Winds of the Apocalypse’”based on Paulina Chiziane’s novel premieres in Almada Festival

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Winds of the Apocalypse’”based on Paulina Chiziane’s novel premieres in Almada Festival

9:28 CAT | 07 Jul 2023

Image: Festival de Almada

A performance made up of memories and sensations is how Angolan director Noé João defines “Ventos do Apocalipse”, a theatre play based on the work of the same name by Mozambican writer Paulina Chiziane, which premieres on Friday at the 40th Almada Theatre Festival.

A co-production of Teatro Griot and Artistas Unidos, “Winds of the Apocalypse” will play at the Cine-Teatro of Academia Almadense, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and has the backdrop of the war in Mozambique, in the post-independence period.

In the construction of the play, actor and director Noé João, who also wrote the text, started with the idea of taking to the stage “the memory of the war, of the search for a place of comfort, of the promised land”, he told the Lusa agency.

“It is this promised land that is in the performance” that the actor claims to have built from his own memories and situations and moments from the original text of the writer who won the Camões Prize in 2021.

A “drama” in which the director intends to invite the audience to “reflect” and “put themselves in the other’s shoes”. And where questions are asked about the extent to which “our memories, our experiences influence, these days”, because the show carries this demand.

“And now, where is our house?” asks a character in the play, to whom another responds “Which house? What house do we want now?”

Questions that, according to the director, “are not limited to the search for just a roof, but also to the search for a country, the country that one wants to build and the place of belonging that one wants to be a part of”.

Do I belong to this place, this space, this country? These are questions that run through the thoughts of the characters in “Ventos do Apocalypse” when, fleeing the war, they begin to walk towards a promised land, wondering, at the same time, whether this will be a place of comfort for everyone.

As the book is “dense”, Noé João chose not to make a play “of the word”, but rather a piece that “gains a lot” in movement, light, sound and in conjunction with the cast of four black actors, three from Africa and one from Brazil.

Two men and two women make this composition in the scenic space in a piece that has little text and in which the lines are more in the silences than in the spoken words.

After the three performances in Almada, “Ventos do Apocalipse” will be move to the Teatro da Politécnica, in Lisbon, from the 13th to the 29th of July, with sessions from Tuesday to Thursday at 7:00 pm, on Friday at 9:00 pm, and on Saturday at 16:00 p.m. and 21:00 p.m..

Source: Lusa