The project Corpos Celestes was born from the research and writing process of the play C., Celeste e a Primeira Virtude, by Beatriz Batarda. It is a video-installation in 5 acts, 5 screens, 5 stories narrated from the testimonies of young artists in the fields of Theatre, Music, Visual Arts and Dance, collected during the interval in which they see the course of their lives suspended: after their student life and before reaching public visibility. These are years of pandemic. Fiction and reality intersect and, with a contemporary gaze, we approach the important debate on the individual conflict between external pressures and intimate motivations.

Based on the idea of Wilhelm Schmidt in Serenity (2014), that Art often has a melancholic character and can offer consolation or inspire a feeling of happiness – that character that Hannah Arendt calls “the highest virtue of the human being” – Beatriz Batarda, who debuts here in directing an audiovisual object, builds a narrative where elements of fiction and non-fiction complement each other in a story about feelings of belonging that concern us all. The installation corresponds to 5 creation laboratories where 5 working groups met, each one of them consisting of young people between 20 and 30 years old, from different geographic origins and singular paths. The author seeks to record how an intimate and dangerous theatre can open up intellectual debate in contact with affections, in order to delve into laborious themes such as the overwhelming power of the image, the place of freedom in art, the manifestations of segregation in the job market, the return to the meaning of the artistic gesture and the importance of truth in the creative impulse.

Project supported by