Suster – no âmbito do projeto Ar livre

The performance SUSTER (Sustain) is the outcome of Ar livre (Open air), a project of co-creation, training and socially engaged art, and was co-created with people in Guarda Prison.

Developed at Guarda Prison, Ar livre grows out of the conviction that making art can offer a space for encounter, for reflection and for rebuilding, both personal and collective. The project takes a multidisciplinary approach to social intervention through the performing arts, combining theatre, creative writing, improvisation and stage composition.

The dramaturgy starts from the idea of ‘breathing as a political act’, exploring breath as a physiological, emotional and existential gesture, and as a gesture of resistance. In a setting defined by the deprivation of liberty, the performance questions the limits of the body, of space and of identity.

Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, Ar livre turns the theatre space into a territory of suspension and possibility, where the participants are invited to reinvent their relationship with themselves, with others and with the world. Throughout the process, the men and women in prison were challenged to turn memories, thoughts and lived experience into artistic material, through sustained work of research, creation and self-knowledge.

Suster is performed by the project’s participants themselves, joined by guest artists, in an artistic gesture that blurs the boundaries between the prison and the community and brings audiences closer to realities that often go unseen.

Synopsis

Diary of breath, day 91:
Today they told us our last performance ended like this:
‘I wish I knew how to make the wind. One of these days I’ll make the wind as one who sings with love. Maybe tomorrow.’
I spent the whole day suspended in this, and it seems that every time I breathe out, a sound takes shape in the resonance chamber where my heart wakes. I want to fall asleep, but my breathing won’t let me. Easy! Easy! Tomorrow I’ll sing as one who loves the wind that passes. Maybe I’ll still like being in the open air. I sleep.

Age guidance: 12+ · 60 min (approx.)