A.L.S.O
ARTIST: Jéssica Teixeira
Brazil, 2019 | 70 min. | Parental Rating: 14+
SINOPSIS
Actress Jéssica Teixeira in her solo investigates her own body – restless, strange and misshapen – and questions how it interacts with the world. Assuming the A.L.S.O persona in contrast to her body (He) [in Portuguese body is a masculine word], Jessica makes her physique become a multifaceted tool (ethical, political, aesthetic), which disrupts and enhances other bodies and sights, seeking a sensitive view of diversity and multiplicity, as well as criticizing the imposition of beauty standards. The artist relies on theoretical texts (such as O Corpo Impossível, book by researcher Eliane Robert Moraes) and her own biography to create, onstage, a mixture of testimony and performance scenes. We see, in this narrative transit, her body becomes many: from pop diva to cyborg, until she gets rid of her ropes ending up in savagery.
HISTORY
Jéssica Teixeira is an actress, producer, director and screenwriter, graduated in Theatre and has a MA from the Federal University of Ceará. She has worked with performing arts since she is seven and has worked with several groups in the capital and Ceará’s inland. She has taken part in more than 30 shows as an actress, in performances and video performances. Recently, she developed a research on Corpo Impossível from the investigation of her own unusual body, raw material for her first solo conception, A.L.S.O, in which she is an actress, producer and playwright. In audiovisual, Jéssica made in 2020, the documentary Pudesse Ser Só um Enigma, she also acted, scripted and produced the short film Curva Sinuosa, directed by Andréia Pires, in 2021. In the same year, she acted in the short film Possa Poder, directed by Victor Di Marco and Márcio Picolli. Currently, she has started directing the first theatre solo from Victor Di Marco, a multi-artist from Rio Grande do Sul.
CRITIC
“When bringing biographical episodes, the actress draws in parallel a historical line from the Greek body, reaching the world wars and the most recent actions. Jessica talks about beauty, its other forms, ways of being in the world. She turns her body into a political act. Subverts logic. Summons the protagonism to herself. She dissects the beautiful and functional body dictatorship, those without such a profile would be exterminated.”
