Apart While you flew, I took rootfrom the Franco-Brazilian company Dos à Deux, is an example that to feel, you don’t need to say a word. Combining gestural theater, dance and audiovisual, the play – which had a new season at the beginning of the year in São Paulo and will be on display again between May 10th and June 30th, in São Paulo – transports the public to a sensorial experience that avoids telling a story or forging a narrative. In the dim light of the theater room, the audience is invited to enter a parallel reality behind a cylindrical screen that looks like an oracle. There, without saying a single word, two beings float and collapse on a trampoline positioned vertically. The movements are sometimes accompanied by video projections and the original soundtrack by cellist Federico Puppi.
The piece encourages the audience to make different associations with the images created from the movements. Through the cylindrical screen it is possible to visualize both a clock, in which the actors’ legs are the hands, and a mirror, an eye or even outer space, where there is no gravity. At times, the viewer may question whether the scenes are even real.
The company Dos à Deux was created by André Curti and Artur Luanda Ribeiro in 1998 in Paris. The gesture theater group has already sold out audiences in more than fifty countries and is currently based in Rio de Janeiro. With dramaturgy, scenography, staging and performance by the duo, While you flew, I took root was conceived during the pandemic and emerged from the search for understanding what fear is – and the sensations caused by it. It is an ambitious project, but, through aesthetic rigor and a synchronicity of movements and beautiful images, the authors manage to construct a melancholic and complex tone that refers to the different abysses of human existence. For an hour, the actors give the audience a cathartic experience, a moment of reflection accompanied by intense sensations.
