Elisa Ohtake
Reviews
“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
Articles
Elisa Ohtake provoca no festival de Curitiba – jornal BemParaná
Peça simula última atuação de seu elenco – Folha de S. Paulo
Seis artistas com paixão em potência máxima – O Estado de S. Paulo
Le théâtre subversif d’Elisa Ohtake – La Règel Du Jeu
Seis bailarinos à procura do amor dançam em espetáculo no Sesc – Folha de S. Paulo