1 in the context of the 100° Festival and was presented in the Institut Franco –Portugais in Lisbon

2007 MY SPECIALITY by Lígia Soares and MY SPECIFITY by Andresa Soares

2008-06-13T02:15:00.000-07:00

Andresa Soares and Lígia Soares were born in the same year, in the same day in Lisbon and they are sisters.

About this, a lot could be said but nothing that they cannot contest, as holders of a phenomenon which refers only to them, living among them - the fact of sharing the same lifetime, the same birth place and of appearantly featuring more similarities than differences.

To draw frontiers and to set territories is, for the both artists, not only a crucial condition to their individual experience, but also a pratice explored at a more complex level, the artistic - their ‘likeness’ creating a representation of the human being that can provide a basis from which every single variation, becomes clearly visible in its singularity.

In previous collaborations (2004 and 2006) the artists explored the potential of simultaneity.After these two works the artists have at last decided to inhabit the borderline previously drawn on stage, assuming an incontestable common aspect, their physical similitude, which will be used as the only cooperation, so that they can prove their singularity.

MY SPECIALITY by Lígia Soares

In contrast to the white I felt myself especially dark. I am the sharp pencil with which I describe the contours of my hand, of each one of its five fingers. I am the white pencil that engraves the indubitable black of my special way of being. Vibrant black, infinite, and so different from the other hand, the left one. In the dark and in the silence I become especially audible and shining, not by any special reason but even so, whithout any reason, brilliant. I am the distinct confusion I share with my own self. I am the black print on the white paper, the red on the chiaroscuro, the almond tree in the cherry-orchard, I am the sunny day in the winter, the secret of my mystery, the road without bifurcations, the curve of the set-square, the hunger without stomach, I am your chaos, everything else has an order, a logic, a reason of being, me not. Me, in particular, I don’t have a reason of being, at least under my sight, under this particular way of looking at. I am the anti-process, the essential nonsense, the absolut renegade, the drifting fragment, gone astray, the original residue, the element without pairs, a composition without components, the crumb without bread.
I am the anti-analysis, the concrete, the unremovable, the unsharable, the building without doors nor windows, I am the glass’s transparency where the flies insist on beating. Tap, tap, tap, tap, it’s not me, it’s them, I don’t reverberate, only in case of desperation, I do not influence, I don’t transmit, I press, oppress, knead, mix ingredients behind the door, take it, that’s the speciality of the house.

MY SPECIFICITY by Andresa Soares

I, therefore, intend to propose myself to execute – not without obviously having, in advance, conceived (conception itself that derivates, never from a banal one, but from a specific, so to speak, inspiration : state of youthful grace and fresh wisdom, like rushes which in the wind’s oscillation intermezzo line themselves up into an ephemerous and memorable harmony disclosing the beyond worlds … with the sight of a hawk that, having landed, still overflies… - a masterpiece.
Precisely a masterpiece, not any piece – subsequently specific, singular, original and, clearly, unique.
I’m going, no doubt about it, to execute, or better, to construct, to produce or to generate with the innocence of the primordial action, with the passion of a first love, with the devotion of all this History’s mothers and the intelligence of all the deepest solitude… Not to create “one” but “the” Masterpiece, as soon as I find and also possess, so to speak – as soon as I get in my possession the necessary or indispensable conditions, both exterior and interior, as the discovery of a sheet of the finest white paper which, from so much light, fascinates, which from so much nobility in its matter absorbs everything that is of beauty and of good…

At this moment I will enthusiasticly and vehemently pass to the concretization – in better words, to the creation of the Masterpiece. It should be noted that the piece does not intend to be something special - in spite of the colours that subtly defy the rainbow’s tones, of the delicate form whose parts passionately hug themselves in a whole that reflects all the beauty of a world, being so specific that it belongs to all as to each one – carrying however the possibilitiy of becoming it at the sight of someone who perceives it - however I do not intend or divine that it has to be according to this way. It is my will for the masterpiece to be, yes, specific!
In the same way that it is my own will and, I assure you, myself. Not particularly, of course, as I expect you to be specific as well so as not to find myself alone in this. I will therefore count on your specificity, that is, on the specificity of each one of you, it doesn’t matter who specifically.

