“Self-exposure was inevitable the moment she described a character’s weakness: the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself. What other authority could she have? Only when a story was finished, all fates resolved and the whole matter sealed off at both ends so it resembled, at least in this one respect, every other finished story in the world, could she fell immune, and ready to punch roles in the margins, bind the chapters with pieces of string, paint or draw the cover, and take the finished work to show to her mother, or her father, when he was home.”
Ian McEwan.

Could we rewrite a person’s life only through its creations? How much biography is revealed in a work of art? Is it possible to separate life and creation or are they two fictional mirrors of a same reality? Isn’t a theatre play a kind of personal museum? Would a work of art repair our unlived moments? How are the moments we could have lived but we didn’t? Which reality do our artworks seek to repair?

In his previous works, Leonardo Moreira always departed from the attempt of repairing his biography – for instance, the father's 
death and his its oblivion being reviewed and relived in O Jardim (The Garden, 2011), in Ficção (Fiction, 2012), the attempt was “to fix” 
actor’s family issues: father and son who are reunited on stage after years of remoteness, a public apology to a dead mother, the insulting 
imitation of a sister. 
 After all, isn’t an artwork also an attempt of atonement?

Starting from this reflection, 02 Ficções (02 Fictions) is a creation with two forms of interaction. A theatre play but also a museum. An audience group has access to an exhibition that ends at the backstage of a play. A second audience at first watches a play and after that, as a kind of time travel, can freely tour the museum that reveal the blanks of the play.

A first audience runs through an imaginary museum, being guided by actors. These players lead the spectators to the backstage of a theatre. There, pieces of a real museum (taken from the tiny Brazilian city Areado, homeland of Leonardo Moreira) reveal the creative process of Cia. Hiato and create a fictional character. At last, the audience watches the reenactment of the play Do Lugar Onde Estou Já Fui Embora (From Where I Am I’ve Already Gone), an uncompleted theatre piece written by that fictional character, from behind the scenes. 
This play inside the play is a thumb-sized representation (miniature) of the present moment of its creation.

The multiple narrative is unveiled through the superposition of life and creation, fiction and reality. Dramaturgically, Moreira equals memory and invention, backstage and stage, past and dream. The past appears as the voice that gives meaning to the scattered fragments of a person who was forever lost. The dream of an artist as the possibility of to apprehend the past from its traces – or from the creations that emerge from those traces.

The combination of these two different acts - a museum and a play – two biographical statements - make 02 Fictions.

Pentimento: the fake museum

“I started with fiction and discovered the real; but behind the real is again fiction”
Jean-Luc Godard

Pentimento is the word for repentance and is also the term used for the appearance of previously made drafts under a painting, discovered during its restoration. Pentimento is an afterthought in the course of work, hidden by several layers of color. Besides fundamental to reconstruct a creative process, a pentimento is also a tool to find out if a piece is original or not. Only one original has "regrets", copies never do.

By appropriating this matter, Cia Hiato reveals his own creative process. Without limiting it to a metalinguistic issue, intimacy and theatricality are united: one does not exist without the other one.

Audience is led to navigate a maze of works that depict or reflect the multiple lives of the character. Six different routes traced by the museum guides thus reveal the biography of Leonardo Moreira and his invented memories. Six different biographies of the same character collide in a single gallery.

This gallery is also a metaphorical reconstruction of a childhood house. In the words of the philosopher Bachelard:

"Sometimes, the home of the future is stronger, clearer, wider than all the houses of the past. In opposition to the birthplace image works the dreamed house image. In the evening of life, with indomitable courage, we say again: what we have not done will be done. Build a house. This dream home can be a simple dream of owner, a concentration of all that is considered convenient, comfortable, healthy, solid or even desirable to others. Must then settle pride and reason, irreconcilable terms. (...) A house that was, in the end, symmetrical to the birthplace. That would prepare no more grief and sad thoughts, but dreams. Better to live in the interim than in the final."

Juxtaposed, the actual elements of the architecture of the building and fictional situations proposed by actors-guides allow the public to "retell" a story by ordering the imaginary objects, spaces and words; performative spaces presented to the spectator put them in a intermediary place in which the pairs theatre/museum, audience/visitor, literary narrative/political history, actors/objects operate simultaneously.

As stated, not everything in this route is fake. Hidden behind Ts’Ui Pen’s biography are also Leonardo Moreira’s and actors’ biographies (already explored in the first phase of Project Fiction). Now, Cia Hiato leaves the fictionalized biographies and go for the deviation. It’s not about collecting pasts, but to create a collection of dreams. Although our lives and our work are activities without creations, says Paolo Virno, we can say that the "product" of life experiences are the lived moments. But what about those unlived moments, those futures we bury on each choice?

