IMPRENSA | Elisa Ohtake

reviews

"HERE elevated to a trillion" is one of those rare artistic events that embed themselves in your soul and memory, resonating strongly for a long time, changing your sensibility and transforming the paradigm of how you see yourself in the world and perceive the planet around us.

Elisa throws us into a dual, surgical gaze—microscopic for our humanity and telescopic for the cosmos—reframing, with this dual perspective, both the insignificance and importance of humanity in this infinite universe. She opens new possibilities for values in our affections, our roles in interrelations, and our larger relationship with the biosphere in times of climate crisis.

Elisa Ohtake is one of the most rigorous, inventive, and vigorous artists and creators on the contemporary scene. She has slowly built, step by step, grain by grain, an authorial work with her own language, a unique poetics and aesthetics of rare coherence and complexity.

Ruy Cortez

HERE 1.000.000.000.000 in its insistent excessiveness creates a transition between embarrassment and pleasure, melancholy and euphoria, boredom and excitement, astonishment and admiration: this is Elisa Ohtake's sublime cynicism. There is something visibly precise amidst the formless chaos that accumulates monologue after monologue, present in a phrase, in an unexpected gesture. In descriptions of images, descriptions of anti-images; liminal spaces, the absurdity of reality, and a journey through places that never existed and always will, through the before that only manifests in the now. In the end, there remains a desire for all of us to be HERE, elevated to a trillion, deeply contemplating and inhabiting the problem where we live.

Amilton De Azevedo

"O Teatro, esse Sol estranho, maior que a Vida." 'AQUI elevated to a trillion' has conception, text, direction, set design, and soundtrack by Elisa Ohtake. Having at her disposal a cast of stars, to begin with, and not being indulgent with this cast is practically a miracle. I swear I've never seen such unison in my life. The show has its language, and everyone on stage is in sync with the spectacle. There are eleven actors, and even though they deliver monologues, no one is "doing another play, but that's okay." The fluency is perfect, and the "pauses" are intentional, with a pretentious nonchalance (oops) in the unfolding of it all. "Look, we're going to spend an hour and a half setting up the scenery, and then the play starts, which will last 15 minutes." Or Maria Manoella calling Georgette Fadel "Forfete Jadel." There is relaxation and virtuosity. A glory for the actors on stage. EVERYONE is excellent, and this allows the message to impose itself because, yes, ladies and gentlemen, the play has something to say. It's not a jumble of words or a portrait of a dead world. It's about our dying and (chemically) polluted world, about the quality of presence and the role of theater, "this strange sun, greater than life," which in the near future will be the only thing that will make us present, as Elisa prophesies. The show often references the Sublime in Kant, referring to something that is not only beautiful but also terrifying, and I can say that the play achieves that. I couldn't sleep until after 5 AM. It's a pity that the term (sublime) is so banalized that it can describe a well-brewed coffee or be used as a brand of toilet paper, so I'll simply say that 'AQUI elevated to a trillion' is a volcano erupting, and Elisa is ready to direct The Magic Flute at the Municipal Theater.

Antônio Furtado

The name of the play is "HERE Elevated to 1 Trillion." It could be called "The Standup of the End of the World." Run to the theater now.

Marcelo Tas

"Here elevated to a trillion," by Elisa Ohtake. How good it is to go to the theater, especially to watch such a good play! Wow! How good! With unparalleled direction, set design, costumes, and acting. I left deeply impacted. A special impact always comes from seeing Georgette Fadel on stage. But all the actors are wonderful.

Thelma Guedes

Elisa Ohtake and her radical and alive theater, beautiful and full of crises and a trillion other things...

Roberta Martinelli

Direction, dramaturgy, soundtrack, and lighting are impeccable, as are the scenes with Maria Manoella, Rodrigo Pandolfo, and Georgette Fadel.

Cesar Ribeiro

An ecstasy elevated to a trillion, watching friends shine in this play with a very urgent hot text and direction by Elisa Ohtake.

Andreia Horta

Aqui Elevated to a Trillion is magnetic. Elisa Ohtake is one of our most powerful contemporary voices.

Natália Lage

Elisa Ohtake is an event. And what a cast!

