The project continues!
The meetings with Jacopo are usually held right where Jacopo is, I mean I go to him. But today the appointment is at my house, he is coming to me!
Is there a rumor going around that I’m weird?
That hard drive in the brain is still full. In a certain sense I haven’t finished my mission yet, I can finally tell Jacopo about it.
And the adventure starts again! 2 seconds and 33 fractions of a second later I am back in Africa, I go in order, I go over all the meetings again, one by one, I tell about the two shows by the two guys of Machaka and the show by Alvim Cossa’s company. Then there was the Luarte group, fortunately there are the photos because it is hard to find the words, I have prepared a speech, but only the beginning, we met many people, visited two different countries, Mozambique of Maputo, the capital , and Mozambique of the villages of the District of Palma, to the north.
Jacopo constantly asks me what I think of the actors we’ve seen, of the performances, of the atmosphere, of the reactions of the public.
I answer that the Machaka touched our souls, creating a beautiful situation with a wild audience. Luarte had the best interaction with the public, even if dealing with a difficult subject like sexual advances in schools, the students were laughing, shouting, participating.
I say that we were welcome by everyone. In some situations, I admit, I felt uncomfortable, but then I saw the smiles, their dignity, the strength to build amazing things such as a disco with few resources at disposal.
There are lot of questions I cannot answer. We did not have the opportunity to watch live theatrical performances in Palma or in the villages, we only saw something in Maputo.
We know that there are theater groups in Palma, mainly scholastic ones, but we do not know what they tell, what stories they write or how they perform them.
In the next mission in Mozambique we will have to go around the opposite direction: start from the villages asking to see the groups at work and then go to Maputo.
It is a few minutes past 5 p.m., Jacopo arrived at 2 p.m. and he has just left. We have made the lineup of the coming work: research on local stories and on the people of northern Mozambique, program and agenda of the next mission. Meanwhile, Jacopo said, let’s just start to think about it …
