Ricardo Neves Neves is a playwright and director who offers the public a broad eclectic view of the world under the very peculiar prism of the Teatro Eléctrico, of which he is also a co-founder.
Why did you decide to found electric theater? How do you distinguish yourself from the other theater groups?
Ricardo Neves Neves: I founded the electric theater in 2007, because when I finished the course in 2006, I wanted to work with some colleagues of the Lisbon Conservatory, with whom I shared an artistic and personal vision. We realized that we wanted to work together, since we already had to integrate new projects or other theater companies and were already diverting, we thought that the best place was to found our own space and invited more actors to enter. Today, we have a lot more people, a better trained team, with more actors, also in terms of artistic production, scenery, etc.
Yes, but there are already several theater groups in Portugal, how do you distance from the rest?
RNN: It's easier for outsiders to identify an aesthetic than ourselves. From what I have noticed, they put us in a certain aesthetic built by us and the texts and scenarios that we have done. I did not tell myself today, let's work on a specific aesthetic, or something new, it was not that, things were happening. The fact is that we have worked with original texts that are not of very represented authors, we do not have many commitments with anyone, it is a construction among friends without having to please to an entity that hires us, they are plays for us, that represent our taste and only then there is something that is born, that ends up being independent of all these things.
Can you say that there is a dichotomy in the electric theater? On one hand, you enact very fractured texts and authors little recognized by the public and then there are lighter shows, such as musical ones.
RNN: It was not something we looked for, I never chose a text by topic. I choose them because I feel that I can work with the actors. I glimpse something in the play, then I work on more serious themes than others, or I have a more childlike atmosphere, in others I deepen relationships between people and are practices that exist, but that I do not seek it. One thing I look for and do not take seriously is theater as a mission, some people think that "revistas” have missions, I think their work has consequences, I do not see it as a mission, I know that a person who does work with the public has a consequence, but I do not want to have that goal. Otherwise, I make shows and it becomes a work conditioned to a theme and that's not what I want, what interests me is to do theater and not a theme, or a policy.
Let's address your texts. Are ideas that come to you, or how does your creative process work in terms of your dramaturgies?
RNN: Once again the texts do not come up with the idea of doing a certain theme, or in the same way. They appear in situations as simple as these, I want to work with a certain actor and what synergies arise for a text. When I begin to develop plays I begin by determining the type of scenery, or setting a song suggests to me. I think it comes out like weeds, it's not too thoughtful, that is, it never happened to me to sit at a desk and tell myself, now, something will come out. It is something that happens unprovoked, it is very difficult to describe a day's work.
After writing, do you do some rewriting when you're with the actors? Or do you no longer do it and demand much more from them in other ways?
RNN: It happens sometimes that there are scenes unwriten. It is something that is not well defined and I end up working with the actors, we ended up "unpacking" the play itself. The actors complete the scenes with scenarios, or with a word that is not written, that is, the text is written, but there may be a word with a sound that I do not like and when I start working with them I make minor corrections.
When the play is assembled and you are on stage do you like that there is some room for improvisation? Or are you too rigid with written words, or parts of texts? I say this because on stage there are unpredictable situations and there are actors who like to improvise in certain scenes.
RNN: When I stage a show and it's on stage, I want to know exactly what I'm going to see. There is no room for improvisation, sometimes they do well, but in most cases they are really bad, they are different and they are useless. If I find that it is indifferent one word or another, it means that my choice is irrelevant, that is, I made a text to the gutters, but if I did not it should not be represented with one word or another. So what happens? And it has happened several times, the actors in some parts of the play, when the text is not fully memorized and we are doing an essay, I replace one word for another, I like the word they use more and that is in the text.
Ricardo, you took a break and decided to do a training and a workshop, why? Were you tired? Or did you want to be "out of the box"?
RNN: When I went to Barcelona I did not decide to take a break, I was 25 and now I'm 31 years old, I had no specific training in writing in terms of method, it was more an experience. I studied at the Conservatory theater, then did a postgraduate degree in theater studies at college, but it was very theoretical. I never took a course in dramaturgy and staging, because it does not exist and then there was a meeting of playwrights that took place in Barcelona, I was invited to represent Portugal, that's when the text of "Mary Poppins, the woman who saved the world" and many possibilities appeared. .
Did you think you needed that because you were too young and not taken seriously?
RNN: I had done some things before that training, it was more an experience. I do not need to be taken seriously, I went to learn something new.
And the play "Find the sun"?
RNN: It was a play I read in 2012 and I was very eager to stage this text. At that time I had an invitation from Aida Tavares who is the director-programmer of the Teatro Municipal São Luís, with a suitable stage for this show, because it had all the logistic conditions and five years later it was possible to debut this text with the cast that I found appropriate. In addition to São Luis in Lisbon, we had a co-production with Teatro Circo de Braga and now I would like to do a tour with this play.
For this text you were very demanding with the actors. You have deepened your inner work, why? Because of the theme of the piece?
