O jardim is the third play created by Companhia Hiato. In scene stories of different times and spaces overlap creating frictions among themselves, complement or contradict each other. These different perspectives create a recognition fractal game and strangeness of situations presented and resubmitted and restated vertiginously. A memory game with audience is proposed, reviewing a scene already seen – but this time full of gaps – is taken to recreate the dialogues in their memory and driven to reinvent the scene with their not transferable view and remembering.

Other elements also make memory an aesthetic choice to work as the partial view of the public. Seeking equivalence to a memory three stories are told from different perspectives, sometimes contradictory. It is not about showing multiple viewpoints of the same situation but emphasizing the implicit subjectivity in every encounter, the relativity of what constitutes our history.

In O jardim the public is distributed in three different spaces and their vision is mediated because of this distribution. Since the boxes scenario is constructed and reconstructed in scene in order to create imaginary worlds transforming moments ever seen in gaps and fragmenting the fable fruition. All this to express also in its aesthetic and not just in dramaturgy, the creative act is remember.

Cast & creative team

Director and Dramatist:
Leonardo Moreira

Cast:
Aline Filócomo
Fernanda Stefanski
Luciana Paes
Mariah Amélia Farah
Paula Picarelli
Thiago Amaral

Invited Actor:
Edison Simão

Direction Assistant / Alternating Actress:
Amanda Lyra

Set and Lighting Designer:
Marisa Bentivegna

Scenography Assistant:
Ayelén Gastaldi

Music:
Marcelo Pellegrini - Surdina Produções Musicais

Costume Designer:
Theodoro Cochrane

scenic objects:
Victor Merseguel

Visual Efects:
Pepe Scrofft

Photos and videos:
Otávio Dantas

Graphic Design:
Cassiano Tosta / dgraus

Executive Producer:
João Victor d'Alves

Management / Production:
Aura Cunha

Nominations and awards

Governor of São Paulo State:
Outstanding Play 2011

APCA 2011:
Outstanding Direction Award
Nomination for Outstanding Play
Nomination for Outstanding Author

Shell Award 2011:
Outstanding Author Award
Outstanding Set Design Award
Nomination for Outstanding Direction

Question of Critique Award 2011:
Outstanding Costume Design Award
Nomination for Outstanding Dramaturgy
Nomination for Outstanding Direction
Nomination for Outstanding Actress
Nomination for Outstanding Set Design
Nomination for Outstanding Play
Nomination for Outstanding Cast

CPT Award – Paulista Cooperative Theater 2011:
Outstanding Author Award
Outstanding Play Award
Nomination for Outstanding Direction
Nomination for Outstanding Cast
Nomination for Outstanding Visual Design

Guia da Folha Newspaper 2011:
Outstanding Play Award

Reviews

"... I dare say that it gives hope to all theater. It is neither the first nor the best Leonardo Moreira's creation, but inset a distant presentation shed in Curitiba the image that came to mind was someone like me, half a century ago in some audience of 'A Falecida (The deceased)' in Rio de Janeiro thought the same thing: Yes, there are dramatists in Brazil. I don't know him, I believe I've never seen him, but after three spectacles – or perhaps in the first I've been preset – it is unquestionable his talent for drama. (..) Most of all, what impresses is how O jardim can turn an experience that few have had, the close familiarity with Alzheimer's, into something universal – as if you were actually in the disease, difference, essence of each one in the audience. I haven't identified myself with any specific situation or character, but in the end I felt more represented in the play than if I had participated in the scene. Hence the fantasy of being in front of Nelson Rodrigues, a dramatic poet like him. Another, in Brazil, such rare thing. "

Nelson de Sá – Cacilda Blog – Folha de São Paulo Newspaper

"The art of memory. O jardim created by Companhia Hiato is a spectacle pursues the powers that remembering mobilize in imagination. It reaches the alchemy to update on the scene, as this significant gift, banal shared memories. The group reveals in its third work a fast maturation and confirms the high expectations that fell upon it. Leonardo Moreira once again condenses into dramaturgy biographical materials offered by actors in a long process of creation and directs with firm hands a decisive scene. Five actresses and an actor who narrate their own lives as much as the fiction they built with the director contribute decisively in scene quality. The set and lighting design are also crucial. Marisa Bentivegna fills up the space with boxes of all sizes providing a background and demarcating three representation niches. More than symbols the boxes appear as concrete objects where spring memory triggers. If the myth of Pandora's box shows the dangers of searching the secrets of human soul, O jardim is not afraid of recognition by recall. Forgetting protects, but remember even more when the reminded revitalizes the present and creates great art, it frees".

Luiz Fernando Ramos – Folha de São Paulo Newspaper

"Long before O jardim's characters quote The Cherry Orchard is possible to realize the direct connection between the text of the director Leonardo Moreira and Chekhov's play. Companhia Hiato of São Paulo's play characters, as well as Russian author's characters, evidence communicative mismatches, as if they do not see neither react to listening and other's presence. They give the impression of belonging to different eras or worlds. The time emerges as the protagonist in O jardim. (...) The garden is, in a sense, a play about death: Of a time, a place, an atmosphere of relations. The moments of happiness remain alive 'only' in each of the characters, destabilized by mismatch between past and present, although this comparison is imbued with subjectivity. (...) Working from very personal thematic universe, Leonardo Moreira, not incidentally, means that the actors use their own names in the scene, aware, however, that memory, the central element in O jardim, involves additions and subtractions for each evoked fact. "

Daniel Schenker – Questão de Crítica Magazine

"Father's sweater, mother's rosary, a mirror has reflected other faces, younger. They are familiar objects, such as family members are speeches, gestures, characters' speech. Herein it is one of O jardim's prowess: the fact of narrating so prosaic stories with simple in a extremely complex scenic structure. Point in Leonardo Moreira's direction, he shows a brilliant conductor not only in the scene, but also with actors. Each cast member gives characters their own names. They are actors-creators. Throughout the process, they have searched their memories and took testimonials and personal belongings to the stage which are associated with collected research material in interviews in elderly homes and groups. What emerges from this fusion is an interesting game between fiction and reality. The life transmutation into art takes place the way it should be: universalizing themes. (...) The lyricism is the keynote of a text that combines conventional dramatic structure with reflections thrown to the audience. However a major poetry arises, the scene itself, when voices overlap and bodies remind staffs have already performed. The play with spectator's memory as the plot is presented in fragments. Therefore, the form mirrors the content".

Renato Forin Jr. – Londrina International Festival