Patrícia Portela
If I tell you stories all the time I do not disappear. -Scheherazade, Flatland(Portela)
Patrícia Portela is an unclassifiable Portuguese writer, performer, media artist, producer, and stage designer who creates and manipulates language in a variety of multidisciplinary projects that include performance, installation, theatre, movement, and video. Her playful, audacious, and speculative texts narrate a hyper-real world where wordsspill from the printed page onto screens andfrom audio and virtual platforms to the eyes and ears of audiences. Unrelentingly inventive, her creations require audiences to question the meaning of language and its relationships to narrating reality.
DiscussingPortelain traditional literary contexts would be to ignore the particularity of her inventiveness and miss its provocative richness. Rather, her writing must be considered in the wider arena of interdisciplinary, contemporary art that integrates multiple practices and aesthetics on a project-by-project basis. Several of Portela’s unconventional texts, however, are also published in book formats, and since she enjoys an international following, someare available in English. On stage, in public gardens, on virtual media, or in books, after more than a decade of original creations,inventive language and unusual storytelling arePatríciaPortela’s enduring constants, attracting international co-productions, festival programming, and awards.
As part of the generation born in Portugal’s mid 1970’s “Carnation Revolution” period, she is a fascinating example of a New Wave of contemporary Portuguese creators shaping current artistic scenes.With regards to her training in stage design and affinity for the open-ended parameters of Contemporary Dance, she has called herself a “choreographing scenographer.” However, her focus includes imagining stage space for text and combining movement, visual art, theatrics, cyber space, and words in multiple presentation platforms. Precisely, it is in mobilizing the synergetic movement, rhythm, and essence of each of these elements that makes her unique to both the performing and literary milieus.
With a team of collaborators, Portela explores possibilities that technology affords in performance. “… our virtual space is just the building of a big book. We like this kind of mixing, the simultaneity of different layers…technology as a book. The book was our first technology. That´s why we produce all the things we produce…because we can write and this was one of the important reasons for using a book and not another surface.”More recently,political, social, and environmental issues have become primary subjects in her work (Hortus and 2084).To say one must see and hear Portela’s texts in order to experience them is no extravagance. In surprising audio and visual dimensions she fabricates scenography from language and as a result twists its very essence as meaning and narrative.
PatríciaPortelaagrees that, “due to the historical, political, and social context following the end of the dictatorship, there exists a new generation of writers in Portugal who show different perspectives, using vocabulary and literary structures that are more cosmopolitan.” She is exemplary of the contemporary artist who studies, works and lives fluidly in and out of her native country, uses multiple languages, and identifies more with a broad range of current artistic aesthetics than anything specific to her cultural heritage.
She studied set and costume design at Lisbon’s Faculty of Theatre and Film and then gained experience working withindependent theatre and dance companies, mainly as a costume designer or dramaturge, and as a decorator for several short films. She moved on to do a masters degree in scenography arts at the Faculty of Theatre in Utrecht and Central St. Martins College of Art, and the European Film College in Denmark,specializing in sound design, scriptwriting and documentary.
In Utrecht she was given the first opportunity to connect movement, text, and stage space in a single project rather than remaining limited to a single discipline. Surprisingly, the link between different disciplines emerged primarily through writing and images. It was also here that Portela became enamoured with the “dramaturgy of space and small, portable things.”
Starting in 1999 Patricia Portelabegan gaining attention and prizes for theater work, and in 2003 she received an Acarte/GulbenkianPerforming Arts Special Mention for Wasteband, the first piece in a trilogy. The same workwon a special mention for its dramaturgy, text, and use of space in 2006 by Portugal’s Association of Critics. Banquet, a dinner-ambiance-performance about cloning and immortality, was considered one of the top10 shows in Belgium by critics in 2007, and in 2009 she received 2 year funding from Portugal’s Ministry of Culture to develop her research on trans-disciplinary projects. She moves between homes inAntwerp and Lisbon fromwhere she directs her research/production company called Pradotv and collaborateswith numerous researchers, programme designers, and visual and sound artists.
