Wasteband
A virtual performance with tea by Patrícia Portela
Special mention Prize ACARTE/Madalena Azeredo Perdigão 2003
Prize Teatro na Década, Clube Português de Artes e Ideias 2004
In eight and a half minutes Sergei Krikalev crosses the atmospheric layer and loses gravity; Tania washes the pause from her face; the Moon falls down on a beach full of frogs; the Soviet Union collapses; and José, lying in a hospital bed, realises that he does not miss the legs he has lost but [does miss] her fingerprints; he asks for an artificial heart and presses restart. As it is scientifically proven that one cannot remember more than seven things at the same time, Tania forgets José. Sergei Krikalev wants to cry but knows it isn’t worth it: tears do not fall in Space and only cause trouble.
We are a succession of moments lived to the fullest while reduced to a minimum.
We are like photographs.
Press
“the ingenious production WasteBand by the Portuguese Patricia Portela.(…) is (a) travel program into the best of allegories, WasteBand. Fundamental science, distorted signs and fake history give evidence in this performance of a real existing parallel universe of stories. The audience sits around a large conference table together with the artists and are taken on a masterfully calculated flight path through this universe.(…) Portela projects dream dancers in zero gravity, remainders of memories of reality and the dissolving love story of Tania and Jose. «We live inside an enormous novel» says Portela, the poetical travel guide and dazzling speaker, «in which nothing must be invented: all these images already exist”.
Helmut Ploebst in de Standard, Vienna, Austria
“WasteBand – the taste of the future”
“very futuristic, very conceptual, and also very amusing (…) The future is always tempting”.
José Couto Nogueira in O Independente
“WasteBand is a play of fusion in which everything connects”
Cátia Felício in Público
“WasteBand makes use of humor and music, offering a kind of work-in-progress, in which real time happens after virtual time. (…) the performer uses rhetorical forms such as the debate, the conference, the monologue, and speaks to us of love stories. (…) The final structure takes a form somewhere between a soap-opera, a video game and an internet environment”.
In Número Magazine
“It was a memorable show for those who were present, on the 6th November, at the Cine-Teatro in Covilhã, at the performance of WasteBand by Patrícia Portela, part of the Y#2 Festival. It was the breaking of all taboos regarding how to make theatre, to be on stage and most of all how to “grab” the spectator”
António Gil In Jornal da Covilhã
“a remarkable process of rebuilding the place of the text in theatre, namely the place of the word in its direct relationship with the audience (…) during the performance, the spectator drifts between perplexity, an overload of information and the recognition of human vulnerability (…)
(…) the saturation of information, as much in terms of the stories, told in great detail, as in the images and the scientific (and pseudoscientific) documentation, that show the way to an opening up of emotion, so unusual at the current moment in culture and the arts”
(…) in a thorough and intelligent structure, in which nothing is left to chance, Patrícia Portela uses the theatre to search for a strategy to communicate with the spectator, researching and renewing storytelling formats”.
Ana Pais in Sinais de Cena