THE ANGOLA PROJECT

THE ANGOLA PROJECT

The Angola Project playfully straddles the worlds of live performance and filmmaking – constructing a movie in real time from fragments of film and narrative, only to have it crumble into disarray. A trilogy of solo performances tearing apart the tradition of Travel Lectures from the 19th century, Jeremy Xido leads the audience on a very personal journey into real-life attempts to finance a film and confront the truth of mortality. (Maria Matos Theater, Lisbon / Tanzfabrik Berlin / Studentski Centar Zagreb / Kaaitheater Brussels / Scene Salzburg / ArtsAdmin London / Impulstanz Vienna / PS122 New York / EMPAC Troy, NY / DIA Detroit )

• PART I – “LISBON” Follows Xido's captivation by the city of Lisbon’s sunset-timed gas lamps and growing idea for a feature film. He finds himself collecting historical tidbits and horticultural facts, twisting random encounters into fanciful story lines as he conducts a slew of interviews with the people he meets there. The stories begin to derail and travel from Europe to Africa, then on to a mulberry tree in Detroit.

• PART II – “ANGOLA” — Delves deeper into Xido's quest to build a script for his feature film as he travels to Angola along the Benguela railway, currently being rebuilt by Chinese construction companies. Xido, the sole onstage performer in the entire series, must carefully navigate the minefield of international film financing, constantly reconfiguring his script and feature film pitch accordingly.

• PART III – “XIN” —The improbable yet inevitable third part of The Angola Project, where personal effort to make sense of the world is reaching its limit—a moment of death that brings us to the heart of the matter; a place where imagery crumbles and flies out of control; where a narrative plot of past/future becomes an excuse for the difficult practice of being here and now.