Conception/interpretation Andresa and Lígia Soares Music Joao Lucas Scenical Space Sara de La Féria Costumes Joao Paulo Assuncao Movement Assistance Madalena Silva

Presented in Instituto Franco-Portugais (Lisbon) and Festival Fabrikationen-07 (Tanzfabrik - Berlin)

MONSTERS I by Lígia Soares and MONSTERS II by Andresa Soares

2008-06-13T01:24:00.000-07:00

After several collaborations, the authors started to nourish one for the other (maybe from spending too much time together) a suspicion of monstruosity.

Equally suspecting the surrounding apathy, mainly fed by a generalized need of safety, they can only believe that somewhere hides something to be feared of, otherwhise this need of safety would itself be an aberration - an existence vaguely human in a life without soul, a path through this limb which is neither life nor death.
In this space between the belief and the reason, prompted by fear or boredom, the fact is that the step into the unknown imposes itself. As a reply to these signals, the artists decided to create, instead of a project, a presage, and instead of a show, a funfair attraction, believing that calling things by their names can break the spell.

“The frontier beyond which our human identity desintegrates itself is drawn within us and we don’t know where.” José Gil in Monstros

Monsters I by Lígia Soares

Of the bad ones, of the big ones, of the crooked ones, of the ones that are better than me- I have suspicions- it wouldn’t be possible within the limits of humanity, the stronger ones, the weaker so weak that rather ressemble dead, of those I eventually take advantage of but just to test my strength, of the ones that say to agree with me, as well, to prevent them of becoming iluded, of the scepticals because they certainly have something to hide, and of the innocents, of the brutality of their purity. From the primitives which are the ones who are yet meant to be both men and animal, from the possessives, who are anything else but the predator’s sublimation, I run away. Of the ones who intelectualize too much, as in them I can’t find any reference to the natural, of the ones who think twice before doing and so denote at leats two ideas they didn’t dare to demonstrate, of the impulsives because I never feel ready for them and so they frighten me, of the welldressed ones because they must be disguised, and of the badly dressed as the clothes are like a second skin that mirrors the soul. We must be carefull more than anything else with the tolerants, those frighten me to death as would terrify the silence before a crime being comited. All of them I went on learning how to tolerate as an accomplice in a collective crime where nobody kills anything else than himself. Remains the memory of the fear, as a secret desire of stupidity (as knowledge wouldn’t allow it anymore) though it subsists, inspite of being neverless fascinating because without sense. Ahhh...such a wish to conquer stupidity, a new place where I could lean on as leans a potatoe that, in the course of time, raised an amazing sprout and with its own putricity contaminated all the sack.

Monsters II by Andresa Soares

Let us have suspicion on everything that is beautifull, on perfection, on happiness, because like an easy bait – and by the natural logic, the logic of the envy and of the social justice – it is a presage of evil: a hairy hand approaches the sweet and fresh innocence to grab it between forefinger and thumb with the intention to deflower; a luxurious and fresh landscape will certainly become a dense web of tenebrous shades as soon as the moon relieves the sun; a story with a happy beginning can only keep being a story if given the usual catastrophy; let us be reasonable and suspect perfection... if it ever existed...

Here bad faith does not exist

I only pretend to be normal

For what is beautiful dazzles

Everything that is mortal

Let us therefore be suspicious, we are human, it is vital!

Thus, yet carefully, let us suspect monters as well!

As behind beauty creeps a monster, what the hell! let beauty be found in the monster!

conception/ interpretation Andresa and Lígia Soares; music Joao Lucas Andresa’s costume Joao Paulo Assuncao Lígias’s costume Sara de La Féria ; scenic space Sara de La Féria

Presented in CCB- Centro Cultural de Belém and Intitut Franco-Portugais (Lisbon)

2005 AT THE ORIGINS OF THE CRISIS

2008-06-12T16:22:00.001-07:00

Ok. I am ready. I’m a blank page, a tabula rasa, you can build on me, come on build on me, you can build on me, build on me…

This project takes as its theme the existential aspects of the origins of a crisis. Working solo, was developed a character whose identity is fragmented by constant dialogues with him self.