Bruno Garbuio

In June, at the Thèâtre National La Colline, I attended “Avant la terreur” (Before Terror), based on Shakespeare's Richard III, written and directed by Vincent Macaigne: on a muddy stage, the king murders in the name of a desire with no direction. At the Comédie Française, I also saw “Les démons” (The Demons) by Dostoevsky, directed by Guy Cassiers: young nihilists want the revolution by destroying everything that stands. At the Teatro Sesc 24 de Maio, I saw yesterday “Aqui Elevado a Um Trilhão” (Here Elevated to a Trillion) by Elisa Ohtake. She brings to the stage the waste produced by the capitalist world: once again, humanity and its destructive drive.

Without Richard III and without the Russian demons, we are now faced with the waste capable of destroying mankind. On stage, characters are not looking for an author but a place, a “here” in the Greek agora for the present. Actors and actresses set aside theatrical interpretations of past centuries and rummage through the trash. Hurrah! Laughter as an effect of confronting the real, of despair, of dead ends, is what we see. The common idea of “throwing it away” has turned against humanity. The Freudian “Das Unheimliche” pours over the earth and decays it. Is it theater? Is it literature? Yes, but who says theater and literature don’t know more about us than we do ourselves?

Ohtake, in the face of the malaise of existence, brings life to the stage: the young juggler Alison Guega, who travels the world, plays with his wanderings. He lives in the “here and now”: that is what interests him. My applause to Elisa Ohtake and the Cia. Explodida, who can summon the entire world with each play, for insisting on theater. Standing ovation for Mário Bortolotto, the resilient artist from Teatro Cemitério de Automóveis, who always makes something out of the trash, rain or shine. I left the theater melancholic but with a desire to live. Today, I will once again attend another play. Long live culture!

Geraldo Martins – Psychoanalyst

THE INSTANT IS A BORDERLESS ABYSS

"AQUI ELEVADO A UM TRILHÃO" (Here Elevated to a Trillion) by Elisa Ohtake, currently showing at Sesc 24 de Maio, uses metaphor and anti-metaphor to cosmicize the scenic discourse. It may be the first Brazilian play that explicitly demands from the audience an autopoeisis. Like a lucid 'kosmic blue' seeking to crack the dome, including the dome of autofictional categories, expanding the experience to a border that demands not only catharsis but the immanent, calling for a politics of immanence, similar to the production of Hamlet by Andrei Tarkovsky or recent films by Radu Jude. Although the Romanian filmmaker lacks what is abundant in “AQUI ELEVADO A UM TRILHÃO”: a certain synergy of affection, Elisa and the cast are traversed by the dual microtexture of tragedy that seeps from the layers of the spectacle that dares to stretch the speculum of insoluble exteriority instead of merely exposing the symptom. In “AQUI ELEVADO A UM TRILHÃO DE ANOS” (Here Elevated to a Trillion Years), the symptom is a starting point for the vertigo of a necessary trance-outburst that transforms the dystopian into tragic and the tragic into utopian thought. In the broadest sense of the concept, utopian thought is 'a way of glimpsing the hidden virtualities in immediate reality and dreaming of another reality, a society ideally more perfect than the one we live in. It is the desire to transcend the immediate in which we are immersed.'

Poems and problems persist, becoming paradoxical topologies; humor and terror also do. “AQUI ELEVADO A UM TRILHÃO” can be seen as a successful attempt at osmotic or hybridization between paradox and topologies, making it a singular event within the spectrum of contemporary Brazilian theater, a borderless spectacle.

Marcelo Ariel

THE BEST OF THE FIRST SEMESTER

The first semester has ended, and Arte8 wants to share with you our list of the 10 best plays of this semester. Of course, we missed many plays, but we managed to watch 62 performances. The top 10 were:

1 - Aqui Elevado a Um Trilhão (Here Elevated to a Trillion)

2 - O Vazio da Mala (The Empty Suitcase)

3 - Puma (Oswald de Andrade Workshop)

4 - Tio Vânia (Uncle Vanya)

5 - O Veneno do Teatro (The Poison of Theater)

6 - Gabri (elas) (Gabri (the women))

7 - O Diário de Um Louco (The Diary of a Madman)

8 - Todas as Coisas Maravilhosas (All the Wonderful Things)

9 - Copo Vazio (Empty Glass)

10 - Dias e Noites de Amor (Days and Nights of Love)

Arte8

With a well-regulated cast, a trillion times above what is seen, and truly seeking a type of language that advances in the form of what theater and performance investigate, “Aqui Elevado a Um Trilhão” is pure parresia. Highlighting the excellent sound design and the extraordinary final scene defended by Georgette Fadel.

