The fanciful art of solitude

Especial Nada / Oração da Carne / Com as Tripas ao Sol | Version 2019 | Photo by Mário Campos Rainha | Actress Sara Ribeiro 

The fanciful art of solitude

It's time to go back. It's time to come back. And yet an embarrassment arises and seems to stunt the movements. The concern of how to do it now? How are we going to be able to do theater together and face this situation? Face the fears and say inside that it was all a fright after all and that once again we resist? A dialogue of style only happens to others and the worst is over. Or are we going to face the fears and still abide by the rules of social withdrawal? Of the style to be always at least two meters away from others? Wearing masks and gloves, protecting ourselves and those close to us and the whole above everything? Each question is like a thread that embarrasses and traps us.

Is anyone there? I ask myself inside waiting to hear answers. The choir that stood up is gone. It moved to other places. Not even the echo of the sound of the voice returns as if giving an image that there is a void through which something can pass. No voice, no echo, no answers. Nothing. Little by little these last days it has dried up like water disappearing from the water lines and to the question there is someone there who does not get an answer. I'm gone. But how can I still be here? What's changed?

Even before the virus crisis, the feeling that being alone was something that instilled fear and terrified us. Paradoxically and as opposed to being all together and in a crowd it made us feel like we were a flock without a shepherd. Let us remember the "rush hours" when in a public transport or in a traffic jam the fears and anxieties that often attacked us when in a brave assault our conscience gained the necessary distance to see us. No one then answered the question: is anyone there? The fears we have are the fears of not knowing why we are there too. The fears we have are the fears of not knowing what can happen to us and will certainly happen to us. We wait for the night for some serene and blind order to impose itself on seeing what is happening to us. But the night carries more fears and amplifies the little devils and monsters that torment the need for courage to be alone.

We are a world completely turned outwards. We have friends. We watch the Netflix series in a barda and together even if separated from each other, we talk about what happened outside, we go to football, we do group therapy sessions, we walk by the seaside with the prams, we go to the gym, we watch TV news, we listen until the same news hurts without anything new. And now we celebrate April 25th, May 1st, Our Lady of Fatima all together, but 2 meters away from each other. If before it was difficult to answer the questions: where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going? Who am I? Please touch me! I need to feel! Feel me? Do you feel me? So many questions right now and no one to answer them. Please, someone to react. Tell me who am I? All these questions lead to having to accept that we have moved so far away from the core that marks us, from the centre that defines us that only in our relationship with others are and exist.

This forced isolation has imposed itself as a time to which we do not print our will. It is a time that after all was not built, dreamed, invented, thought of, by any of us. It is the opposite of the paths we were following. If it had its genesis in a group phenomenon, in an impulse to be one, it threw us in the opposite direction. On the hermit's route that carries a faint light with it and moves fearlessly through the darkness. Everyone is being asked to destroy in this time of isolation what distinguishes him from the human mass of which we are part. To understand who we are we must feel. We must collect all the divided parts that are scattered around. Each one is: mother, father, son, teacher, warrior, politician, lover, tourist, coach, opinion maker, worker, lazy, fearful, courageous, friend, healthy, or belonging to a risk group. It has already been understood. We are all that others see us as and for which we arm ourselves externally. But in fact who answers the question who is there when we open our voice to the loneliness that surrounds us? We were forced - or so we all accepted - to withdraw for a brief two months. Have we learned to be alone and to like what we are? We learned that it is from this forgotten art of loneliness that we can revive life?

This period of introversion, of forced solitude is ending. Now all the fears of how to come back and why to go back to doing the things we used to do before are rising. But can it be any other way? The theater actors have to reinvent themselves. How can you act with two meters between bodies? And with masks and gloves? By disinfecting the theater and by all means following all the rules requested. It is hoped that this period of isolation has been fertile in ideas. That the active imagination has worked in a secret and or explicit way and that the lack of people around each one has populated the inner worlds with many others - new and old characters - and that they are the ones who are now proto taking the stage. It is hoped that these new characters will have new ways of dialoguing, that they will bring imagination and invention to dispel the fears and ghosts that until recently occupied the stages emptying them of humanity. That these new characters invent songs, somersaults, enchanting numbers. And that this time that we did not wish for, but that we ended up embracing brings us courage. To receive with openness and clean eyes the opportunities that are emerging. May each one look inward and prepare him or her to welcome being alone with us as a moment of interior construction.

The theater as the light goes out and each spectator is given over to their world and to the darkness that simulates the night where each one is confronted with himself is a preferential space so that being alone is a generous way of being in society. The theatre is a magnificent opportunity to be alone with oneself and with all the new characters that have emerged from our active confined imagination. Let us be hermits then. Let us be like the hermit who gained this quality of being alone and confronting the hidden corners of his soul with his lamp. That is why the Iberian Theatre and the João Garcia Miguel Company are preparing to reopen and resume activities at the beginning of June.

NOTE: text freely inspired by the Tarot card The hermit and the text of Sallie Nichols - Jung and the Tarot

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)