EFFEA Story: Isabel Costa

MANIFESTOS FOR AFTER THE END OF THE WORLD or  Searching for translation for an excursion into possible futures

Developing Isabel Costa’s MANIFESTOS PARA DEPOIS DO FIM DO MUNDO for international audiences was the title and the subject of this residency with Portuguese artist Isabel Costa and her Lisbon-based theatre collective Os Possessos. Currently, Os Possessos consist of five members - Catarina Rôlo Salgueiro, João Pedro Mamede, Leonardo Garibaldi, Leonor Buescu and Isabel Costa - who work in collective creations, as well as individually for roles in projects of the five directors.

MANIFESTOS PARA DEPOIS DO FIM DO MUNDO is the latest version of a constantly transforming project that Isabel Costa has been developing for some time now, adapting it to different locations and current societal situations. In small groups, the audience walks through an empty building and encounters seven performers, one after the other, who recite from seven political and philosophical manifestos that formulate analyses of the existing and drafts for a future society. In an intimate situation, and without the usual trappings of political activism, the encounter leaves it to each listener to absorb the message and reflect on what resonates.

©Leonor Fonseca

The invitation to perform outside Portugal for the very first time immediately raised the question of how to translate it for a foreign-language audience, as text and context play such a central role. The residency project proposed by the EFFEA leading festival Fast Forward, European Festival for Young Stage Direction and facilitated through the amazing and inspiring EFFEA funding concept, initiated joint research into scenarios for making the work linguistically accessible to diverse audiences and how to cooperate with potential partners wether by touring with the original cast or by creating a new adaptation on site with local performers, professionals or non-professionals, of different ages or communities.

As it was clear from the start that the residency would lead to a two-day performance for a partly German-, partly English-speaking audience during Fast Forward in November 2024, artists and organisers were equally involved in a work process that was as challenging as it was productive.

In June 2024, we started with step 1

Director Isabel Costa came to Dresden for three days together with actor João Pedro Mamede and production manager Leonardo Garibaldi to inspect the venue, one of the three locations of the Dresden University of Fine Arts. With the technical team of the Staatsschauspiel Dresden, they explored possible venues, worked on logistics and technical solutions for the live translation of the site-specific performance and met potential collaborators and local volunteers who applied to assist the performance as translators.

In August and September 2024, the work continued online.The group of volunteers assisting with the performance as live readers of the translations was finalised. The group was formed by a philosophy and physics teacher, an author, performer and performing arts teacher in high schools, four students from different fields (pedagogy, art history, administration) and a cultural manager. They received an introduction to the project and their role, and we prepared for the upcoming online rehearsals in October.

©Charlotte Orti

Step 2 - October 2024: Cooperation with translators Rosa Churcher Clark and Samir Sellami

The task was not only to translate Isabel Costa's Portuguese adaptations of the original texts from authors Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, Grupo Krisis, Isabelle Stengers, The Care Collective, Nina Donovan, Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher plus Franco Berardi - but also to synchronise them in rhythm and length for a performance in which the translation would be read live and in parallel to the speech of the performer. In two online sessions between Rosa Churcher Clark, Samir Sellami, Isabel Costa and Charlotte Orti from the Fast Forward festival, several aspects of the translation were discussed. Based on these discussions, Isabel Costa worked on her final artistic decisions and shaped the texts together with both translators.

Step 3 - October 2024: Workshop programme with colleagues from the partner festivals

As an artist interested in collaborating with organisers from around the world, during the workshops, Isabel asked questions that piqued her interest. As someone who has already gained experience with international study programmes, she is aware that the cultural field functions quite differently across different countries. So she asked four different questions to the four colleagues from our partner festivals. We had two conversations before the performances at Fast Forward in November 2024 and two after the festival. The four topics were:

1. Exploring the national theatre field, e.g., France – a talk with Isabel Andreen, International development manager for the programme Crossings at Festival TNB by the National Theatre of Brittany in Rennes
2. Exploring vibrancies – How to address the audience? – a talk with Agata Tomšič, Artistic Director of POLIS Teatro Festival and the theatre group ErosAntEros
3. Exploring the practical issues – What are the challenges of programming a festival? - a talk with Christian Watty, Festival and Managing Director of euro-scene Leipzig, International Dance and Theatre festival
4. Exploring environmental & societal contexts – How to programme theatre on the Azores? – a talk with Rubén Monfort, Programmes Coordinator of Walk&Talk

Step 4 - October 2024: Online rehearsals with the translators and performers

By the end of October, Isabel Costa, together with seven Portuguese actors, rehearsed the English version of the texts in Lisbon. Until then, they had only performed them in Portuguese. For every actor, it was a challenge to perform in a language that is not their mother tongue. The process was a discovery for the director and the performers. Transferring the way of performing, the clarity of thought, the emphasis, and the way of addressing the audience in a text that is initially completely new requires confidence in the project and their performative skills. Ultimately, this was an encouraging and productive process. From now on, Os Possessos will be able to tour an English version of MANIFESTOS PARA DEPOIS DO FIM DO MUNDO.

