Paraíso

"Paraíso" (Paradise) is three dinners and shows of dance, music and food. These dinners are designed with the intention of bringing the same audience back every night while providing them with food for thought. These dinners are unique and connected and will take place in the land of Savoy. The impression of how we live in a torrential zone will emerge from all of them.

The three nights will be crossed and enveloped by the river's energy. The river is a constant link that connects everything, always moving towards its nearby future, the next performance. This flowing water changes and transforms the elements that move from one night to the next, carrying them to other rivers and places at each dinner.

We will always be dancing to create the feeling of a constantly changing land. The serving of the meal always brings the river to the surface. We'll talk close to people, and there will be music, sounds and singing that flood the space with meanings crossed by contradiction but also by mutuality, hospitality, symbiosis and partnership. We will all be in a relationship with food, thought, action and sound. As if we were at the table of a great table that doesn't exist.

"Paraíso" is an idea created by Madalena Victorino for the "Águas Gémeas" colloquium. It is included in the programme of this conference and in the "Night of Ideas" organised by the Institut Français du Portugal.


29 SEP 2023
First dinner
TAKING THE ANCHOR

Water’s fate is to flow. To flow under gravity. The plunge of the earth into the water and the torrentiality of the water in response. And how it is crucial to take our anchor with us. If we were water creatures, we would carry within us, in our chests, a void shaped like a fish. No other shape could fit, and nothing else could cover it.

For there to be liquid energy in the air, dinner will be served between broths and waters of different densities that move between what is not solvent.

When food is scarce, one must eat slowly.


30 SEP 2023
Second dinner
THE BREAD OF THE DAY BEFORE

"Who loses the land, loses his soul" (Bruno Latour).

O "Paraíso" of this second dinner are the gardens created by the men and women who, with their hands, bring moisture and humanity to the arid land. The river stops, and a lagoon appears, like a freshly ploughed, opaque field of liquid. Solid, hard, earthy energy that moves around is shared and bounces into everyone's lap during dinner.

A dinner made with the bread from the day before, as a deep source for the creation of muds, pastes and soups. An invitation to bite slowly into the hard stuff, to savour the stones that gave birth to the bread. The stones as symbolic fields of the human jungle. The deaf struggles and the ways of overcoming, succumbing, reacting and resolving will lead us to the courtyards where love is dressed inside out. What have we done? Untied and disarmed the earth.

Night should not be confused with fear but with food.
Only freshly baked bread tastes like hunger.


01 OCT 2023
Third dinner
TURTLE WATERS

Wash the slopes, take the slopes, lean against them. To enter into partnership and unstable union. To fluctuate according to circumstances. To merge. To be on one's back. To stand still, hover, cloud over, and be silent. To silence thoughts, images, curses and superficiality. Words will be like the parts of the day: blurred, unfinished, hiding and revealing.

To leave something on the plate, curb gluttony, and show restraint. The banquet that is consumed. The beauty of the transitory. There will be more people and less food.

Hunger, flowers, pain, excessive reality. The rain gives birth to tiny plants that save us from destruction. This is the opposite of war: to irrigate and irrigate is a victory.