| João Garcia Miguel | |
|---|---|
| Native name | João Miguel Osório de Castro Garcia dos Santos |
| Born | 1961 Lisbon |
| Website | |
| www.joaogarciamiguel.com | |
João Garcia Miguel (João Miguel Osório de Castro Garcia dos Santos, born in Lisbon 1961)[1] is a Portuguese theater director, playwright, visual artist and performer, as well as author of theater plays.[2] He initiated his work in the 90s and is generally characterized as a provocative and postdramatic theatre artist, and his artistic performative practicing has been described as "an hybrid theater asserting an alternative concept of globalization, establishing an invigorating line of work, between the spectacle of society and the society of spectacle".[3] One of the most visible and relevant aspects of Garcia Miguel's theatrical work is the way he uses classic texts of European theater, re-working them through an approach of disruption and innovation, based on an intensive research on the qualities of the actor's work in relation with advanced visual and audio interactive technologies.[4] Special Nothing/Especial Nada (2003, with Anton Skrzypiciel and Miguel Borges) presented at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival was considered by The Herald as "a fabulous blast" and "the inspired springboard for a fascinating window into creative processes and what constitutes 'art'".[5] Burgher King Lear (2006, also interpreted by Skrzypiciel and Borges) was selected as one of the best 2006 Portuguese performances and described as one of the most accomplished and intelligent deconstructions of a classical theater text recently staged,[6] having achieved a considerable success in Spain,[7] where it was awarded with the FAD Sebastià Gash 2008 Prize[8] (Barcelona).
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Garcia Miguel started his professional artistic activity between the late '80s and early '90s during his degree at FBAUL- Lisbon Faculty of Fine Arts. He then started an inter-disciplinary journey that led him to the performing arts where he became involved as a founder and participant in many alternative and important art collectives – reaching different artistic areas such as painting, installation and performance. He is one of the founders of the experimental group based on performance and installation Canibalismo Cósmico and was involved in the foundation of ZDB Art Gallery (Lisbon). Between 1991 and 2002 he directed the Theater Association OLHO (Eye).[1] This company has been considered as a fundamental landmark in the renovation of the theatrical language of the late twentieth century in Portugal.[9] In 2003 Garcia Miguel starts working under his name as an artistic director, theater director, actor and artist. By this time he also founded a new artistic and cultural venue in Lisbon called Espaço do Urso e dos Anjos (The Bear and the Angels Venue). In 2008 he was appointed Artistic Director of Teatro-Cine de Torres Vedras, a theater owned by the municipality of Torres Vedras 40 minutes away from Lisbon center. Garcia Miguel is also affiliated in the Actor's Center, in Rome, Italy. Garcia Miguel's main artistic work features is the rewriting and interpretation of classic texts and biographies, including Samuel Beckett,Brecht, Cervantes, Chekov, Jean Genet, Peter Handke, Fernando Pessoa, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Strindberg, Gertrude Stein, Andy Warhol and Virginia Woolf, in addition to the production of original texts. In the last few years Garcia Miguel has collaborated with artists and performers such as Andres Beladiez, Alberto Lopes, Anton Skrypiciel, Carlos Pimenta, Chema Leon, Clara Andermatt], Custodia Calego, Edgar Pêra, Francisco Rocha, Lucia Sigalho, Luis Guerra, João Fiadeiro, João Brites, Michael Margotta, Miguel Borges, Miguel Moreira, Nuno Cardoso, Rui Gato, Rui Horta, Sara Ribeiro, Steve Bird and Steve Denton amongst others. His work has been exhibited in France, England, Walles, Germany, Senegal, Norway and Spain. Since 1995 Garcia Miguel has regularly presented his work in the most important theatre venues of the country: Centro Cultural de Belém - CCB (1995, 2000, 2008, 2010), Teatro Nacional São João /PONTI Festival, Teatro Carlos Alberto (1999, 2005, 2006, 2010), Teatro Rivoli (2001), ACARTE/ Centro de Arte Moderna]/FCG (2002, 2003), Nacional Theatre D. Maria II/Teatro da Politécnica (2007), Teatro Maria Matos (2009), Teatro A Comuna (2009), Culturgest (2010), amongst many others. He regularly presents his works on National and International Festivals such as Festival Internacional de Almada, Festival A8, P.O.N.T.I. in Porto, Citemor in Montemor-o-Velho, Festival Les Bernardines (2002, 2004), Marseille, Fringe Festival, Edinburgh, Festival de Almagro, Festival AltVigo, MadFeria de Madrid, among others.[1]
