History of the Eye - A Porn-noir Fairy Tale
ARTIST: Janaina Leite
Brazil, 2022 | 180 min., with 20 min interval | Parental Rating: 18+
Premiere
SINOPSIS
In a free adaptation of the novel History of the Eye, by Georges Bataille, Janaina Leite investigates the relationship between theatre and pornography, a recurring theme in her last shows, in which it is claimed as a scenic art. Hybrid between fiction and non-fiction, Story of the Eye – A Porn-noir Fairy Tale mixes 13 performers, some amateur and sex workers including a porn actor, a camboy, and a camgirl. With the collaboration of erotic film director Lara Duarte and multi-artist André Medeiros Martins, who performs works on art and pornography on different platforms, the play follows the structure of the book to tell, in fairy tale settings, the story of three teenagers in their sexual discoveries. During intermezzo, the audience watches a gig with live music and performances. Between the blatant theatricality and the explicit of pornography, the show recreates this fable noir among the vulgar and the sublime, mundane and cosmic, ordinary and abyssal.
HISTORY
Janaina Leite is an actress, director and playwright. She is one of the founders of the award-winning Grupo XIX de Teatro de São Paulo, with whom she created several awarded shows touring the country and abroad. Besides her work with the group, she has conceived the shows Festa de Separação: Um Documentário Cênico, Conversas com Meu Pai, Stabat Mater and the online performance Camming 101 Noites. She is the author of Autoescrituras Performativas: Do Diário à Cena (Perspectiva Publisher). Janaina was the researcher in focus at MITsp 2020. Currently, besides the show Story of the Eye – A Porn-noir Fairy Tale”, she is part of the program of Latin American playwrights included in the Bombom Gesell project based in Buenos Aires and is one of the Brazilian artists commissioned by MITsp & Edinburgh International Festival to create an unprecedented online work for the 2023 edition of The Edinburgh Festival.
CRITIC
“More often, an artwork is a rare thing, because to exist is not enough the intention to create it. It is necessary to reach the intensity of a blooming presence, which emerges as a beautiful thing in itself, and excels in the surrounding visual-audible-live-banal ocean (opposed to inventions and ruptures) as living matter, which enlivens and pushes us. The artworks are the pulsating life and the risk that this pulsation takes. They rely on the courage to look and see, and return to say and present saying and showing. Janaina Leite explores deep regions such as speleologists, astronauts, divers and microbiologists. As a poet, she also navigates in the fate of the research in progress, in losses and winnings, stumbles and pathetic shocks.”
LUIZ FERNANDO RAMOS, University of São Paulo
“Placing yourself on a situation of production of porn-related images can be a way of reversing or even subverting the myth of female passivity, by having the body and not only discourse taking part of it. A fundamental desecration.”
DANIELE ÁVILA SMALL, Questão de Crítica, on Stabat Mater