The story begins when the character has reached an awareness of the meaninglessness of his existence, and therefore cannot fit anymore into any given reality. His failure to either integrate into or escape from reality keeps him from feeling any commitment to it. Thus all his existence will be justified by this precarious link to reality and by the drama of not finding a recognizable identity. He finds himself standing on an impossible ground of a reality that was there before him (having not considered him in its foundation).

The texts in the piece dramatize this condition of existence, struggling to find the answers that would justify the presence of this character, as a person, in this space and in this time. The movement takes an abstract character, not through any aesthetic proposal, but because the action always fails to lead the causes to their consequences, like a theater play that always fails its narrative.

Conception/interpretation Lígia Soares Text Lígia Soares and Thierry Deccotignies Video Andresa Soares

This project was developed in residency at Tanzfabrik-Berlin and presented in Fabrikationen- 05 Festival (Berlin), Casa d’Os Dias da Água and Institut Franco-Portugais (Lisbon).

2005 AT YOUR FEET

2008-06-12T15:46:00.000-07:00

“At your feet” is a performance lab aiming to develop a creative project in 7 days.

As a process is developed through a series of exercises starting from a dramaturgic basis (action) on the way to abstraction (movement and voice) and ending with a collective composition and performance.
The work, being sustained by a strong dramaturgic component, looks for the way to allow an emotional basis for the composition of movement.
For the dramaturgical aspect it explores the tension between two opposite movements
Ascendancy - the approachment to an ideal, the experience of transcendancy, the feeling of being unique and the desire for the communion.
Fall – the experience of the specimen, of the trivial, the intermeddling, the feeling of being part of a society and the need of distiguish it self. Human being in a colective as part of a society and representing its specimen
To freed ourself from a reality to become prisoner of an image and to freed ourself from an image to become prisoner of something else.

Conception / Lígia Soares

Assistance/development / Elisa Ricci

Performance/ Co – creation / Claudia Tomasi, Elisa Ricci, Grit Koppen, Lígia Soares, Valentina Calandriello

2005 MODULBOX designmai

2008-06-12T15:27:00.000-07:00

Improvised performance with the musician Carlos Bica for the "DesignMai" in Berlin

2004 VITAL CURRICULUM

2008-06-12T15:09:00.000-07:00

The curriculum is nowadays one of the main faces through which we present ourselves in society. In a time when diaries are hardly written, the curriculum substitutes the biography as an immediate prove of our skills.

Even though writing the curriculum does not imply any reflection from the start, it is yet one of the few documents in which we put our lives in perspective. Considering that what people do is the most concrete and visible aspect of their lives, the curriculum, by its impersonal, but intrinsically biographic character, has revealed its enormeus potential for the confrontation with the character both concrete and subjective of life.

Vitalcurriculum is a project that starts from the professional identity as a frame to reveal what lives apart from the active life, a frame for a process of disclosure of other biographic aspects.

Conception/text/ interpretation Lígia Soares music Joao Lucas Costume Tânia Franco

Presented in TanzFabrik- Berlin by the Festival Tanz Made in Berlin

2004 THE END AND THEN

2008-06-12T14:46:00.000-07:00

In this piece, we want to focus on what really matters, to spare the audience to the hero's anguish, the doubt of return, the bore of historical context, the sorrow for the victim, the suspense, the intrigue of the unplot, the involvement of a passion which is not our own, the morbidity for violence, the eager desire for an ending, the sigh of rescue.

We seek the story's amoral meaning, the not mediated message, the catharsis without time, the culmination without progression, the characters who weren't built up, the love stories without failed meetings.

This is a creation that starts and terminates with endings, in which only resolutions are to be found, like something autonomous. The ending that detached itself from time and history, to find here the value of matter and content.

They lived happily ever after, after all she wasn't the one who killed him, and so he went away... he took her hand and they kissed each other tenderly, and no one ever heard about this small house lost among the mountains again, when he got him at fire range he couldn't shoot.

conception/performance Lígia Soares and Madalena Silva music João Lucas and Pedro Gonçalves video Andresa Soares costumes Tânia Franco

Presented in CCB- Centro Cultural de Belém (Lisbon)

2004 O QUE FOI JÁ ERA QUE VIER SERÁ followed by TAMBÉM PASSARÁ by Lígia Soares SOPRO FINO EM PEDRA DURA followed by VENTANIAS DE OUTONO by A. Soares

2008-06-12T12:54:00.000-07:00

which means

THINGS THAT WHERE CAN NOT BE followed by IT SHALL ALSO PASS by Lígia Soares

THIN BLOW IN HARD ROCK followed by AUTUMN WINDS by Andresa Soares

Given the circumstances that nowadays typify this new generation of creators –excess of creativity and a voluntary need of rendering things concrete versus limited possibilities of achievement due to logistic reasons – both authors, after several inner and outer debates, faced the impossibility of choosing only one of two ideas that each one of them have been developing. Driven by compassion to this mutual issue of lack of space, they decided to associate and to share the same workspace.

