Elisa Ohtake
false show
False Show
to the catastrophes artistic ones, these ones!
In Fake Spectacle, three performers place themselves in a situation of assumed failure, error, and worthlessness. They are interested in the “not knowing” on stage, the artistic catastrophe, the situation of exile of a body that proposes to dance, act, and not a supposedly ready body that does spectacular things. They are interested in that body that inaugurates in itself a certain impotence, a certain weakness, an imposture that is itself an ironic power, worldview, state of being. Artists are often terrified of accepting their own limits, but depending on the look, these limits can be more interesting than what is considered “presentable”. “Speaking in the name of absolute incompetence”, as Gilles Deleuze said. To speak in the name of absolute incompetence, here, to minimally unbalance the yoke of data, of formatted stability, of artistic stereotypes. Creating loopholes so that possible or impossible, true or false, optimistic or pessimistic contours, perhaps momentarily, can open up to experimentation, to artistic freedoms, to Espinosa's question: “what can a body do?”.
False Spectacle is a conceptual exercise that tries to blur the border between opposing concepts, an aesthetic reflection about the ambiguity, the complexity of life. The title “False Spectacle” reveals itself as a kind of trap: throughout the play, false and true are framed in another frame, that of ambiguity. In this montage, theater and dance are treated in their specificities, metalinguistically, the theater that is thought and the same in relation to dance. The way to organize this information on stage, however, has a lot to do with the performance and its radicalities, its self-irony, its search for language.
Credits
Creation, concept, direction, writing, sound design: Elisa Ohtake
Performance: Emerson Meneses, Ricardo Oliveira, Elisa Ohtake
Part in video: Sheila Mello
Set design: Elisa Ohtake and Cesar Rezende
Set construction: Mateus Nanci
Light and sound operator: Ricardo Gelli
Production: Elisa Ohtake and Escritório das Artes
Photos: João Caldas and Lenise Pinheiro
reviews
“I had heard from friends that this was a real find in performance. And delightful it was, indeed. False Spectacle is intelligent, fun, audacious. It is always on the verge of inconsistency, rejecting spectacle but dodging all the prat falls or “artistic disasters” that performance itself sets up. As mentioned, it swings from impossible to possible and back. Playful but not at all naive, it knows what it is doing by playing on real and false in ‘everything’.”
Nelson de Sá – blog de teatro Cacilda
“A forceful and competent discussion of issues usually posed by thinkers interested in explaining the complexity of life, such as Spinoza, Prigogine or Deleuze. (..) The audacious proposition of perceiving that we live in an ‘in- between’ state of total simultaneity between joyful doubt and hellish uncertainty. Each deliberate intonation, gesture or movement weaves a succession of surprises. Perhaps the greatest of them is that such complex issues have been so seductively organized.”
Helena Katz – O Estado de S. Paulo
“Celebration of uncertainty” as its creator Elisa Ohtake says, or paean to precariousness, *False Spectacle* is a fine example of the opportunities open to the performing arts in this post-modern age. Turning away from the Enlightenment and from Cartesian determinism, our own everyday bankruptcy may be confronted without intellectual shame or existential fear. *False Spectacle’s* three performers seem to be proclaiming “We are fallible, thank God!” – and taking an almost sensual delight in doing so.”
Sebastião Milaré – Anta Profana (electronic review)
*False Spectacle* is a self-assumed bluff in the Futurist or Dada tradition of disruption. Like Duchamp taking a urinal to be displayed at a museum, Ohtake has the candor of children showing off to visitors, exposed to all ridicule; those who least expect it will find her intelligence contagious.”
Sergio Salvia Coelho – Folha de S. Paulo
