​Cyborg Sunday

By Tiago Bartolomeu Costa in Publico

Cyborg Sunday, by Dinis Machado, is a surprising revelation in between theater and dance where the idea of community appears as a possibility of reconstruction of the intimate gesture.

(…) [Cyborg Sunday,] was developed through more than six months with performers from several countries that answered to the proposal of thinking about the emphatic limits of their own bodies.

It's that intentional strangeness effect that allows Cyborg Sunday to emerge as a possible place for the existence of a community that learns to leave intimacy from the sharing of contradictions and setbacks (…) in an object as delicate as fragile by performers who are asked to be brave and affirmative, and to answer to stimulus through a narrative structured by the relation created in between words and movement. This is a movement - and a structure - full of details about what the body can do in space in a lonely dialogue with other bodies in the same space sharing a common vision.

This is a choreography of space and time, what they say gains an importance that needs reactive bodies. The five bodies build a future memory that imposes a mode of acting over this utopic space departing from a present where they live with closed eyes. They search and need bodies that can be, in the end, able to think and exist besides the physical memory. Bodies that can be, finally, vehicles of transmission and sharing of a memory in process of construction. Effectively, what is more relevant in Cyborg Sunday is this deep desire of questioning form, recognizing that in the tension between movement and discourse, which means, between body and message, the potential for dialogue, is unreconcilable but utopic.

(…) Time and action, exist from the differences they provoke in the body, understanding, though, that these differences can't justify collective alienation. The strength and elegance of Cyborg Sunday comes from the intelligence of knowing how to manipulate the tension created between body and text at the point of transferring it to the physical memory of the own spectator.

The text exists from the mnemonic effort that transforms what is narrative into evocation, and what is intuition into emphatic condition. What is suggested is a mode of making reality exist through a choreographic process of evoking which anticipates the own action. And it's because the action is evoked, that the movement loses its condition of support of the discourse, to be seen - and felt - as a rescue mechanism of the present. Cyborg Sunday, in its hybrid condition in between a present body and an absent discourse, is a work about a deterritorialization of the image and it's meaning, from an emphatization of another reality, constructed from a very well crafted net between utopia and quotidian.

The tasks of remembering that are given to the performers, that travel from the non personal - in a certain way, from the other - to their own discourse - which is like being inhabited by the other - reveals that, in the end, the modes of self fictional narrative construction, that are the core discourse of Dinis Machado, knows how to exist besides an inconsequent rhetoric, in a movement that knows how to be more than a point in space.