After her impressive Strindberg adaptation Julia at REDCAT last year, Christiane Jatahy returns to Los Angeles with The Walking Forest. Inspired by Shakespeare’s Macbeth, she explores the impact of our greedy political and economic power systems on ordinary people.
The Walking Forest is an immersive and interactive performance and installation that mixes film, theater and…cocktails. An intimate audience orders drinks from a bar as they interact with a provocative kinetic video installation, which transforms into a theater and film event, with actors and audience members all playing crucial roles.
To the pulse of a live DJ, the audience roams through this video and theater installation, which visually depicts the stories of young Brazilians who were crushed by the power systems. The event transforms into a live film, with actors creating a modernized Macbeth. Breaking down the boundaries between fact and fiction, and between theater and film, Jatahy brings the tragedy of everyday life to the surface. A must to check! More Info and Tickets here.
Artist Statement:
What are politics today? What is democracy’s fate?
Not only in Brazil, but in the world. What to think of this global system, of this economic, social, human, ecological crisis, that, in chilling fashion, coincides with normality and becomes a tool of governments in a continual process of decision making which decides absolutely nothing? A permanent state of emergency with perpetual coups d’etat to maintain power.
In this “new notion of politics”, which is intertwined with security, the State, rather than repairing the causes, only treats – or punishes – the consequences. It attempts to control the effects of a policy that does not see to the needs of most of humanity, acting through control, through fear, through vigilance, inciting an unprecedented level of violence that affects everyone.
And in this current paradox in which we live, in which the State seems to have abandoned the domain of politics and entered a no man’s land, whose geography and frontiers are still unknown, good and evil are diffuse and reality becomes the worst fiction. And the question regarding whether it is still possible to change comes out in this work on the scope of subjectivity and advances desperately towards the public space. In this search for answers – or merely for more questions – we turn, as if in a dream, to Macbeth – and, through Shakespeare’s nightmare play, we look at the world of today, not to look for who could be the tyrant of the here and now, but to, through the mirror, through the reflections and through the shadows, think of our choices.
The Interviewees
Prosper – A refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo. His family was murdered and he was arrested and tortured for two years because his father belonged to an organization opposed to the government. He is 28 years old.
Michelle – A resident of Rocinha. Her uncle was murdered by Rio de Janeiro’s Police Pacifying Unit (UPP). An iconic case of the power struggle within the favela and the State’s action of violence through the military police. She is 28 years old.
Igor– A geography student, he was incarcerated in the Bangu Maximum Security Prison for seven months for participating in and organizing the 2013 demonstrations. A political prisoner in a democractic country, he still accounts for a series of legal processes that are ideological in nature. He is 27 years old.
Aboud– A refugee from Syria in Germany. He worked for the press and was arrested and tortured for publishing denouncements on social networks of the murder and torture of people who opposed the current government. He is 26 years old.
More
* Christiane Jatahy is an author, film and theatre director, with projects that in recent years have created a dialog for different artistic fields and new mechanisms for the imagination. She created the theatrical trilogy “Uma cadeira para solidão, duas para o dialogo e três para a sociedade”. These plays test the limits of reality and fiction, actor and character, theater and cinema.
Facebook Comments