O Riso dos Necrófagos begins with the remains of the Trindade War found on the island of São Tomé, by director Zia Soares and musician Xullaji, in the mouths of those who lived it and those who heard it told, accounts of memories blurred by the passage of time.  

The show develops like an organism that spreads in duration and simultaneity, finding inspiration both in the ritualistic route that takes place annually on February 3rd in São Tomé, and in Tchiloli — syncretic theater that manifests itself in the form of ritual on the island.

 

Zia Soares, director

The utopia of emptying the sea

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In the Trindade War, the dead were piled up in mass graves that were never found, or piled up at the bottom of the sea — an exercise in violence perpetrated by the invader who believed that by stripping the dead of their names, he would condemn them to oblivion. But for the people of São Tomé, these dead are present on the island as an incarnate symbol, and to celebrate them, on February 3 of each year, they follow a ritualistic route from the center of São Tomé to Fernão Dias beach, parading for several hours in a march that amplifies speech, songs, laughter and sounds that come from convulsing bodies.  

The Laughter of the Necrophages transports the carnivalesque sphere of the parade to the performance floor, constructing isochrony in the bodies of the performers; it is an extension of the celebratory, entropic path, where the performers manipulate images, debone and laugh at the delirium in a succession of times that evolve through mechanisms of trance and possession — the body opens up to a kind of limbo, where the dead burst into the temporal linearity and causal links of the living; the body transfigures the scene as the remains and fragments of the carnage are devoured by the necrophagous performers.
It's the necromancer island.
It is the manifesto of laughter.
The exultation of laughter blessed by the dead.
A chaos that does not define order.
After all, the utopia of emptying the sea.