Kidnapped

Departing from the conventional notion of theater as a tool for depicting and potentially influencing notions of reality, Rodrigo’s latest research endeavors to reflect upon an assumed contemporary reality, 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 the free market and the individual subjectivity. This reality can be likened to several collective hallucinations that challenge established ideas of truth, casting a pervasive shadow of doubt on our collective beliefs.

In this context, the metaphor employed suggests that in our illusory world of neoliberal “freedom,” we are all kidnapped. We find ourselves kidnapped by various forces: ideologies, identities, technology, political systems, strained relationships, competition, capital, and inequalities, among others. 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 ambiguous, abstract, and often elitist, desire for solutions in the micropolitical realm.

To navigate through these complex issues – and refusing a Westernized, often minimalist and conceptual, approach – Rodrigo is delving into an overflow of several contemporary topics/problems and translating it into theatrical embodied language, with the ultimate aim of producing a theater piece that can be compared to a mixtape: an affective and multilayered compilation of distinct scenes/tracks/topics, designed for those who identify with an uneasy sense of non-conformity towards the Regime. Think of it as a form of “variety theater” that seeks to reveal fragments of political and global realities and realism while simultaneously provoking within the audience a palpable sense of urgency, encouraging them to “awaken” from both secularized and contemporary hypnosis. In other words, it aims to offer a theatrical provocation that can cause, at least in the imaginary, a collective rescue from colonial and capitalist captivity.

Rodrigo Batista

NL, BE

https://www.portfoliorodrigobatista.com/

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.

Mariana Senne

D, BR

Mariana Senne, born in São Paulo, Brazil, is a Berlin-based theatre maker and performer whose current work explores intercultural theatrical practices and develops new forms of staging, with a focus on feminist topics. As a performer, she works with collectives and directors, especially from the independent scene