Returning to the question of what distinguishes contemporary creators from the past, Portela comments, “Every generation has it’s own questions and themes, its fantasies that come from preceding generations. It’s normal that some questions are recurring and others are replaced by more immediate preoccupations.” She questions interpretations of reality, satirizes political discourse, and is playfully polemic and provocative.Such perspectives share deep literary traditions, but she articulates themin a singular manner using technology. Further, she adds, ” The last ten years have seen the emergence of new and promising writers that could leave their mark on the period.”
Because of the experimental nature ofher work and the fact that published books are generally not her priority, one wonders whether Portelafeels marginal with regards to contemporary Portuguese writing?”I can’t say that I feel on the margin. I am still living in an astonishing period, but my primary occupation is performance. Literature and its environment are very recent for me. However, I think that poets are the ones truly on the margin, the real radical and experimental writers. With regards to prose, there are emerging writers who are respected and read with admiration. This all contributes to a strong literary generation and reinforces everyone individually.” She has published four books, the last two with the renowned Editorial Caminho. Her publications “Odília” in 2007 and “Para cima…” in 2008, were considered a new revelation and style in Portuguese literature by critic Miguel Real in the reputed Jornal de Letras.
Portela‘s Creations–A book is a surface for words
Muses are born between the little finger, the heart, and the human brain. (…) If we look very carefully we can notice that they have the shape of a plant or a leave. They navigate in a very organized and active way through the brain and they communicate through highly complex systems, by propagating electric signals and primary chemical reactions. (Odília)
Portela the experimenterappears obsessed with keeping language mobile, a seemingly contrary role to what is routinely expected ofnarrative descriptions and fixations of reality.Visually and aurally, her words are often in a state of flux, shifting positions, playing tricks, contradicting, and transfiguring themselves. Reading Portelaslowly, pondering meaning, or beginning again is fruitless because the text will have possibly changed or disappeared as speed is a consciously integrated element in her inventions. A tour through PatríciaPortela’s projects offers a view of her hyper-literary imagination.
The recent site-specific sound installation HORTUS(2012) explores the tension between the ideals of nature and capitalist market economics.Portela’s narrative framework “situates the sound garden in an environment of contemplation and reflection about how we can make the balance between man and nature shift again by rewriting and re-understanding our relationship with real-time and natural conditions.”Visitors are invited to explore a garden where a sensor network measures the dynamics of wind and light harvested by the plants during their photosynthetic process and translates them into bird sounds. Human movement in the garden provokes a financial algorithm similar to the ones used in a speculative economic marketthat interprets the variations of the received data and transforms and remaps the natural garden soundscape to which plants seem most profitable in that split second. When the visitors decide to stop, to read, or to reflect, the original sound design for the garden returns, reflecting only the readings of natural energy.Simultaneously, a network of micro stories circulates in a loop in electronic paper botanical displays, comparing definitions of common terms in the economic, political, or natural worlds such as growth, beauty, regeneration or time.
Accompanying Hortus in the “Utopian Salon”, the lecture-performance 2084, the title an apparent takeoff on George Orwell’s satirical”1984,” makes a similar ‘technological’ metaphor with the relationship between nature and society. An “orchestra” of 20 plants reacts to the dynamic of light and wind that other plants receive in the garden, and accompanies the reading of two New Year’s speeches. Portela presents two separate reflections about possible futures for a dying civilization, blending citations from President Obama andMao Zedong in her own text. Each presentation ends with a reading and debate led by a pair of invited guests from such areas as science, politics, or philosophy. Audiences are invited to “exercise and practice Utopia”, rather than be presented with a model, and to “imagine the impossible” by adding suggestions or themes to the debate.
ThePrivate Collection of AcácioNobre(2010)is a staged fiction documentary based on a trunk full of texts discovered in Portela’s grandparent’s house. Nobre was a controversial, avant-garde Portuguese writer and public figure that suffered from aphasia. With elaborate lighting and giant screens that reveal texts typed live on stage, Portela’s performance documents and exploresNobre’s persona via the discovered letters.
