For me, writing for theatre (and for me this is the difference between being a writer and a playwright) is to perceive time and space unity from the point of view in which I’m writing. I am here and now writing this. Therefore staging is to confront the time of staging and the time of writing. So, consequently my issue is almost always an attempt to see and to perceive the others as they really are, in spite of this time and place problem.
Miguel Castro Caldas is a playwright, translates and teaches playwriting in the Theater degree at the School of Arts and Design. Teaches also Short Fiction. He worked in theatre with Bruno Bravo, Jorge Silva Melo, Gonçalo Waddington, Miguel Loureiro, António Simão, Tiago Rodrigues, Teresa Sobral, Raquel Castro, Pedro Gil, Lígia Soares, Gonçalo Amorim, Rute Rocha, among others. Some of his texts are published in the collection Livrinhos de Teatro dos Artistas Unidos, the publishers Ambar, Douda Correria, Mariposa Azual, Culturgest, Primeiros Sintomas, and in the magazines Artistas Unidos, Fatal and Blimunda. He translated Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Ali Smith, William Maxwell, Joyce Carol Oates, Salman Rushdie, Senel Paz, among others. He won SPA Prize for best-staged play with Se eu vivesse tu Morrias.
Were I to live, you would be dead
This piece has the nature of an essay, an experiment, an investigation; its matter is the exploration of one of theatre’s limits: the text. The text is made available alongside its representation on the stage; thus, the spectators can switch back and forth between reading and watching the performance. One key concern of this project is this particular gap betweeen seeing and reading. Even if reading is also, and simultaneously, seeing, to read implies a kind of blindness – one can only read if one loses sight of letters, words, sentences, the text; one only gains access to meaning by freeing oneself from form. This project operates precisely in that gap: between reading and seeing, between the book and the stage, in the folds of the spectators’ flickering attention, between the lifting and dropping of their heads, the swing of their necks. One could claim, then, that it inquires into the visibility of the theatrical text, including the stage directions – that voiceless speech that choreographs all that you see on the stage.
