The Idea

“THE IDEA” NUNO LACERDA LOPES The idea was to create a scenic device, versatile, something playful and light at the same time, able to transform and adapt itself to the many and often unthinkable needs of spatial and temporal resolution and aesthetics, that the current contemporary theatre demands for : a multifunctional object without losing any aesthetic discourse and strategic performance, without endangering the coherence of discursive production that Ricardo Pais always demands and that here, in this work, rather than demonstrate, it seeks above all to enforce. The existence of amplification for the actors’ voice somehow suggested the solution to stage design, something urban, something in construction, something provocative or under maintenance ; a daily space, for the mismatch of the meeting, a fleeting space, without reference to something concrete, a suggestion only, something rich... as I like . A space / place where bodies can touch and move freely between objects and the relationships they establish with themselves! Something that makes them move and that provokes them, stimulates their sensuality, their path, their being... I use set design as experimentation. Set design is a place where I draw and I seek so many spatial ties, which I use later in the architectures, often misaligned, that I like to do. Perhaps because of the theatre and my debut at the D. Maria II Theatre, with a text of the Austrian Thomas Bernhard which asks us what we’ve been doing here “if it’s maths or theatrical art?” And that tells us that to be a true artist you have to be crazy from head to toe; you need to fully surrender to madness, turning it into its radical method ... and the world thinks what it wants and writes whatever it wants, the artist cannot be a sissy. And it later tells us that it is necessary to disrupt, disturb ... disturb, always. I sometimes wonder if these words have been a pressage and were striking in my career’s definition and my whole activity either in scenery or architecture. I do not know how to answer to this question yet, so I say, maybe ... But these were important words that, in part, clarify much of the work I produce, both in terms of set design, Furniture Design and Design and Architecture - I don’t doubt it! And so the line is curve, and is often blurred just like the song! The “stigma of difference” that marks all Ricardo Pais’ production, is particularly evident in this show when the shell gets undressed ... suggesting an essential but not minimalist space, an object that transgresses the theatrical place and invokes the show! N. Lacerda Lopes, “The Idea” in P. Botelho e R. Afonseca (coord.) “Scenes” ed. Transnética, Porto, 2011, p. 176-177. ISBN 978-989-97480-4-2.