MATRIZ

Cão Solteiro & José Maria Vieira Mendes

“And I feel crushed by consensus. Consensus is one of those things that crushes and squeezes and empties and tears me until it makes me feel scoured and really dry and drained and withered, consensus dries me all up inside and outside, it leaves me all pickled and consumed, all inexistent, all destroyed and wilted.”

José Maria Vieira Mendes, Sigh

MATRIZ is a nonsense piece in which two people describe the world as a sequence of nonsense events.
The two people try to find balance in contradictions, searching for the place of unbalance. And so, they often fall in the trap of their own words and silly remarks, expecting each time to avoid all the imposed senses, those that point a direction, those that point meanings, or those that tighten our hearts.
MATRIZ is also a curtain that hides nothing, because there’s nothing to hide. It protests against the economy of secrets from within, and although it speaks and speaks and speaks, about this piece it is said that it says nothing. Because it is assumed that there is a world of seriousness and a world of playfulness, a nonsence speech and a correct speech. Well, a world where we live. Or in which we don’t live. Or in which we don’t want to live. And to whom considers that this piece is against everything, we whisper that MATRIZ is mostly in favor of itself.

To audiences given to practical matters, this is a piece by Cão Solteiro who asked José Maria Vieira Mendes to write a text when a title was all there was. Time went by, the text was written, it is called SIGH and it’s a dramatic text.
As for the piece, it was thought by Mariana Sá Nogueira, Paula Sá Nogueira and Patrícia da Silva, fighting against the preconditions of action, visibility and understanding, matrices of a certain idea of theatre which is also a certain idea of art.
So that everything is present without being a presence, the artist Vasco Araújo knitted two useless curtains that replicate all the curtains and cloths and draperies and fabrics with which theatres are usually dressed as if they were cold or should be something or hide something, as if theatre was obliged to be the place of magic and illusion and secret, as it goes.
As if theatre was an olive with a seed and the piece is an olive with a seed, and the seed is what we take home, an idea that often makes MATRIZ angry because in MATRIZ there’s no seed. It is also for this reason that Daniel Worm D’Assumpção, that designed the light, decides to step in and embody Nothing. And here he comes with luminous splendor to declare the inexistence of interiority, giving us the pleasure of accessing the aesthetics of inexistence.
And we sigh and we relax in nonsense.

Teatro Académico Gil Vicente | Coimbra 2022

script Cão Solteiro

created by Daniel Worm D’Assumpção, José Maria Vieira Mendes, Mariana Sá Nogueira, Patrícia da Silva, Paula Sá Nogueira, Vasco Araújo
set design set-up Nuno Tomaz
production Mariana Sá Marques
production director and photography Joana Dilão

residency Espaço Casa Cheia

support Plataforma285, Teatro Praga

company financed by República Portuguesa. Cultura – Direção Geral das Artes, Câmara Municipal de Lisboa