RNN: No, I do not feel it was exaggerated. I'm always picky with the actors and they expect it from me too, I do not feel I've been particularly more in this text. There are different times from play to play because there are new things that I'm learning, I still feel like I'm in the beginning of a genre and although I'm doing the twentieth performance I still feel like starting, I feel that I'm learning from the plays and that there are something that transforms. In terms of been demanding with the actors, I think that this is what makes sense and if we are going to take a certain amount of time to do a certain job, now that it goes well and that we are proud of the show, I want everyone to feel proud, from actors, set designers, technicians and musicians, and not to make them angry.
And what were the main challenges for you in this play?
RNN: It's a pretty quick play, it's only an hour, but with a great amount of things that happen, or that are spoken in the show it's a very short time and managing it in such a scarse time, was a challenge. There were scenes of 6.7 seconds, they were really fast and before that a lot happened. This for me and the actors was the challenge, the speed of the text. At the same time that we worked on this aspect, we were working on a beach scene, with a certain delay in time, a certain laziness, that rest, that speed also had to be developed. It was the time management for this play which was also a big challenge.
"The night of Dona Luciana" is a show with a large cast? Was that something you had to take into account, the cast as a challenge?
RNN: This play has only six actors and is one of my shorter shows. I have had much bigger casts, in the one I will debut in April, we are more than fifty, 15 actors, 15 musicians, I still have a band on the scene and some invited singers, in total I have 38 artists. In "Less emergencies" in 2014 had 80 people, in the 2015 version there were 104 if I am not mistaken. In this show, the challenge was to stage a very peculiar author, who has a very particular and specific mood. At the same time that it rises, it is acid and corrosive, colorful and poisonous and I like to work with this type of texts. It is very earthy and beautiful, because we never know what is true and what is false in that play and it was a lot of fun to work and I think it was very well received. In all, had two nominations from the Portuguese Authors Society awards, for the best performance and the best actress, and this came from the pleasure we had in approaching such a strange text, for it is so strange that it is fun, at the same time it is silly and disturbing
And how does the partnership with José António Tenente come about?
RNN: I had known the work of this designer for many years, as long as I remember and one day he saw my work and offered to cooperate with me. We have already done several shows together and more will come, of course, he has already made the costumes for a play that will debut in September, for children and he idealized the costumes of "Find the Sun".
What is the next play you are staging at the moment?
RNN: It's a big show with a great cast. And for the first time I will work with a digital scene, it will be drawn live, it will always be different and it is an order from the Municipality of Loulé. Its debut is scheduled for April 13th to commemorate the 100 years of the city and was made from a great investigation and testimonies of the people of the Algarve. It is a homage to its people and to celebrate also the 150 years of Raul Brandão, with the replacement of some excerpts from the "Fishermen".
Did you write the text and stage it?
RNN: I did the dramaturgy and I cannot say that I wrote the text, because there is also a lot of collection of people's testimonies. I did just a little writing to connect some things with others, there were sentences that were repeated and others that were not clear because of orality, it is a very punctual intervention because they are the words of other people and not mine. I did manage these speeches.
From all the plays you wrote do you think that some reflects your mental universe?
RNN: I do not feel that and I think this will never happen, because in each of the plays there are very specific aspects and there is a lot of me in all of them. I do not think that any is a symbol of my person, or of my writing, or as an artist. Of course, there are texts that I like more than others, there are ones that I liked to reissue in a few years, I liked to take some of the things I did because I felt that I liked to go further and take a different approach.
And what you like to rewrite, can you give an example?
RNN: "The battle of I do not know what" I wrote it in 2015 and I would like to take this text further. I wanted to have more time to rewrite and stage it with the same actors and not others, if it is 3 years from now I can invite them, after 20 years, of course it no longer suits the same work team. There was a potential that I could not achieve at the time and I would like to take further.
And the future of electric theater? Do you have a vision for the next few years?
RNN: This is a difficult thing to tackle, because in 2017 we are in a completely different place than in 2014 and it has only been three years. I do not know if the next time will be better or worse. I know that things transform, evolve and change rapidly. We have many plans that we want to accomplish, other projects are confirmed for 2017 and next year, some that I wrote, others that I will stage and I still have texts from other authors that I will adapt. Now there is another perspective that the Electric Theater has, that we cannot materialize and I do not know if it will be possible or not and it has to do with very practical issues that happen to have a producer. Who does it today is me and Mafalda Simões and she already accumulates the communication and promotion part of our theater company, it is not our profession to be producers. We also liked to have a space for our plays, this is one of the objectives we have, because the theater's programming has a tendency to present a group in a day or a week and I think this is deadly for the plays. I like to be, for example, a week in Funchal, I've never done more than two presentations in a touring context, but the most usual is one. In Lisbon, which is the capital, and has more public in percentage terms, because it has more population, we only do five or six presentations and in this aspect I would like to have a space where we could be on stage for at least 3 months without any problem.