These shows don't intend to have a contemporary language in the sense that the materials and language used in them are as old as being, thought, speech and acting. However, they are contemporary among themselves – because they are two creations presented in the same period of time and in the same physical space – they suggest a restoration of the concrete sense of the word contemporanity.

With this play I intend to say that nothing is really that important but that the body is a container of memories, a vehicle for emotions, that movement is a dramatic language, a tense throb between suffering and happiness, between waiting and action, between hope and disappointment, between attack and defence, that time is a narrative space that only becomes real in communication, in compromise, that space is an affective place filled with memories, gesture is a movement romanticised bylanguage. Words begin when the body is no longer enough to express everything that needs to be told. And, since things are like this, I might as well try to make perfect those moments that were almost perfect, to express those revolts I ended up accepting, to take love to the limit, hate because I could never get there in this world where there is always somebody else involvedAnd I might as well bring to an empty space the possibility of a life without fear or favour, because in a stage there is nothing else to fear. Lígia Soares

Winds move stuff, hence erosion. Winds destroy, they move objects that stumble on other objects, cause disturbances, they toss loosen dust, they sweep the autumn leaves, they help moribund beings to die. Winds are, in themselves, a factor of displacement and corrosion, like Irony. The irony of nature, deconstructing what was built and became solidified. Speaking of people, what, in this project, is and is not for real? What are the limits of irony, of the inversion of subversion? How far can we take the displacement of meaning while keeping something intelligible? That's the domain explored by the person, and that's where the person moves without being moved, or else she couldn't present them or cause them. The person is not subdued to the winds. It's by keeping that distance, in the freedom of not becoming entangled, that irony resides. The person doesn't live, doesn't die, doesn't have an autumn. "Since intelligence exists, all life is impossible " Barão de Teive (F. Pessoa). But the person is not intelligent, is not intentional, the person isn't mean nor does she intend to frivolously cause troublesome and irreparable destruction - I must stress that the effects are pleasant and funny – the person is simply joking. The person is a clown. The person is simply searching for "nothing" because (as stated above) she thinks that "nothing" is very important. And it is. And it should be safeguarded that "nothing" has nothing to do with alienation, just the opposite. Andresa Soares

conception/performance/stage design Andresa Soares and Lígia Soares music João Lucas andresa’s costume João Paulo Assunção Lígia’s costume Tânia Franco

Presented in Palco Oriental, Teatro Taborda, Galeria ZDB and Institut Franco-Portugais (Lisbon).

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2003 THE NATURAL DISORDER OF THINGS

2008-06-12T12:20:00.000-07:00

A character without identity, without an inner order is created, a character divided by the neck in two different realities. This fragmentation seeks to take the duality head/body to the limit of all its representations and meanings. The body becomes an exclusively physic element sensitive to the space and sound through a movement without form, without action or dislocation, as an expression of an almost vegetal vitality. As for the head it is detached from the real space to an exclusively temporal and textual image. It becomes an ultra-conscience of itself, of the others, of the world, of the past, of the future and of imagination.The temporal distance between though and action has been abolished, the body is blind and the head is an image.

conception/text/performance Lígia Soares music João Lucas (on Stockhausen)

Developed in the context of “Capitals" in Lisbon, 2003 and premiered in the Festival Fabrikationen-04, Berlin, 2004.

