Marionet x 20 – The future is ahead

2021

©Francisca Moreira

Teatro Académico de Gil Vicente

12th January to 12th February 2021*

NEW DATES

19th April to 14th May

One of the characters in LED – one of our plays, originally staged in 2006, and which we’ve revisited this last year as part of the celebration of our 20th birthday – asks: “Where are we so fast?”

This question perfectly reflects our feelings in preparing this exhibition, the fleeting passage of time. We usually say we hardly notice it when having fun. That must have been what happened here.

Marionet completed its 20th birthday on October 23rd 2020. Not even in our wildest dreams did we ever think we would be blowing out the candles from this cake. It has been a path built show by show, the road appearing before us at every step, as our feet touched the ground.

The selection of images and objects we made for this exhibition attempts to encompass these twenty years’ activity and to create a broad panorama of what we accomplished in this period. It will hardly be able to do this. At best it might sketch some constellation of memories, little dots a viewer can trace into a broader image, its sharpness depending on how close to our activity one is and has been.

Materially, the exhibition is based on the work of two fundamental elements of the company: Francisca Moreira’s photographs and Pedro Andrade’s posters and objects.

Francisca has been photographing our shows since 2003, building the company’s image and memory that way, with her human and attentive eye for detail and for the inter-play of every stage element.

Pedro, who has also been reinventing Marionet since 2003, is usually responsible for our image, stage and wardrobe design. He keeps an extraordinarily close and lucid relationship with contemporaneity he always brings back to the stage and which is thus reflected in the images exhibited here.

On a second level of atention, growing from the ethic and aesthetic choices of these artists, one becomes aware of the collective and multi-artistic work entailed in theatrical activity. The images show the contribution of the many professionals who have worked with us throughout our existence, specialists of diferent artistic fields and who, with their work, have built us all, collectively, and to whom we are deeply grateful.

A special thanks, in the present circumstances, goes to TAGV, our stage-house in Coimbra, co-production partner of our first show, back in 2001, with whom we have produced several other shows and where we’ve presented several more. It has always been this Theatre’s praiseworthy policy to support local artistic production, and that is indeed worthy of mention. Proving it, once more, is their associating in our celebration of this event. We are thankful to all their team, past and present.

Also worth the mention, was the creation of a Virtual Visit to the exhibition, at the moment it was closed, so as to accessibilize and perpetuate this important mark in the history of the Company.

And now… the future is ahead.

*The exhibition was suspended due to the confinement measures decreed by the Portuguese Government on January 15th 2021.