Marlene Monteiro Freitas: NÔT

Having previously presented her work at the Athens and Epidaurus Festival, Marlene Monteiro Freitas returns to Greece as an Onassis AiR Fellow through the Dramaturgy Fellowship to conduct research for her next project along with her team. Central references in this new piece are “The Thousand and One Nights” and miniatures. Freitas and her collaborators will develop a new production that is going to be presented at the legendary open-air theater of Cour d'Honneur in the next Avignon Festival in 2025. In anticipation of this research period at Onassis AiR, Freitas shares some thoughts about the Cour d'Honneur theater:

“The Cour d'Honneur in Avignon is an imposing piece of architecture. On one side a wall of people, on the other a wall of stone, like ‘between a rock and a hard place’, the stage. In this enclosed space, a miniature show crafted to fit into large spaces. It takes the form of a fable, the result of an accumulation of several short stories, perhaps 1001, altogether: weapon-tales told for the survival of their narrator, in a duel between images and a hardened, petrified heart; lament-tales told to celebrate the absent. In this architecture of stone upon stone and people upon people, an imaginary mirror. Artifact of multiplication, projection, alienation, and bewitchment which, night after night, transforms the scenic space into an onion. From layer to layer, enveloped in odors and invisible splashes, it offers itself to the sword and deliberately smashes against the wall. Rebellion or conformism, who knows?”