Venâncio Calisto – The obsession with the same great themes

Venâncio Calisto’s path is made up of obsession with the same great themes. The exploitation and expropriation of the other, the silencing and marginalization of the other’s voice, loneliness in the midst of the crowd, in this theater of invisibility that makes the other the putrefied flesh that fertilizes the soil on which empires are built. And he does so in the same vein as a theater combating indifference, commonplaces and closed-places. In the adaptations and stagings of “The Merchant of Venice” by William Shakespeare, and “The Mother” by Bertolt Brecht, or in texts written by his own hands such as “What is the sentence: the woman who killed the difference”, “(Un)masked”, “The Crisis”, “The bowl that cries or the story of the stones that talk” and “Inside the stomach of the world | Inside the void, to be more precise”, are just a few examples of this obsession.

Advertising

I knew you first through poetry. Then at the theater. These are two forms of expression that are distinct in nature. And I wonder: how do you navigate between the two?

For me, poetry and theater are waters of the same ocean. It’s true that my artistic initiation begins with poetry, with reading poems, above all. I’ve always liked reading aloud.

And this was the path that led you to theater?

At a certain point, I felt that it was necessary to transform the worlds in which poetry transported me into body, image, movement and sound. Maybe that’s why I never defined a border between these two disciplines. If, on the one hand, poetry uses the written word to express our subjectivity, our deeper look at things, theater is dedicated to its scenic implementation. The stage is a kind of blank sheet that we must fill with metaphors.

For the past three years you have lived in Portugal, another reality, especially in the field of ​​arts and culture. What perspective do you think this gives you on the reality that the country lives in these fields?

My experience as a theater student and professional in Portugal allowed me to come into contact with different ways of doing and thinking about theater, obviously very different from ours, after all it is a different context with other challenges. However, I think there is one thing that serves us all, which is quality training, both for professionals in the field and for the public. Therefore, I believe that this should be my contribution. I hope to turn my experience, as a theater creator and teacher (I teach Dramaturgy at the School of Communication and Arts), into a tool for the materialization of these challenges, in order to contribute to increasing the quality and appreciation of our artistic products.

An easy question is: having already published poetry and theater books, what can we expect from you next?

I intend to continue writing and publishing more books. At the moment, I have a book that is about to come out, it is a comedy in three acts, “Moz my love”, which has already been staged by the Kunhlanganyeta theater company, and at the Winter Theater Festival last year, and had a reading staged by Teatro da Rainha, in Portugal. The piece will be published later this year. The other novelty is the publication of the play “Viagem Por Mim Terra”, created as part of my participation in the National Odyssey carried out by the Teatro Nacional Dona Maria II.

Edição 83 MAR/AGO| Download.