I AM NOT PRETTY. I AM THE PIG.
Texts: Angélica Liddell and Paulo Castro
Creation, direction and set: John Romão
With: John Romão and Solange Freitas
Light design: Daniel Worm d'Assumpção
Musics: Daniel Romero (.tape.)
General assistance: Tiago Cadele
Pictures: Susana Paiva
Artistic Residences: Alkantara, Negócio/ZDB, O Espaço do Tempo
Co-Production: Colectivo 84, Festival Citemor, Vertigo
Support: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian
PRESENTATIONS:
31 Julho 2012, Festival Citemor (Montermor-o-Velho)
12 a 29 Dezembro 2012, Negócio/ZDB (Lisboa)
"Decadence is the grand moment where the civilization becomes exquisite." Jean Cocteau
Contemporary society lives intrigued by distortion, by anomaly, by immorality and evil. "I'm not pretty. I'm the pig." is an object that departs from the theme of sexual abuse in childhood and adolescence, bringing the text of Angélica Liddell and the one of Paul Castro, to be able to talk about body image: its nakedness, its openness to all possible.
The show evokes the universe of fairy tales and black gore film, a pictorical peep-show powered by two figures dressed by the demonly of the characters by Frans Hals and the Greek nudity by Louis David. It is about defiling the body, its beauty, revealing firstly their secret parts, creating a vicious circle of horror and attraction. There is no picture of the body without the imagination of its opening.
REVIEWS
"It's a show - as always in John Romão - erotic, disturbing and heretical. Agony and interpellation. It's beautiful and horrible. The show I AM NOT PRETTY. I AM THE PIG. has a precious structuring: John Romão is a structuralist director. And semiological: see the introduction that gives the 'tone' of the formal logic of the work. With Christ in the background, Humanity proceeds, centered on sex, to the humiliation and loathing of the weakest: children, blacks, distracted. The plastic creation joins criticism of philosophers (Kant) and performativity shows up to demolish. On stage, John Romão and Solange Freitas give the body to manifest. Hurrah John Romao, the Beautiful! " Eugénia Vasques (21/12/2012)
"John Romão rode a circus of horrors, a kind of fable symbolist raised from the bowels, which asks for understanding but never to forgive. Among a cornucopia filled with iconographic allusions to horror bloodiest cinema, to comics, and to painting of Goya and Louis David; in darkness or illuminated by neon crucifixes carved in néon lights, with a special dynamic created by the great light designer Daniel Worm d'Assumpção and engaged by the music of Daniel Romero, the director's and Solange Freitas's bodies are assaulted and aggressors, pure and corrupt, victims and violators surrounded by codes, rules, conventions and impositions. Bodies that, faced with the frustration of desire and reality of violence, react, act, paunch preconceived ideas, accentuating stereotypes ready to implode." Rui Monteiro (**** Time Out Lisbon, 12/26/2012)