Tiago Guedes – Materiais Diversos (Various Materials)

Last night was the last of three performances of Tiago Guedes’ Materiais Diversos downtown at the Portland Center for Performing Arts. When Guedes first walks onto the blank stage he appears to be a perfectly normal fellow. Clean haircut, baby blue t-shirt, khakis, and Converse sneakers. But as soon as he begins you know that everything for the next hour will be anything but obvious.
It starts with him performing a sequence of abstract movements and gestures. It’s totally silent, except for the sounds of his shoes and body contacting the floor as he moves and slides from place to place. He touches the ground with his finger tips. He walks in a line. He lies on the ground. His demeanor is neutral and there is no decipherable meaning or consequence to his actions. Yet it is completely captivating.
He executes everything with such odd specificity and care that one can’t help but be curious as to what this whole personal ritual means. Although he starts in this non-referential or representational mode, there are several moments of unexpected humor where Guedes’ skill as a physical comedian are revealed. It’s hard to describe why if you haven’t seen it, but he had us laughing by how he puffed up his chest, or bashfully turned his back to the audience.
It reminded me of an adage I heard during my training in the theater that, for an audience to be engaged, they don’t necessarily need to know why you’re doing something or what it means just as long as it’s done with great specificity and importance. Meaning can come later.
This was certainly true for Materiais Diversos. In the second half of the piece he starts to work with the various materials alluded to in the title. Like his gestures and movements before, nothing too fancy was involved here. Tape, paper, plastic bags. And yet by the end he’s playfully created (and demolished) a miniature world before our eyes.
One of my favorite things about this piece was how surprisingly full and satisfying it was while not relying upon pre-ordained modes of storytelling. By pre-ordained I mean when meaning between artist and audience is communicated via set expectations of form, content, genre, technique, etc. (I use story pretty liberally here. To me anything that is an experience with intent could be considered a story.)
Stripped of a common language from the start, the performance of the piece is the building of that shared language with the audience. And the delight and pleasure comes from the actual moments of humor and understanding that are earned.
In the end, the genius of Guedes’ work is that the “various materials” he is an artist of is the normal “stuff” around us. He uses commonplace objects like tape, string, and newspaper in the show. But the material he uses the most successfully is simply his body in space. And that too (sans a few moments of theatrical lighting and sound) are used without embellishment. But when executed with great imagination and focus, these materials are proven to be capable of revelation.
It’s hard to pin down what kind of show Materiais Diversos is. It’s something like theater, a bit like dance, related to performance art, and stands as visual art. In the end it’s all of these and none of them. But what it certainly is, is an intriguing and delightful hour of performance and a testament to the vitality of PICA’s festival of time-based art.
Links of interest:
http://pica.org/festival_detail_new.aspx?eventid=345
http://www.tiagoguedes.com
– Chi-wang Yang