Denying various senses of the “classic scene” and replacing much of the aesthetic framework with an enraged and unpleasant torpedo of truth. Showing the anticlimax brought by the “real” and fabricating the “almost unfabricable” – this is the great question of the production, beyond its theme, beyond its form, and, above all, far beyond the final product.

Elisa Ohtake, not without first defining a recognizable language (but not blind to diverse readings), masterfully architects these issues. Parresia involves the pursuit of some possible answer regarding what has not even been precisely formulated in debates about contemporary art.

Deus Ateu

“Elisa Ohtake modernizes Shakespeare so as to contemplate the present (and permanent) crisis of western civilization and of life stifled by debilitating sociability. The play is a surprising, intoxicating, moving experience performed by a group of kids as if it were the first magnificent audition of William Shakespeare’s work. You almost feel the text is born out of the 21st Century. In the best spirit of The Tragic Philosopher, the joy and spontaneity of the text and these actors (small in stature, but giants on-stage) instill in us the desire for a future childhood in which the flux of life is guided by lightness and the power of the simple desire to exist. The play is a happening shot through with affection and unity between the director and the actors.”
Miguel Chaia

Professor on Shakespeare and Politics on the PUC-SP University post-graduate course

“The five actors represent Hamlet in a most exposed and revealing way.”
FOLHA DE S. PAULO – 17/02/2019

“Ohtake’s signature, with inventive scenic compositions and wood-turned dramaturgy, is evident throughout, but “Play for Adults Staged by Children” is magnified in the singular presence of each of the kids. Performative in nature, the staging explores its inner processes. The passages from Hamlet performed by the children, based on their individual understandings of the work, reveal a startling seriousness in their gaze.”
FOLHA DE S. PAULO – 18/11/2018

“What a play!? Play? Play doesn’t do it justice. As others have said before, it’s a happening. It doesn’t fit into any genre, obey any theatrical manual, subscribe to any of the established languages. The result is hard-hitting, unbelievable, surprising, totally outside the box, beyond any recognizable model. It’s breathtaking. It fills your chest with hope. Theater still has some keys to turn and doors to open onto experiences worth exploring, futures worth pursuing. (…) This is a trans-play, an unforgettable experience for those on stage and in the audience. Let the run continue. Theater needs the chink Elisa Ohtake has managed to open. A window onto the future. Ah, what a breath of hope. Ah, the sort of prank only theater could ever pull!”
Dib Carneiro Neto

“With dramaturgy focused on a fractured representation of reality and fiction, the piece Play for Adults Staged by Children is one of the most unexpected and surprising performances currently on show.”
Celso Faria- blog Urbanidade

Play for Adults Done by Children is one of the best plays I’ve seen in a long time. Intelligent, original, daring, philosophical and playful all at once, yet the most essential aspect is this: though staged by children, it eschews the infantilization to which children are submitted, and the infantilization to which theater submits us today. Few plays display their inner workings quite as splendidly, revealing thought in its state of creation.”
Peter Pál Pelbart, philosofer and teacher at PUC-SP University

“In Play for Adults Staged by Children, children get their message across, and they are in no mood for playacting. For the kids, the world today is selfish, anthropocentric and ruled wrongheadedly by self-centered human beings. They want to grow up and become adults who can look at other creatures, even the invisible and the inanimate. They want general integration with the universe. They want universal solidarity. Their message is transmitted through various theatrical languages and techniques, and the result is a valuable experience for everyone involved: performers, technicians, the director and the audience.”
Iná Camargo Costa, theater thinker

“Take My Breath Away is absolutely smart, united group, harmonic, delicious text and extraordinary concept, anti-everything, anti-virtuose, anti-expressive, excellent humor, brilliant.”
Agnaldo Farias, curador of 23rd Sao Paulo Bienal

