João Fiadeiro, director 

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In the past I had already ventured into directing with the plays “Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Becket; “4'48‘’ Psychosis” by Sarah Kane; or “The night sings its songs” by Jan Fosse (for the United Artists). But these were contemporary texts with which I had a strong emotional connection to the content. In Prometheus, because it was a commission (a GRIOTesque proposal), this affective dimension was not present and so I had to approach the staging from another angle. I had to find affection - the driving force behind this work - somewhere else. And that place was translation. Or rather, the act of translating, of passing a phrase (an idea, a sensation, a concept) from one language to another. And then, as with everything I do, what interested me most was what is lost in translation.

I started by reading the book Prometheus - Drafts (editions &Etc.) by Jorge Silva Melo, which is not actually a translation, but an adaptation made by Artistas Unidos to stage Prometheus Shackled/Liberated in 1997. I started with this work because at the time I collaborated in the creation of the play as the person responsible for the movement of the actors and I wanted to see if reading the text activated any familiar experiences in me that would allow me to approach this staging. In Prometheus-Drafts, only one of the passages - the meeting between Io and Prometheus - had been translated directly from Greek by Jorge and I felt that this might be where the work could unfold. What I did next was to place this translation next to other translations, some more than 30 years old, and I was immediately fascinated by the relationships between repetition and difference that emerged when the various translations crossed paths. For example, the word “people” in one of the translations was translated as “gente”, “raça” or “quem” in the other approaches. These nuances and multiple perspectives of the same text (resulting not only from the fact that we were dealing with different people, but also different times), when superimposed, resembled a choreographic or musical score that plays with approximations and distances, contractions and expansions, synchronisms and arrhythmias. I had inadvertently found my affection. The “what” of the thing. What was missing was the “how”. And the “how” comes from an unlikely hypothesis (the only reason for me to venture into the creation of anything): what if I staged different versions of the meeting between Io and Prometheus and placed them side by side, in the same space and at the same time? 

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