2002 MEMÓRIAS REDONDAS DE UM JARDIM INVISÍVEL round memories of an invisible garden

2008-06-12T11:59:00.000-07:00

The need of security creates predefined realities that become cultural or social systems, which stand out through education, language, behaviour and in ethical and moral values.To effectivate and protect these systems, others were created, where away from that consensual reality other realities are kept. These realities live in a parallel space, but should not intersect the other or they may put it in danger.These are closed spaces, that may be places of grace, aberration, depression or transcendence; that can contain constant or disturbed lives, but, for some reason, the persons who live there consider themselves or have been considered outsiders to a common reality. The Security Pavilion of Miguel Bombarda Psychiatric Hospital was one of those places created to turn invisible certain aspects of the reality and to protect some people from other. Its circular character distributes small rectangular cells around a garden. In opposition to the aggressiveness of the experience of closure inside the cells, the garden appears as a way of harmonization of that way of living. The perception of being confined in a circle and not in a rectangle, works as an acceptation of a live without perspectives. The garden lightens the eternity that people were condemned to.

concept / performance Lígia Soares co-creation/ performance Lígia Soares, Ricardo Carmona and Rute Lizardo guest performers Andresa Soares, João Lucas, Gustavo and Medeia music “Jesus Blood Never Failled Me Yet “ Gavin Bryars .

presented in Miguel Bombarda Psychiatric Hospital

2001 AZUL ASA DE CORVO crow’s wing blue

2008-06-12T11:51:00.000-07:00

This is a performance based in informative texts, that tends to relate to the audience according to the same movement that people have when they are leafing trough the pages of a newspaper, reflecting in it all the indifference and uncertainty that this action contains.

On stage the actors function as a vehicle of sociological and cultural situations, that generate a conflict through the absence of relation between them and that, by creating artificial combinations, put in danger the logic of language in itself.

To this logic of fragmentation inherent to the informative structure of the newspapers we added the subversion of the sentence construction of the text. Keeping the audience’s access to the origin and contents of the text, we have taken out its internal and narrative logic underlining the gap that exists between the informative language and the reality that it refers to.

Conception Lígia Soares and Mário Trigo Text Lígia Soares Staging Mário Trigo Choreography Lígia Soares and Mário Trigo Music João Lucas Interpretation Lígia Soares and Rute Lizardo

Presented in Teatro Taborda (Lisbon)

1999- 2001 PELE skin

2008-06-12T11:08:00.000-07:00

Pele is an idea of return to an initial moment, without a history, where the recognition of the body sets the beginning of a route of reconition of the world, in what is contradictory in them and where do they find themselves. For what we suspended a woman above the stage, alone, going almost invonluntarily through a process of internalisation that takes her to a place of oblivion, without space and without life. We created time to look and to listen to this woman and so that she can, through her selflessness and innocence, give back from then on, an eminently human beauty- the possibility to modify what is seen or heard through the misunderstanding of what lives inside her, and change what lives inside her when she tries to understand what she sees and listens. At all times she fights a battle between what she can already master and everything else that appears to her without any warnings or memories or names.

. My ears had stone walls. And my tympanums did not vibrate. Deaf. I read the words written in black on the bones on the blank of my tympanums. While I read I was not thinking. I didn't connect it to any word. I don’t remember any situation. I was neither in the future nor in the past. It was not pretty. Like the bones. I have never seen pretty bones. I have just seen bones. Bones. I didn't see. I didn't hear. They were bones. They were notvisible .I don't know.I don't remember everything.

direction/ text . lígia soares . music . joão lucas . interpretation . ângela vidal . video . marta wengorovius . costume design . joão paulo assunção . photo . andresa soares

Presented in Teatro Curvo Semedo (Montemor-o-Novo, Fórum Lisboa (Video Lisboa festival), Institut Franco-Portugais and Teatro Taborda (Lisbon)

2003 CAEM COMO FRUTOS falling like apples

2008-06-11T04:56:00.000-07:00

The conflict between the need of evasion and the fatal fall in reality is in this work represented by constant fights, a measurement of forces between opposed realities.

2002 MUSICAL EXISTENCIAL existential musical

2008-06-11T04:47:00.000-07:00

Existencial Musical had as its first form the answer to a need to explore and live the action of music directly over the body, and to search for the sensitisation of the body to emotions originated by the musical audition.

2001 AVESSO wrong side out

2008-06-11T04:32:00.000-07:00

Wrong Side Out

is a work of deconstruction of the ideas people build of themselves searching for a time that appears as unpredictable, leaving always open the possibility of a situation immediately converting into another.