Limbo

PDL 26 Capital Europeia da Cultura

Integrated into the programme of PDL26 — Capital Portuguesa da Cultura, with artistic direction, choreography, staging and musical selection by Milagres Paz, Limbo is a performance that brings dance, music and the spoken word into dialogue, portraying the state of today’s world, where war, artificiality, globalisation, loneliness and isolation, violence, and the absence of empathy and love for the other — the locus of difference — enable the development of (non-)human societies, alike in their architecture, their abandonment of nature and the robotisation of ways of thinking, attitudes and automated behaviours that reveal abilities increasingly removed from the individual path towards knowledge, wisdom and creativity.
These are the new forms of human servitude, making each of us an inhabitant of a «non-place», as defined by Marc Augé. What, then, is left to us but limbo, that space between individuality and automation, between war and armistice, between agony and jubilation? With our senses, feelings, words and movements paralysed, all that remains is life suspended between the past we know and a future we fear. In this performance, the ambivalence between hope and disbelief, together with our shared powerlessness, has a name: limbo. It is our condition. — Ângela de Almeida