The new work by Sanja Mitrović/Stand Up Tall Productions, in collaboration with local Teatro Oficina, brings together five recently unemployed people from the Guimarães area, five Portuguese actors, and of the Lameirinho factory’s current workers. Everyone Expects to Grow Old But No One Expects to Get Fired is developed from the communal sessions in which these disparate groups socialised, shared stories and comparedviews on life, work and economy. The actors, alongside other artists, are considered “free spirits”whose existence is unstable but also self-sufficientand resourceful. Their work is symptomatic of the increasingly common modes of production basedon immaterial labour and the economies of self-employment, in which the workers don’t have fixedincome but have to use their ingenuity to survive from one short-term job to the next. How does theirexperience compare to those who have been made redundant and who may not posses such finely attuned hand-to-mouth instincts? And if the workers’ predicament is dramatised and played out, by themselves and the others, could such enactments contain a kernel of an educational, therapeutic or empowering potential?
The former and current workers look at these questions through a series of scenarios based on real-life cases and “performed/worked on” together with the actors. Utilising sociological research undertaken by local academics, and methods of improvisation and role-playing as employed in the acting workshops, which nowadays are often part of corporate training courses, Everyone Expects to Grow Old But No One Expects to Get Fired explores the economy and psychology of unemployment, the differentiation of labour and the dramatisation of the lived experience.
All the while, the cycle of production remains unbroken – the performance takes place during the third shift, in the textile printing facility, while in the background the current Lameirinho employees go about their everyday jobs. They are at the same time a part of the performance and separated from it. Like show business, the industrial production must go on.
PREMIERE: November 15, Lameirinho Factory, Guimarães, Portugal at 21.00
Second show: November 16, Lameirinho Factory, Guimarães, Portugal at 21.00
Credits
C
oncept/direction/choreography: Sanja Mitrović
Dramaturgy: Maya van den Heuvel-Arad with Jorge Palinhos
Stage/lighting design advice: Laurent Liefooghe
Sound design: Luka Ivanović
Performers: Pedro Almendra, Albano Alves, Ivo Bastos, Mário de Castro, Sara Costa, José Luís Cunha, Rosa Manuela, Maria de Fátima Moreira, Domingos Mendes Salgado, Carlos Silva, José Eduardo Silva, Maria de Rosário Sousa, André Teixeira, Albano Vale
Produced by Stand Up Tall Productions, Amsterdam
In co-production with Guimarães 2012 European Capital of Culture and Teatro Oficina
