O Agora que Demora (The Lingering Now) is the second panel of a dyptic called Our Odyssey by brazilian theater and film maker Christiane Jatahy dealing with these questions, starting from Homer’s epic. It deepens the development of a language that has earned Jatahy a place on the forefront of contemporary theater worldwide : exposing the tension lines between film and theater and their respective connections to past and present ; undermining the border walls between fiction and real ; challenging the position of the spectators within these new connections.
The Lingering Now takes Jatahy’s research to a new level, beyond exploring how cinema can add to our theatrical experience, dramaturgically and formally. It reverses the roles between both media. The Lingering Now is a film that only reaches its full dimension in a dialogue with theater. A film, shot in Jenin, Palestine ; in refugee camps in Lebanon and Greece ; in the African cosmopolis of the inner city of Johannesburg ; in an indigenous community struggling to defend its homeland and its integrity in the Amazon rainforest ; and in Rio De Janeiro. The context of these film shootings may be documentary, but the scope is definitely fictional : actors from these communities arm themselves with the verses of Homer to speak about their realities. They become a succession, a multiplication, a manifestation of Odysseuses, Penelopes and Telemachuses, drawing straight lines from the ancient greek characters to us present in the theater. Each of us, spectators and performers, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, with a present, a recent history or a near future, of journeys and transformations in order to secure home, branded into our genetics.
In The Lingering Now we embark on a journey, guided by a 3000 years old fiction, but always with the mud of the now and the real sticking to our shoes. A film, a play, that positions the audience
inside the fiction. An encounter trying to discover the cracks in the wall, the backdoors left open, raising the question : how can we break the cycle ?
