The Living Museum of my Generation’s Failure: On The Living Museum of Small, Forgotten and Unwanted Memories by Joana Craveiro/ Teatro do Vestido

• Autor(a) principal: Coelho, Rui Pina
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/30540
• topic: Documentary theatre; Political theatre; Craveiro, Joana; Performance-lecture

Um museu vivo de memórias pequenas e esquecidas - sobre a ditadura, a revolução e o processo revolucionário [The Living Museum of Small, Forgotten and Unwanted Memories - on dictatorship, revolution, and the revolutionary process], by Portuguese theatre artist, Joana Craveiro / Teatro do Vestido is a five hour performance that deals with Portuguese history from the last century, focusing on the fascist dictatorship (1926-1974) and on the 1974 Carnation Revolution. It is a performance composed by five lectures (presented separately throughout 2014 – in its final version it premiered in November 2014). It departs from a minuciously built historical research, mixing innocent family memorabilia such as letters, books and pictures with the most relevant public events that occurred in that period. Craveiro’s work departs usually from autobiographic, personal and subjective materials. This performance is no exception. But this lecture-performance has the singularity of merging the intimate and the public, the factual and the objective, the poetic and the journalistic. It is a performance that clearly fights the oblivion of the horrors of the dictatorship and the current Right Wing politics desire to blank out some of its major accomplices and perpetrators. Joana Craveiro was born in 1974. I was born in 1975. Politically and ideologically, although there are some nuances on our approaches, I think we are on the same side of the barricade. And the stories that Joana Craveiro lectures on (memories from the early years of democracy, the freedom of the eighties, contemporary labour precariousness…) are very familiar to me - to a sense that they could be my own memories. Craveiro has created a Museum of Memories for our generation. For me as critic, I have no objective distance whatsoever of this artistic object. I have no option than being Baudelarian (partial, political and passionate) about this performance. As a critic I feel a passionate urge to defend, to read, to discuss this performance as part of my generation task against oblivion. The extremeness of this example only signals what I consider to be an inextricably part of criticism: there is nothing objective in performing arts criticism. Criticism always carries the political, generational and subjectively personal signature of its author. The body of the critic is always determinant.