The search for an experimental poetic language is one of the most important features of Garcia Miguel’s work. As Fred Kahn described in 2004 in an article published in UBU – European Stages Journal, dedicated to the Portuguese Theater scene: “João Garcia Miguel is an artist of globalization. His work is an attempt at presenting a clean and clear transcript of what the global existence of the individual's global existence, by which we can understand a being connected to others on multiple levels, living in a global environment open to infinite influences, each vaguer than the other. (…) He is therefore a man working on multiplication rather than scattering. His career has been quite atypical and may wrongly be classified as chaotic, but in truth it shows a constant search for a unique poetic language." [10]
After several years exploring the complexity of scenic machinery Garcia Miguel started a new area of dramaturgical and scenographic research based on the creation of a technology that expands the "phenomenal body of the actor" on stage (about this concept see Erika Fischer-Lichte[11]).
The first work that clearly explored this new approach was the piece The Anarchist Banker based on a story by Fernando Pessoa, premiered in Lisbon in 2009.[12] At a table in a restaurant, two friends talk about the social situation and one of them says that, paradoxically, became a banker because he was politically an anarchist. The absurdity of the situation, the lack of theatricality and the mental flirtation of this character, lead, according to Garcia Miguel, to a portrait of life that most listeners know and has many similarities and reverberations with the current reality shows or big brother programs. The effect of expansion of the performer’s body was created by the use of web-cams installed very closed to the actor’s body, capturing images in real time that where projected on big screens.[13] In The Son of Europe (2010), based on Peter Handke’s piece Kasper, João Garcia Miguel and his team created a three-dimensional device that increased the perception of the rhythm and audio visual impulses created by the actors on stage, using four video projectors and four web-cameras.[14] The images captured by the cameras in real time were then edited through a complex matrix software system.[15] With this kind of experiments, João Garcia Miguel is also forcing new ways of public involvement with the performance.[16] Another important aspect about the originality of the artistic language of Garcia Miguel is the influence of a ritualistic and post dramatic logic in respect to the actor’s work. Rather than sticking to a literal model of an autobiographic construction of the actor’s approach to the character, he seeks a new way of reading Artaud’s ideas about experimental theater, updating them with the new challenges imposed by the fluidity and ambivalence of the contemporary world (Zigmunt Bauman). This is very visible in his staging of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (2011).[17] His approach to the piece relates directly to the ways by witch some important contemporary theater has been reinventing itself. The role of the characters Romeo and Juliet is not, in Garcia Miguel’s piece, to tell us a story,[18] but to serve other primary purposes of theatrical practice. They serve as mirrors that produce cultural-aesthetic reflexivity to think about the social drama (Victor Turner) that loving and being loved represents in the present society. In this Garcia Miguel’s Romeo and Juliet staging, which is reduced to the two main characters, we see the lovers as shamans engaged with the contradictions of the present society.
