RICARDO FRAYHA
producer

Electric Awakening investigates how we can awaken the dormant powers within to dismantle the systems of corruption and death that enslave us. Electric Awakening is a treatise of the body’s revolt. Our memories and identities are written across our flesh so we return to the body to wipe the slate clean and start over; forge new systems and new relationships with one another. We invoke the human life cycle as a form of exploration. However, in our piece, we  reverse the cycle, beginning with our death and ending with our conception, in order to manifest a rebirth for performers as well as the audience. The transition from death to birth, is influenced by Artaud’s writing, “The Plague”, an important work in The Living praxis. The experience of death allows the audience to connect with their own inevitable passing, but instead of approaching it with fear, the use of ritual, music, movement, and language will enable the participants to shift perception of their own mortality and infuse it with awareness, passion, and a revitalized sense of a rebellion against everything untrue we have been taught since birth. The purpose of the Electric Awakening is to kill the parts of ourselves and our system that do not serve us; the people and the earth. Electric Awakening challenges the participants to seek out their own internal transformation by drawing them through a radical birth rite. We begin by reckoning with our own fears, shame and desires and move towards creating a new life system within ourselves, so that we have the ability to gather collectively as a society and begin to dismantle the current oppressive social systems that are in place and to begin to create new ones that allow humans to benefit rather than suffer from their existence.The Living will awaken and step towards freedom with shaking feet and pounding hearts. The creation of the piece includes a four day workshop with 20 Brazilian performers who will be integral in shaping the piece through an intensive exchange of ideas. The final work will be the synthesis of communal sharing.  This immersive work will rely on the performers welcoming and guiding the public through the entirety of the show. We shed our passivity together and discover a collective transformation.​

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THE LIVING THEATRE

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Founded in 1947 in New York by Judith Malina and Julian Beck, the Living Theatre was, at its birth, already directly linked to an important renovation in the theatrical territory of the second half of the 20th century. Together with other New York experimental groups, it gave rise to the off-Broadway movement, occupying small theatres or adapting deactivated warehouses and aiming to discuss current issues and the very nature of theatrical work on the scene, in a structure that is directly opposite to productions aimed at box office success and easy entertainment. Quite influenced initially by the tradition of political theatre by Erwin Piscator - of whom Judith Malina was a student and through which she came into contact with Bertold Brecht's epic theatre - the Living Theatre associated other poetic, philosophical and theatrical references to the theories of engaged theatre with a Marxist view, at for a work and political posture aimed at non-violent revolution and anarchism. Absorbing and anticipating characteristics, perceptions and behaviours typical of the cultural revolution that took place after the Second World War, the group fixed itself as the counterculture theatre, engaging in street theatrical manifestations and performing on the scene an unexpected combination of the rationality of the dialectical theatre with Antonin Artaud's theatre of cruelty. With political activism and the intertwining of art and life as its major brands, the Living Theatre has maintained a constant collaboration in its creations with activists, around various struggles and in a direct relationship with the most urgent issues of reality. Facing, at times, the practical difficulties of maintaining a challenging aesthetic proposal - the complex equation between the need for financing the productions and the desire not to charge tickets, for example, in addition to the constant changes of address motivated by problems with the State - the group achieved its first major success with 1959's The Connection, whose hyper-realism in the portrait of a group of heroin users generated a mixture of surprise and delight in the public and, from which, the actors deliberately came to represent themselves. Since then, the company has toured Europe and won acclaim at the most important festivals such as the Festival of Nations, Paris, in 1961, and the Avignon Festival, in 1968. At the same time, the radical nature of its creations did not fail to generate controversies and extreme repressive reactions, as was the case with the expulsion from Avignon by the local authorities with the piece Paradise Now. In 1970, the group came to Brazil invited by José Celso Martinez Corrêa, director of Teatro Oficina, who had met them in Paris that same year. The following year, when the group was preparing a parallel work for the Ouro Preto Winter Festival, in Minas Gerais, its arrest was decreed by the DOPS, which had international repercussions and mobilised protest actions in Europe and the USA, leading them to be expelled from the country by presidential decree - Judith Malina would only have her entry into the country released in 1990, through the revocation of the 1971 decree by then President Fernando Collor and would be awarded, as a form of reparation, the Order of Cultural Merit by president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in 2008; Julian Beck had passed away in 1985. In the following decades, the Living Theatre would continue its performance alternating between long periods of residence in Europe - passing by the Venice Biennale in 1975 -, tours through the interior of the United States and the establishment of venues with more or less smaller longevity in New York. Even with the death of Judith Malina in 2015, the group remains active, at her request, operating collectively with the guidance of several generations of company members. Its septuagenarian trajectory, which has about one hundred plays, represented in eight languages, in 28 countries, constitutes one of the greatest references of the world and continues to inspire new theatrical generations.

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ELECTRIC AWAKENING

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Living Theatre Ensemble: Leah Bachar, Brad Burgess, Natalia de Campos, Jessica Daugherty, Brad Hamers, Monica Hunken, Mattias Kraemer, Dennis Yueh-Yeh Li, Lois Kagan Mingus, Philip Santos Schaffer, Ilion Troy, Thomas S. Walker, in collaboration with Brazilian participants of the workshop.
 

Production: Performas Produções Artísticas and prod.art.br | General direction: Andrea Caruso Saturnino, Ricardo Muniz Fernandes | Executive producer: Ricardo Frayha | Production coordination: João Moreira | Graphic designer: Erico Peretta

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The performance ELECTRIC AWAKENING was created in the frame of the exhibition LIVING THEATRE, PRESENTE!, curated by Andrea Caruso Saturnino, Inês Cardoso and Ricardo Muniz Fernandes

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Realisation: Sesc São Paulo

Sesc Consolação

São Paulo, SP, Brazil
03 to 07/11/2017