I met Diana in 2016, at the Teatro Maria Matos, in Lisbon, in Gala, by Jérôme Bel, in which we both danced. Now Diana presents her latest work at DDD, in Matosinhos, and I talked to her about this piece.

The show Anda, Diana is an autobiographical work, about a body in reconstruction. A tribute to herself and, at the same time, her funeral. For Diana, this work has a great importance as an artist, but at the same time she considers it a piece of external desires, imagined and created with great expectation over the years. All this has generated extra pressure because she considers that creating a piece - starting from her life and her biographical self - is something already embarrassing. 

After the book Anda, Diana, released in 2021 (but already in her mind for many years), as a fictional diary, the piece reconstruct the body, giving the audiences the opportunity to experience it. 

"The book already had the reconstruction of my body in a very raw, direct, violent, sarcastic way and everything it represents" and so it made sense to share this place and not just tell it. 

It’s a work with a very strong technical dimension, where any detail makes a big difference, and that mixes circus techniques, contact and release; it is a work where three-dimensionality, expression and the limits of the body are always present. In this way, Diana believes that it is also a work to study movement, where there is a body-identity and a body-on-stage. Starts from a literary object that already had a place in it – "the place I did not want to bring to the piece (...) a place of reports, many events, many facts, many stories, many names." Throughout the work, Diana seeks a more poetic place, evoking the events described in the book, but in which, at the same time, adding an apparent perversion, a kind of "welcome to my horror film". 

The audio answers to following questions are only available in portuguese:

1. How do you see your piece from a first-person perspective?

2. Do you also consider that it is a piece that intends to study movement? 

3. How did you go from a diary to a book and a book to a show? 

4. Would you consider this piece as a solo?

5. Can you share how you directed your interpreters? Did you follow the whole process?

6. How did you meet them?

7. What's it like to be inside the piece and direct it at the same time? How do you make corrections?  

8. What can we expect from the presentation in Matosinhos? Any adaptations?