As Aves [The Birds]

As Aves [The Birds] is a play from the Western classical repertoire. Although it only won second place in the Dionysian competition in which it premiered, this comedy with a strong sense of criticism towards the «evils of Athens» is considered Aristophanes’ masterpiece. The narrative is based on the ability of a human – Pistetero – to persuade birds to fulfil his desires. Birds of the countryside, birds of the mountains, birds of the trees, birds of the streams, marshes and seas – all are led by Pistetero to build a city that hovers in the sky. The city begins to rival Olympus and eventually defeats and replaces it, and Pistetero, himself transformed (cross-dressed?) into a bird, becomes the supreme deity in place of Zeus. The play has a strong musical component, not only because it includes the traditional synchronised chorus to speak the words and some songs, but also because of the imitation of birds that it allows; and it includes moments of dance.

mala voadora joins Comédias do Minho for an incursion into this text by Aristophanes, not only because of its allegorical content – the founding of an ideal city and the victory of a figure who persuades crowds – but also because of the theatrical opportunities it offers: (1) the formal experiments that the simultaneous presence of birds and humans allows, namely with regard to the ways of saying the text (exploring the musicality of words with a view to varying levels of abstraction) and the choreographic potential of representing animals; and (2) the conception of the scene as a place of utopia with regard not only to the trans-historical displacement of Aristophanes’ imaginary city to the present, but also to the interest that the opposition to anthropocentrism has acquired in recent ontological conjectures. We will speculate on this place of ambiguity, between fable and political commentary, between the utopia of a new world and the dystopia of over-ambition, between the human and the non-human, between theatre, dance and concert. We also have the ambition to create a world, in our case, a scenic one.