The Flatland Trilogy (Wasteband,Flatland 1, Flatland 2)was created between 2003 and 2005 and is a whimsical, outrageous, and surreal 3-part adventure. The first piece is a virtual performance for 1 astronaut/salesman, 1 musician, and 1 PowerPoint, subtitled “a performance about waiting, wishing, and wasting.” Tongue in cheek, Portela notes that the project is “Based on the coincidental fact that both a Chinese ritual and scientific theories prove that the moon will soon fall on a beach full of frogs on the exact date we perform.” She leads a faux scientific discussion around a table where performers and spectators are seated and vertical images are projected on a screen. Playing on the words “waist” and “waste,” Portela adds, “Wasteband is a strip of time that shapes your days, by extending the waiting moments instead of the action ones, creating a bigger possibility of accidents and collateral effects in lives that have been over-programmed.”
Flatland 1tells the story of a Flatmanas he discovers a third dimension is missing in his life. We followthe superhero’s reflections through worlds of bi-dimensionality until he finds out that existence in the 3D world is possible only if spectators are looking at him. Elated with the discovery but unhappy with his dependency, Flatman organizes a strategy to conquer his tridimensional immortality.The project uses a detective story format and has multiple presentation formats: audio, visual projection, and printed book.
Exploring the very notion of books and language as moving objects, Flatland 1‘s published formatis a book titled “Para Cima e Não Para Norte (Above, Not to the North). LikeFlatman’s desired life, the book is 3 dimensional with words undulating on the printed page, sentences running off edges, circling, and recomposing in an animated circus of print acrobatics. Pausing in what seems like a literary madhouse romp, the reader wonders what mischief continues withinonce the book is closed.Portela manipulates metaphorical possibility in Flatland 1(the narrator requests one minute of silence near the conclusion) in a zany mix of James Bond antics, comic book lightness, and scientific treatise.
Flatland II,subtitled “to be is to be seen,” is a performance in which”spectators are kidnapped and taken to an unknown place where a nonstop multimedia show presents many different entertainment options, all offered at the speed of a click, including salvation by a pizza delivery man.”Momentarily, the world obeys a parallel construction of the world itself. Polemical and probing, in this final installment of the trilogy, theater is terrorism and terrorism becomes theatre, thus creating fiction in real time and riskingbold statements about the very act of performance.”Before you’re a victim, you’re an audience,”says Portela.
Odília, (2006)like Flatland1, exists asboth book and performance. She calls it “A journey through the house of ideas and impressions, like still lives in the brain. A labyrinth (…)as if we could lose ourselves in our heads.” Perhaps in the persona of Odília we sense Portela’s narrative voice best and glimpse her comic nature: There are the normalmuses and the confused muses! … They are regularly naked or semi-naked with semi transparent dresses and are responsible for romantic delirium and the Music of the universe…The confused muses are all Odílias.
Says Portela, “I would love to make a book that could be read in many directions and could have several possibilities of order, but both Odília and Para cima can be read from beginning to end. I would say I never know what to expect when I open a book and all I want is to be fascinated by what it wants to tell me… if people can expect that of my books I will be very pleased, but that is one of the most difficult things for books to be: fascinating and expectedly unexpected!
In earlier work she usedspeed and information overload as dramaturgical tools and narrative strategies, “text and images sometimes running so fast that itis impossible to catch all of it… it´s no longer an information, it´s more an environment.” CurrentlyPortela, the probing contemporary Darwinian and activist artist is probing issues related to nature and survival. She is, amongst her generation of contemporary Portuguese creators, a treasure to be discovered.
Patricia Portela, images, videos, texts, information:www.prado.tv
*The text on PatríciaPortela is part of a series of portraits of 4 contemporary Portuguese writers with support of Portugal’s Institute Camões and The Québec Arts Council.
Richard Simas, June 2012
richardsimas@netaxis.ca
NOTE: This text was first published here on Sept.03.2012
Richard Simas is a freelance writer living in Montreal. His fiction won a 2008 Fiddlehead literary prize and has appeared in the Journey Prize Anthology. His nonfiction work has been published in literary and arts reviews in Canada and Europe, and includes commentaries on contemporary dance, music, theater, and Azorean culture. Recently, he created a New Music-Spoken word performance based on Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet that premiered at the Open Ears New Music festival in Kitchener, Ontario and was performed at Les Éscales Improbables in Montreal