Afonso Molinar and TRASH

Enterview published by CoffePaste, on January 3rd 2024

teatroàfaca is the theater company of Upside Down - Associação Cultural, founded by Afonso Molinar and Filipa Correia in 2018 and based in Lisbon. Their most recent creation is TRASH, which will be performed from January 4th to 7th, 2024 at Avenidas - A theater in each neighborhood. We spoke to Afonso Molinar to find out more.

What concerns currently lead you to create?

I have a lot of ideas every day. It becomes a problem. I would like to have more time to write, experiment and develop things, but the hours don't last long, so I find myself constantly forced to choose the object whose execution seems most challenging to me and which will give me the most enjoyment. In recent years, I have developed different formats with teatroàfaca to present simultaneous narratives on stage. It excites me to think that, on stage, I can put the same story, or different stories, in so many different formats, bodies and mechanisms, from the soundtrack that has one narrative in itself, to the video that has another, even each of the interpreters may be developing their own narrative that, in some way, ties together with everything else. In the end, taking all these separate elements and uniting them, creating a web of relationships, equalizing, and transforming all these narratives into one. A bit like what happens in life, right? The great performance of the world, which only makes sense when all the small lines come together and a great fabric is woven. Without people there can be stories, but there is no one to tell them, and a narrative created with all these separate lines, but together, worries me; I really like that, and that also lives in this show, taken to levels of thematic and technical complexity that I hadn't experienced before. I think that now, perhaps due to the troubled times in which I feel I live, I am becoming more political, and that could be a path to follow from now on; time will tell.

How did the TRASH show come about?

The show TRASH comes from a series of fragments that I started writing in March 2020. I wrote a lot during the pandemic, partly as exercise, but mainly to keep my mental sanity more or less intact; like 90% of my texts, they ended up in a drawer or in a lost folder on the computer. I didn't remember them again until, more or less, October 2022, when I participated in lectures on performing arts at Universidade Nova de Lisboa where two of the speakers introduced each other through a recording they listened to on headphones , for the first time. This talk had such great scenic potential that I immediately knew I wanted to work on it. I quickly went through my trunk looking for texts and ideas that could give some direction to this concept and I came across, in particular, an A5 notebook that I had kept on the shelf, which contained almost all the texts I had written during the pandemic. , which left me with the feeling of reading a kind of diary of someone I didn't know well, of moments I didn't remember and of sensations that I had already purged from my body and mind. This distance that I had already established with the pandemic and with the world that my head inhabited at that time informed me enough to create the structure of a show. From then on, it was just writing and rehearsing.

What themes are covered in the show?

I don't particularly like creating based on theme. I think that most of the timeless objects that survive are not based on theme, but on form. I could say, perhaps, that the main theme addressed in the scene is the form that was chosen, but I'm afraid of sounding - at the very least - pedantic. I'm talking, perhaps, about the material with which that form is woven: mainly, the issue of mental health, isolation and above all loneliness during the pandemic. Not loneliness in general, but that loneliness, with that form and that set of circumstances. The loneliness of someone who finds an escape in writing, in his own mind an interlocutor, in a robot vacuum cleaner a connection with the outside world, and in a painter from the 80s a guardian angel. Obviously, very specific issues of the pandemic that we have been experiencing until recently are portrayed, but this is the one that moves the show forward, and that justifies the narratives that run through it.

Tell us about the option of having a fixed interpreter and the other being different per presentation?

To have someone repeat a sound recording in a true and raw way, like someone reading a book or listening to an album for the first time, they could never have heard the recording before - so you would have to have different people every day. It was something that, technically, I couldn't escape, but it was an idea that greatly fueled the show's dramaturgy. Since this other character is a superficial layer of the Young Man's mind - the character I play - it's great to have the freedom to play with that person's error on stage: we too stumble over our own thoughts. The panic that you might normally have about that person failing, not saying some part of the text, or stumbling over some word, is replaced by an enormous enthusiasm to witness and live a moment with someone who is discovering something, and then transmit it to us - and That has a lot more juice, I think, than having someone pretend to listen to a text. It has, at least, all the content that the person who is there that day has to give. It was also good, wherever the show was, to have local performers participating: the pandemic, despite being the same, was not felt the same way everywhere or by everyone, so it became a different show every day, and being able to do it like this is a privilege.

Does the show have anything autobiographical?

I think there's enough remoteness and fantasy involved for it to be ambiguous. Part of texts written by me, during the pandemic, clouded by thoughts that were very complicated to manage, but at the same time, when I reread them, I did not identify with the author who put them on paper, so much so that the vast majority of the fragments did not reach directly to the show. The very logic of the speech is not mine, and that makes them alien. I believe that at the time I was already writing for a character, without knowing it. So, in a way, yes, one could say that it is autobiographical, but at the same time there is so much present that it is not, that I believe it is equally valid to find the opposite reading.

What was the creative process like?

The writing was peaceful: a lot of reading and re-reading of what was a file that seemed decades old, and then writing and rewriting. I'm very boring at writing and editing what I write, and it takes me a long time because I write too much and then I have to cut out what I don't want. The initial version of this text would have resulted in a four-hour show, and I don't wish people any harm. It was a process that took about 6 months, from the end of February to September 2023, and which involved several artistic residencies where I was able to isolate myself to focus exclusively on the text. The rehearsal process was strange, because I had never worked so much in absence. While on some days I had friends and colleagues helping, a large part of the process was very similar to those rehearsals where our co-star is absent and we have to pretend that someone is there who we know will be present, but who is missing. I'm very lucky in the number of friends who made themselves available to help with the rehearsals, and who turned this process into something less lonely, I'm very lucky in the creatives I collected to complement the show's environment, but above all I'm very lucky in the show's producers, who make the two alone the work of four veteran technicians. It is above all a creative process very dedicated to the details so that, for the most part, the complexity of making the show happen is not noticed on stage, and that even the failure is more than an integral part, but merges with the whole.

Are your expectations for the future positive, or not?

I'm not an optimistic person by nature, but lately I've preferred to maintain positive expectations, even if everything points to the opposite. However, the future is far away, and if you ask the Afonso of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, maybe they will tell you something different. There are horrible things happening in the world, and people next to us and everywhere proclaiming hate and that scares me deeply, but action comes from hope. As long as we have hope, we can always act and fight against this hatred. So yes, it won't be easy, but I believe it will be mostly positive.