The Idiots — Terceira Pessoa

The Idiots — Terceira Pessoa

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“The Idiots” is the last creation of the tetralogy which began in 2015, around the theatrical process, in which a normative, organic or merely functional idea of “theatre” is questioned, starting on the elementary conditions that underlie the organicity of this artistic convention or formal assumption.

In “The Old Image of Being Loved” (2015), the audience was directly involved in the creative process as active participant; in “Common Sense” (2018), the emphasis relied on the text written in real time; and, in “Teckné” (2021), the highlight was given to the technique, the scenic assembly and disassembly, as a procedural device of performative creation.

In “The Idiots”, the leitmotiv is the acting work of the actors and the actresses, as a research and experimenting engine around the binomials fiction / reality and, consequently, performers / audience. There’s no intention of operating a dichotomy of these concepts, but rather an attempt to bring them to the same horizontal frame, giving them an active presence, even though under different perceptions, centered in the presence of the actors and actresses. This way, the artistic creation as a cohesive and meaningful unit is reversed, putting it as an unclean happening, swinging in the edge of risk and unpredictability.

The dramaturgy does not intend to create a fiction out of the real world, but to watch the real world through the eyes of fiction, to observe the fiction itself which the real world is, simultaneously its light and dark exuberance, benign and terrifying, rational and intuitive. To observe the act of observing itself, to admit the risk of giving the world a look, fully accepting the inescapable condition of being equally observed by the world: “what we see, is what looks at us”, as proposed by Didi-Huberman.

Making the condition of the actor, the one who experiences inside and outside himself the draft of a character, as a trigger to an unappeasable questioning process, which overlaps the whole statement of the artistic reality.

Created by Ana Gil, Nuno Leão and Óscar Silva, and dramaturgy by Miguel Castro Caldas, “The Idiots” seeks to flesh out the acting technique, testing the previously mentioned binomials, under a concrete fiction: a group of unemployed actors creates a club to practice the acting art, fundamental for their jobs. It is within this narrative framework that it is intended to make into the possibility of theatre, the condition of the actor who is continuously struggling with what is redone and undone, fighting doggedly with the silence – as if more he acted, the more he ended up missing.

About Terceira Pessoa

Terceira Pessoa is an arts organisation that focusses especially on the performing arts and areas between disciplines.

Using an interdisciplinary approach, Terceira Pessoa brings together professionals working in a range of artistic languages. Catering to audiences of all ages and sociocultural backgrounds, Terceira Pessoa brings communities closer to the territory of both their local area and the country as a whole, promoting cultural interchange between local heritage and contemporary modes of expression.

Our activities thus focus on three main areas:
– We create and produce artistic works under the Terceira Pessoa name, and promote the regions we work in as spaces for artistic production and community work at national and international levels;
– We bring the public closer to contemporary artistic languages, through participatory methodologies and ongoing collaboration;
– We programme seasons of multidisciplinary artistic practice that encourage the circulation of contemporary artists and provide the local population with access to the contemporary and experimental work that arises.