Director: Rabih Mroué

With the director Rabih Mroué and the performers Lina Majdalanie and Yasser Mroué. Mediation Pollyanna Diniz (USP)
March 16th, from 10am to 12am | Venue: Itaú Cultural

Crossing Dialogues

With Ilana Feldman
March 19th after the performance | Venue: Sesc Vila Mariana

Essays Space

Check out the text by Daniele Avila Small about the Rabih Mroué showcase.(only in Portuguese)

Synopsis

Pictures; one disappears and another appears. Most of the time, he doesn’t understand the connection between a picture and the one next to it. He needs someone who knows him well to tell about it and set the picture in motion, so it’s not still anymore. When memories in head are like still pictures with no scenes from the past, how does the memory work? The theatre piece of the director Rabih Mroué is an impressive combination of the personal and political: For RIDING ON A CLOUD he invites his brother Yasser to play the role of a character that resembles him personally. A person, who was injured in the Lebanese civil war and lost his ability to use words, Yasser began to shoot videos, which fuse with his recounted memories on stage to form a subjective picture of the political developments in Lebanon. RIDING ON A CLOUD also describes the fragile construction of biography, which emerges between political reality, memories, facts and fiction. For Mroué this is always the starting point for artistic self-reflection, which he then transposes for the theatre and exhibitions.

History

The work of the Lebanese Rabih Mroué, actor, playwright and visual artist, born in Beirut in 1967, lies at the frontiers of theater, performance and video. He is known for his subtle deconstruction of images. In his work, they become narratives of contradictions. He reveals them to the audience layer by layer, creating moving reflections of our world that blur the lines between fiction and documentary, between imagination and manipulation. The conflicts in the Middle East of the last decades, especially in Lebanon, serve as material to the artist. In the film Je veux voir (2008) by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Rabih has met with Catherine Deneuve in Beirut and drove through areas devastated by the conflict. Rabih Mroué currently resides in Berlin. He is co-founder of the Beirut Art Center; a contributing editor of TDR: The Drama Review (NYC); and theater director at Münchner Kammerspiele (Munich). He was a member of the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures” / Freie Universität in Berlin in the years of 2013 and 2014.

Credits

Written and directed by: Rabih Mroué
Performer: Yasser Mroué
In Collaboration with: Sarmad Louis
Assistant director: Petra Serhal
Assistant: Janine Baroud
Portuguese version: Patrícia Lopes