When exposing the biography of a fictional character, Cia Hiato wants to 
give life to these unassuming moments, those dreamed but never performed lives. The affirmation of the existence of an invented reality here is attested by the credibility of the space that welcomes his/her works - the museum. The works in
this space allow the formation of an identity that is intended to be real. Fiction becomes an indisputable reality.

Do Lugar Onde Estou Já Fui Embora: the uncompleted theatre play

“I have to conclude that fiction is better at ‘the truth’ than a factual record”
Doris Lessing

This second act is the re-enactment of the unsuccessful foray on dramaturgy by an disappeared author. This is the fictional plot that reunites the actors of Cia. Hiato. Trying to fill the blanks left by the author, the actors use the author’s biographical notebook to put on stage the reading of an unfinished play.

Part of the audience follows the actors through the backstage, the moment before the play will be staged. The other one acts like a fictional audience. Meanwhile, another audience is preparing to watch the show "From Where I Am I’ve Already Gone": a re-enactment held by Cia Hiato.

Written by Leonardo Moreira, this piece is fictionally treated as an unfinished project of the artist previously described in the museum. Raising questions about the ephemeral nature of the theatrical event, Cia Hiato redo this fictitious work, true to its anachronism and excessive theatricality. This theatrical event is not an original piece, but a faithfully reproduction.

The play "From Where I Am I’ve Already Gone" is a dramatic text in which the author tries to repair his biography. The text presents a drama conceived in geometric progression. To say this is to consider that all the regrets, sketches, discarded ideas are also part of the text. This work, full of incongruent fragments, shows us Leonardo: a man who writes the past (all his notes and texts are diagrams of his childhood 
home), but that is unable to cope with the present.

Six different times and six spaces overlap on stage, memory and invention are equal, past and present mingle, actors double themselves and an imaginary house is built with words in front of the audience: this is the ambitious failed project that Cia. Hiato tries in vain to reconstruct. The failure and the attempt itself are the theme of this work.

What is proposed, then, is a superposition of two opposite poles: the fiction proposed by the drama and the faked author - where the memory cuts and rewrites a story - and the presence of actors - "simulating” a confessional state, assuming characters of themselves, confusing the viewer with real stories and made up ones, mixing people from their family life with fictional characters.

Although this confusion results in a temporary disappearance of the dramatic figure, we cannot consider it as a device that makes to disappear completely fiction, but rather as a strategy that transforms our perception. The audience is thus thrown into a space between the fictional characters in search of his memory and materiality of the play role, rescuing the story of a creative process and, therefore, their personal history.

It is hoped that the audience perception remains between actor and character. While the devices of staging (the occupation of a backstage) can go up or fix the attention of the viewer in the presence of the actors, the drama opens the possibility that sometimes the focus changes to the dramatic figure. And vice versa.

Each time that this "ripple" appears, there is a break, a discontinuity. The order of perception that viewers built is destroyed and another one has to be 
established. Becomes relevant here, the moment of instability, the gap when perception changes, the “hiato” - the in-between moment when the order of perception is changed, but another one has not yet been established.

Is it possible to reconstruct an abandoned life? Is it possible to repair a past or rebuild it? If “forever” only exists in fiction, could a work of art repair a life? Is not our present geometry of echoes from the past?

These are the questions raised by the drama “From Where I Am I’ve Already Gone”, trying to create a poetic scene in which public space (theatre / museum) and intimate space (the house) merge themselves.

Together, these two acts form the show 02 Fictions. Among issues evolving originality, plagiarism, the function of fiction, biographies of the actors merged to a faked biography, 02 Fictions confronts its doubled audience with a constant sense of doubt.

And the confrontation between these two fictions may create a new reality, one full of overlapping perspectives and divergent impressions. Paraphrasing the author Ian McEwan, in his novel Atonement, Isn’t the possibility of showing coexistent worldviews the only aim of a story?

Cast & creative team

Conception, Text and Direction:
Leonardo Moreira

By and With
Fernanda Stefanski
Luciana Paes
Mariah Amélia Farah
Paula Picarelli
Thiago Amaral

Assistant Direction/ Producer
Aura Cunha

Set and Lightning Design:
Marisa Bentivegna

Music and Sound Design:
Marcelo Pellegrini

Costume Design:
João Pimenta