MITbr - PLATAFORMA BRASIL
Guest performance
Philoctetes in Lemnos
Filoctetes em Lemnos
ARTIST: Vinicius Torres Machado
60 min | Ages 16+
- March 7, 8, and 9, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, 5 PM
- TUSP | Rua Maria Antônia, 294, Vila Buarque
- Accessible Location
- The session on 8 March features audio description.
- There are occasional moments of loud sound
SYNOPSIS
Vinicius Torres Machado’s solo performance, directed by Marina Tranjan, follows Philoctetes—a hero, yet not strong enough to endure the pain of a wound that will not heal. Faced with his rotting flesh and terrifying screams, his fellow warriors abandon him on the way to Troy. Philoctetes then lives alone on the island of Lemnos for nine years, forced to endure this incurable wound. Drawing from the Greek myth, the artist presents the materiality of his own body after the removal of part of his sciatic nerve and posterior musculature as a result of tumor treatment. With limited movement in his right leg and a radiotherapy wound that has reopened periodically for the past 20 years, he approaches Philoctetes to address bodily fragility as it manifests in the contemporary human form.
BACKGROUND
Vinicius Torres Machado is a director, performer, and playwright. A professor at the Institute of Arts of São Paulo State University (Unesp), he holds a degree in acting and a master’s and PhD in performing arts from ECA/USP. His main research areas include theater theory and aesthetics. He has published the books The Mask in Modern Theater: From the Inside Out of Tradition to Contemporaneity; The Scene in Becoming: An Instant in Which Something Ceases to Exist; and In Time: An Introduction to Performativity in Ancient Greece, co-authored with João Pedro Ribeiro. Among his notable works are A Porta, Aporia 23°S 46°W, Com os Bolsos Cheios de Pão, Revoltar, and Philoctetes in Lemnos.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
“What is presented is the poetic synthesis of a scientific experiment that added to medicine’s victory over cancer the consummate resilience of a mere survivor. It so happens that this survivor is an actor and director in full command of his craft, capable of performing this absence of narrative without resorting either to Greek tragedy or to subjective documentary drama.”
Luiz Fernando Ramos
“Philoctetes in Lemnos is an abandonment of another order—an inner one, it seems. The audience is present as mirror, witness, object of supplication, accomplice, equal, and other. Torres Machado performs a subtle despair, or the despair of subtlety. Images form and dissolve in a time of their own, produced in the vastness of that scenic island—inhospitable and yet deeply sensorially inhabited by the many layers of Tranjan’s staging.”
Amilton de Azevedo, Ruína Acesa
CREDITS
General concept and performance: Vinicius Torres Machado
Direction and creation: Marina Tranjan
Sound design and creation: Pedro Canales
Assistant direction, production assistance, and design: Luane Sato
Movement coaching: Laura Puche
Set construction and materials research: Beatriz Mendes
Scenography: Eliseu Weide
Lighting: Wagner Antônio, Dimitri Luppi
Photography: Ju Paié, Helyana Manso
Translation: Giulia Fontes Gadel
Production coordination: Léo Birche
Production and installation assistance: Juan Luís, P. Olionis, Pedro Alves