May 13th | 7 pm
Location: Lagos Cultural Center – Duval Pestana Auditorium
Organized by: CM Lagos
Duration: 1h43
Class. age: M12
Ticket: €8 (usual discounts apply)
C., Celeste e a Primeira Virtude is a show about the trails that artistic teaching opens up for invention, that happy place where the human soul vertically connects the Earth to the celestial abyss. A show that intends to contribute to an honest debate about freedom, the role of Art, love and the power that is installed in the various isms – machismo, racism, fascism – and other manifestations of fear.
C.
A group of artistic education students develops the final project under the direction of Mestra. They work from a medico-legal report and reconstitute the details that result in the analyzed crime. Names of virtues are attributed to them, lines of events are speculated, they try to attribute theatrical efficacy to scientific language, but the personal agenda takes precedence over the interest in collective work. Feeling that the academic path is coming to an end, the students, moved by anxiety and fear, come into conflict. The group is divided into several factions, and a physical attack on one of the students triggers gratuitous accusations, mixing affections and ideologies. It is necessary to channel this violence, it is necessary to unite the group and in an outburst a scapegoat is naturally defined. The teacher, named Mestra, object of hatred and admiration, takes on this role. In an outburst, blinded by despair, the group breaks free, tragically ending the lives of two people.
Heavenly
Justiça is a theater student at a school where she meets young people from diverse backgrounds and cultures. The young girl, an orphan abandoned at birth, hides her story and invents an identity that she thinks will relieve her of the past. Upon meeting Mestra, Justiça is haunted by the ghost of real history and it is in hatred that he finds her way out. Mestra builds her pedagogy on the basis of pushing followed by lap, and in the meantime she tells stories of her personal and professional life. One of the recurring characters in these stories of hers is Celeste, a maid who claims to have been her wet nurse and who worked her whole life at her parents’ house. Every time Master refers to Celeste, Justice trembles. In a heated confrontation between Master and Justice, the student reveals that she is the result of rape, that Celeste was her mother and that everything in her is driven by hatred of the father she never knew. Master’s father.
The First Virtue
Mestra, an actress convinced that she made an important discovery about error, became a teacher but now wonders if the future will need more knowledge. Is she the one who looks for answers to the first questions in the students, or is she the one who paves the way for these answers? A young student questions Master’s practices and teaching. A vortex of secrets, annoyances, discord opens up, layers instilled by civilization break and, in the silence of a desperate embrace between the two women, the truth comes out again. Students bring their genetic and contextual history, part experienced and part collected, to the space they deem to be one of experimentation and which, after all, is one of definition. They compromise the future by undermining choices with concerns and fears, ingeniously boycotting their learning by moving away from their element. They think they know better. It is up to Master to look at each one of them with love, curiosity and courage; it cannot fail. In a gesture of approximation, she assigns them names corresponding to virtues: Justice, Faith, Sensitivity, Kindness, Courage, Empathy, Hope, Honesty, Generosity, Excellence, Respect, Humility. The ecological disaster and world calamity destroyed Hope, now at home with a depression. There is always someone missing, for whatever reason, no one is satisfied, and even so, Mestre hopes to direct them, even if it is to a place of dignity.
Image credits ©Estelle Valente/Teatro São Luiz