Presented in Portuguese with Russian subtitles
Not recommended for children under 12 years
It would be quite misleading, Ricardo Pais warns, to think about the production of ‘The Shadows’ in terms of national identity. Its themes, motives, characters, situations and allusions are of explicitly universal nature and ‘translate’ easily into national languages the world over. First and foremost ‘The Shadows’ is a pilgrimage to the cultural sources of Portugal with all the ensuing swings from grief to joy, from love to death, from dream to reality, from fado to fandango, from drama to cabaret etc. In the meantime this performance can be regarded as Ricardo Pais’ private excursion to the domain of his theatrical imagination: in point of fact the director revises and reinterprets fragments of some of his more or less recent works. Thus the director’s personal creative experiences, his poetics, aesthetic preferences and obsessions become superimposed on the history of the growing up of the Portuguese culture. These two narrative patterns are overlapping all the time.
Bruno di Marino, Italian essayist and media art researcher