Garcia Miguel is characterized by his taste for risk, for provocation, the obscure deepness, and the enlightenment of crossing boundaries, the enchanted machinery, the baroque conceptualism and sophisticated sense of humor. All of this gave him his nickname of The Bear. He uses contradiction as a methodological element and puts himself frequently in antagonistic positions as an instrumental resource for the development of aesthetic perspectives. He seeks a theater that works like a hallucinogenic. He differentiates himself through the utopia that theater must serve to change the private world of those who still have the chance and ability to enjoy theater as an art form, providing them with inner experiences, developing perceptions that allow for the expansion of reality.[19]
Since 2002 João Garcia Miguel has been developing new strategies of researching in the artistic field, teaching and investigating in an academic context. His Master degree in Culture and Communication Technologies has led him to the creation of an introductory study that hybridizes visual culture and the performing arts. Since 2007, he engaged with an advanced training by attending a PhD Program in Theater and Visual arts trying to deepen his studies at the University of Alcala de Henares (Spain) and now a days in Lisbon Fine Arts Faculty. Has a teacher he has worked with students from the main Portuguese performing arts schools and more recently in the UK (Aberystwyth Arts Centre) and Norway (Norwegian Theatre Academy).
Prize FAD Sebastiá Gasch Performance Arts, for the direction of the show Burgher King Lear , Barcelona, 2008.
Honours for the Award Maria Helena Perdigão, ACARTE, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian for direction of the show EL- Carrying on shoulders in a quarter time syncopated, 1992
Award Theater of a Decade with the show EL- Carrying on shoulders in a quarter time syncopated march, OLHO Theatre Company, 1992.
Award for the best scenography, best original soundtrack and honours for the show Humanauta, OLHO Theatre Company, 1994.
Award for the best scenography, wardrobe and original soundtrack with the show Warrior, OLHO Theatre Company, 1995.
Romeu and Juliet – staging and adaptation of William Shakespeare's text, premiered in Lisbon October 2011.
Look at me now, Here I am, – staging and adaptation of Gertrude Stein's texts about Picasso and Matisse, premiered in Fredrikstad in July 2011 at NTA – Norwegian Theatre School.
"Mother Courage – staging of Bertolt Brecht's piece, premiered in Lisbon, at CCB, January 2011.
Cherry Orchard - staging of Anton Chekhov's work at the Arts Center of Aberystwyth and Swansea Theater of Tallinn, premiered October and November 2010.
Son of Europe – writing and staging based on Peter Handke's "Kasper", primiered in Oporto, FITEI, June 2010.
Waiting for Godot – staging of Samuel Beckett's piece, premiered in Azores April 2010.
The Anarchist Banker – staging of Fernando Pessoas's text and additional writing, premiered in Lisbon, at Maria Matos Theatre, in December 2009.
Blood /Antígona's sudies – stagin and adaptation of Sophocles' piece, premiered in Lisbon, at Comuna Theatre, July 2009.
The Maids – staging, translation and adaptacion from Jean Genet's piece, premiered in Lisbon, at CCB, September 2008.
The Old House – staging of the portuguese writer Luiz Pacheco's text, premiered in Palmela, Portugal, July 2008.
Made in Éden: an Ode to my dead friends - staging and dramaturgy of Epístolas de Guerra from Adolfo Luxúria Canibal, premiered in November 2007 Politécnica Theatre, Lisbon.
Making good use of death –Directing (with Miguel Borges) of Pier Paolo Pasolini's texts, premiered in Lisbon, July 2007 at Casa D’Os Dias da Água.
Burgher King Lear – staging and dramaturgy based on William Shakespeare King Lear, premiered in Black Box (Montemor-o-Novo) November 2006.
Story of a Lier – staging and adicional writing based on Ibsen's Peer Gynt, premiered in Casa de Teatro in Sintra, June 2006.
Delivery – staging and adicional writing (with Luís Vieira) based on different texts by Strindberg. Casa de Teatro de Sintra, Dezembro 2005 e Casa D’Os Dias da Água, Janeiro de 2006
Ruins – staging and adicional writing (with Luís Vieira) based on different texts by Strindberg, premiered in Teatro Carlos Alberto - Porto, June 2005. Co-production with Teatro Bruto and TNSJ.
The Waves – acting and co-creation with Clara Andermatt and Michael Margotta based on Virgínia Woolf's book, premiered in Oeiras July 2004.
Special Nothing – Staging and writing based on Andy Wharol's diaries. Premiered in Capitals, Lisbon September 2003. Presentation at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, August 2006.