heading against the wall

Cão Solteiro invited me to Lisbon to make a show in Autumn 2020. It was my first time working with them, and the performance that resulted is an improvised show based on questions and answers enacted by three performers. It is composed of two separate but related objects: an in-person performance in the main room at Lisbon nightclub, Lux, and a simultaneously broadcast online film. Questions of intimacy arose as I got to know the company during the process and presentation.

We always start with an impossibility or rather, a possibility which we then rush to render impossible. We always work directly with the place and the people. What can we do then in the thin space we’re now in, dominated by images of absence? Perhaps what we are now seeing is not theatre, but an idea of “theatre” that we insist on projecting digitally, an indefinable space, somewhere between public and private. Perhaps it would be unwise to accept that proximity will guarantee any kind of intimacy. Heading Against the Wall has two versions that can be seen at home or live. They’re two different objects, choose one. This is a documentary about nothing: the more you find out the less you know.

Maria Sequeira Mendes in Pastoral, Book of Texts:

This is a show about borders. 
This is a show about borders which become saturated and overflow. 
This is a show about borders which became saturated, overflow and enter bodies. 
This is a show about bodies. This is a show about bodies heading against the wall.
And then, they die.