In parallel with the rehearsals, Isabel and the actors met online for rehearsals with the seven volunteers who would read the German translations of the manifestos during the on-site performances in Dresden. Each of these online rehearsals was assisted by a second German-speaking person tosupport Isabel in case a volunteer had questions. Our working language was English, and we were able to discuss most questions quite easily. However, it was still challenging to rehearse online with someone who was reading a text in a language Isabel does not speak, yet was indispensable to making the performance accessible.

By the beginning of November, we were ready to bring the performers and the reader of the translation together in pairs for their first rehearsal. It was a unique discovery. We experienced seven exciting and empathetic encounters and became aware that we had already started a common journey. The volunteers from Dresden and the performers from Lisbon met online – happy and excited that they would meet in person only one week later and both sides engaged with the texts and the topics they were going to present: the ones by performing, the others by simultaneously reading the German translation to those in the audience who would no follow the voice of the English speaking performer in front of their eyes but to the voice of the hidden translator.

Step 5 - November 2024: Try out the concept in Dresden

Two and a half days of rehearsals (13-15 November 2024) brought together Os Possessos and the German readers before the performances at Fast Forward. Students from the Institute of German Studies and Media Culture and the Institute of Art and Music at the Technische Universität Dresden participated in the first test run of this concept to test how a site-specific production could be made accessible to both English-speaking and German-speaking audiences. Their task was to switch between the languages by operating the channels of their headphones and report back on the artistic experience. The feedback they provided convinced us to reorganise the receivers' channels so that each of the seven performers had their English channel next to their German channel. Through this crucial change, the audience was free to choose and hop between languages without getting confused while searching for the right channel.

Step 6 - November 2024: Real-life testing during performances in Dresden

In the framework of the European festival for young stage directors Fast Forward at Staatsschauspiel Dresden, a total of 24 runs of Isabel Costa‘s MANIFESTOS FOR AFTER THE END OF THE WORLD took place on 16-17 November, each for seven spectators at a time and presented in four different performance blocks. The Portuguese actors performed the manifestos in English, except for one performer, who presented in Portuguese and distributed the English translation on paper. Their voices were transmitted to the audience over headphones, as in the original version of the performance. Only this time, every performer was accompanied individually by a simultaneous live reading of the German translation, which was available on a neighbouring channel on the headphones. In each performance block, an after-show café was offered to the audience where visitors were invited to share and discuss their experiences with performance maker and director Isabel Costa. Two of these after-show cafés had been accompanied by staff members of the Hannah Arendt Institute of Totalitarian Studies at Technische Universität Dresden to inspire and initiate the discussion.

The performance had 156 visitors plus 24 in the test runs. It was attended by local audiences from Dresden, by the Fast Forward Young Jury, by a first year’s acting class of Hannover University of Music, Drama and Media, by students of different departments of the Dresden University of Fine Arts, by European students, artists and theatre professionals of the Fast Forward Festival Forum (a cooperation with the European Theatre Convention), by the international Fast Forward Festival Jury and by further professional programmers visiting the festival, among them the artistic directors of two partner festivals of the residency: Agata Tomšič of POLIS Teatro Festival in Ravenna and Christian Watty of EURO-SCENE Leipzig, International Dance and Theatre festival. We collected as much feedback as possible from all these visitors, both professionals and non-professionals, and gathered a wide range of impressions about the performance’s content and artistic form.

Step 7 - January 2025: Online evaluation session between Isabel Costa and Charlotte Orti, Curator and Artistic director of Fast Forward

We embarked on this challenging experience from the ground up, and all teams agreed that we learned a lot from involving so many people in the residency process. The task of translating a performance, on the one hand, offers a simple action: a walk through an empty building; and, on the other, presents seven different and short analyses to look at the current state of our societies and reflect on possible future developments – this proved more complex than we had initially anticipated.

Despite receiving a lot of positive feedback, especially regarding the contents and characters of the seven manifestos, it became obvious that there is a need to accompany the project with after-show talks and discussions about the content and their philosophical, political and societal backgrounds. The workshop with Agata Tomšič, Artistic Director of POLIS Teatro Festival in Ravenna, was particularly important, as Isabel's own experiences during her studies related more to the intellectual and artistic development of the project. Isabel transferred the text corpus of a philosophical and intellectual discourse she discovered during her studies in France to her artistic working field in Portugal, where these texts were completely unknown. Inspired by a project by the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, she started looking for an artistic form and developed the site-specific format for an encounter with seven challenging and meaningful philosophical texts.

With the first invitation to show this production outside of Portugal, the question of what would be needed in terms of translating and contextualising the performance to make it resonate for local audiences took on a new dimension. Apart from the technical and logistic issues that formed a big part in our collaboration and the working process of the residency, perhaps the most important outcome for both of us was the finding that the performance requires an accompanying discourse about the corpus and contents of the manifestos for everyone involved: those in the production and the audience. It’s the immense and promising potential of the project to inspire and foster exchange about today’s most crucial topics in our various societal identities. These questions affect everyone. Therefore, it will stay the ongoing objective of Isabel Costas' MANIFESTOS FOR AFTER THE END OF THE WORLD to artistically inspire, facilitate and encourage the debate on proposals to reflect on our common future on this planet.

Watch the residency film, which includes selected snippets from the process:

by Isabel Costa and Charlotte Orti