Kidnapped
Karolina Maruszak

PROJECT

Kidnapped

Departing from the idea of theater as a tool for depicting and influencing notions of reality, Rodrigo’s latest research reflects upon an assumed contemporary reality (or realism), born from the Post-Modern Era, which has evolved over the past six decades under the sway of the Neoliberal Regime and the misleading promises of free market, individual subjectivity, and privatization of life, leaving us with a landscape marked by collective hallucinations that challenge established understanding of truth, casting a pervasive shadow of doubt on our collective beliefs.

In this context, the project metaphorizes that in our illusory world of neoliberal “freedom,” we are all kidnapped. Kidnapped by ideologies, identities, technologies, political systems, predatory relationships, capital, structural inequalities… In other words, we are kidnapped by the rooted subconscious of colonialism and capitalism, caught between the concrete – and daily – absurdity of globalized macro-politics and the abstract – often elitist – desire for solutions in the micropolitical realm.

Rodrigo Batista

Rodrigo's ambition is to create theatre performances that function as unapologetic aesthetic statements addressed to geopolitical contexts. He achieves this through intense body/mind research made from impulses of iconoclasm, humor, indigestion, mutilation, blood, and explicitness. His goal is to create a palpable sense of political urgency and action in his audience, through theater pieces that were intertwined with large concepts such as the relationship between art and power, tragedy, Latin-American politics, strikes/insurrection, political explicitness, poverty pornography, gore-capitalism, propaganda, anti-colonialism as an event of violence, the operations and consequences behind the North-American Alt-Right Movement, among others.

Credits

Concept and research by: Rodrigo Batista in collaboration with Mariana SennePerformers: Rodrigo Batista and Mariana SenneResearch collaborators: Flávia Pinheiro and Tom OliverResidencies: Studio Alta, wpZimmer and workspacebrussels