CAPÍTULO III – UMA LUZ CORDIAL

06.02.1984 Porto Alegre, Brazil — I hear the call of return.

2016 I write: I am looking for male artists interested in the performing arts, willing to engage physically and interested in poetic experimentation around certain aspects of what we may call masculinity — for an artistic residency focused on a series of performative practices and exercises I have created, requiring intense physicality and imagination. The residency lasts one week and will take place every afternoon at the Oficina Oswald de Andrade, in the Bom Retiro district of São Paulo. Around thirty people will be selected. From this experience, I will invite fifteen artists to join the performance LOBO [WOLF], which I will direct and whose premiere is planned for 2017/2018 in São Paulo. Important: participants must be available for all meetings and understand that, in this work, all bodies will be nude.

20.09.2020 Departure for Europe. Sometimes I think I am younger than I really am. Utter anguish, winter, brutal solitude, almost no money. My friend Carolina Mendonça takes a train from Brussels and joins me in Amsterdam during those few days between lockdowns. We are about to begin the work that will later become the first chapter of the Bitches Trilogy. When I see her, I hold her in my arms for a very, very long time and, kneeling like a child, I ask her not to say goodbye.

06.07.2023 Premiere of The Bride and Goodnight Cinderella, the first chapter of the Bitches Trilogy, at the Festival d’Avignon. The day of the death of José Celso Martinez Corrêa, founder of the Teatro Oficina and one of the most important directors in the history of Brazilian theatre (I would like to open a time portal here, because this date leads directly to another date — 18 August 2018 — the day of the premiere of Lobo [Wolf] at Teatro Oficina, with a cast of thirty performers. Between an immense theatrical squirt while I was fucking a lobster, audience members vomiting, and emotions running raw, Zé Celso was there, simply there, witnessing everything. Then there was a voice message on my phone ending with the words: “to you, my eternal love”).

12.07.2026 For the first time, I present in a single sequence the three performances that make up the Bitches Trilogy at the Festival d’Avignon: The Bride and Goodnight Cinderella, The Brotherhood, and A Cordial Light. I am accompanied by the artists who, together with me, form what we call “Cara de Cavalo,” a theatre company that has functioned in the same way for more than ten years, and whose artists are also my dearest friends. During these ten hours, I fall asleep and wake up onstage. A hallucinatory experience. I think: Tomorrow, what will I write about today? For ten hours, I try to stay awake after ingesting a mixture of sedatives and alcohol — the "Boa Noite, Cinderela" ("Goodnight Cinderella") as it is called in Brazil. If I survive, you will see me onstage at this theatre — the Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe in Paris — in the autumn of that same year. If I do not survive, you will see a double, an alter ego who has learned my lines and gestures, and who will surely feel more at ease onstage than I do, which may be a great gift for the audience, depending on whom you ask or personal opinions. Whichever destiny comes to pass matters little to me. What matters is that before everything begins, standing in a circle onstage, the team and I embrace one another and, our eyes moist and full of life, say: Axé.