“Elisa Ohtake is inventing an approach to stage performance that might be called ‘a different logic of dramaturgy’. There is an inversion here: instead of dramaturgy developing by dealing with existing materials or new ones especially created for the occasion, here it emerges as invention, as a way of thinking the performing arts, all of them. It may be applied to dance, theater or other art forms that share the same setting. The most instigating part begins there: How may the same logic be unfolded in different artistic situations? Elisa has devised such a novel approach to directing that she has to create her own crafts – namely, in both cases, writing and narration. But the foundational characteristic of her approach is the fact that this logic may exist totally independent from its constituents, while being fully dependent on the craftwork of those who will be giving it a body. In the same measure as the weight of materials diminishes, so do performers take on key importance. Danilo Grangheia, Georgette Fadel, Luah Guimarãez, Luciana Schwinden and Rodrigo Bolzan show competence to spare in *Let’s Just Kiss and Say Goodbye*. Only a total mastery of stage craft – shown by each of them in their own way – could keep them from falling in the subtle trap of actors becoming their own characterization. Allowing theatrical craft to take the leading role in every scene, they successfully harness the power of ambiguity without lapsing into representation of irony.”
O Estado de S. Paulo — 13/12/2014

“Let’s Just Kiss and Say Goodbye is about life. Being about life means it’s about theater too: a happening, a tribute. The play / performance directed by Elisa Ohtake provokes five experienced actors from São Paulo’s theater to act in the “last play of their lives”. It proposes a dramaturgical logic that involves innovative strategies for creation, testing them in real time, extending outside the stage boundaries and using the presence of actors to place theater itself at the center. It addresses drama as object of actors’ passion, and their farewell to this love. Love is love and farewells are farewells. These two affectations move and transform the scene and the audience.”
Gazeta do Povo – Curitiba — 01/04/2015

“A spectacle that few will be able to fully share. For those who are actors. However, it is a spectacle for the many too. For those with a thirst for knowledge. A thirst for art. For those who want to rekindle a light. *Let’s Just Kiss and Say Goodbye* is an ode to theater, the theater of Ideas, a profound idea within a text that is recreated in the presence of the actor-character.”
Curitiba Theater Festival — 02/05/2015

“This is a play about theater in which actors — from among the best experimental groups in São Paulo — pretend they are bidding farewell to the stage.”
Folha de S. Paulo — 19/11/2014

“Take My Breath Away delivers what it promises: it is hard not to be in a breath-taking state of awe that is brought about by the viewing of scenes, one more exciting than the other. Elisa Ohtake and her amazing team of five assistants produce a gleaming sequence of awesome, fun, and provocative propositions. If it were necessary to identify them, the tag would be “displacement”, given their resulting from a legitimate present-day production. Ohtake’s performances bring together a bit of theater, pop world, visual arts, one-man show, standup comedy, all cooked in a broth of established references and, of course, dance. Matters pertaining to the performing arts are all there, lined up and smiling to / laughing at us: authoring, collaboration, representation, narrative, presence, crowd, expressiveness, things that separate modern from contemporary, biography, relationship between warm-up exercises and performance, etc.”
O Estado de S. Paulo — 20/02/2014

“I had heard from friends that this was a real find in performance. And delightful it was, indeed. False Spectacle is intelligent, fun, audacious. It is always on the verge of inconsistency, rejecting spectacle but dodging all the prat falls or “artistic disasters” that performance itself sets up. As mentioned, it swings from impossible to possible and back. Playful but not at all naive, it knows what it is doing by playing on real and false in ‘everything’.”
Cacilda Theater Blog — 10/11/2007

“False Spectacle is a self-assumed bluff in the Futurist or Dada tradition of disruption. Like Duchamp taking a urinal to be displayed at a museum, Ohtake has the candor of children showing off to visitors, exposed to all ridicule; those who least expect it will find her intelligence contagious.”
Folha de S. Paulo — 05/11/2007

“Celebration of uncertainty” as its creator Elisa Ohtake says, or paean to precariousness, False Spectacle is a fine example of the opportunities open to the performing arts in this post-modern age. Turning away from the Enlightenment and from Cartesian determinism, our own everyday bankruptcy may be confronted without intellectual shame or existential fear. False Spectacle’s three performers seem to be proclaiming “We are fallible, thank God!” – and taking an almost sensual delight in doing so.”
Sebastião Milaré – Anta Profana (electronic review)

“A forceful and competent discussion of issues usually posed by thinkers interested in explaining the complexity of life, such as Spinoza, Prigogine or Deleuze. (..) The audacious proposition of perceiving that we live in an ‘in- between’ state of total simultaneity between joyful doubt and hellish uncertainty. Each deliberate intonation, gesture or movement weaves a succession of surprises. Perhaps the greatest of them is that such complex issues have been so seductively organized.”
O Estado de S. Paulo — 06/02/2007