I always wondered about Ophelia as a silly girl and, until that time, she wasn’t part of shakespearean female heroins team in my point of view.
I was passing through bad moments in my personal life when invited to create such work. Working on Ophelia’s madness made me fall in love with that character and, as consequence, I forgave her to have been so silly.
By developing the performance with my director and master Marcos Vogel, I realized that, in fact, madness and death saved Ophelia from her stupidness. They made her brilliant.
She could figure out the truth from madness. She found herself as a woman, daughter and lover and also conquired all strengths she was not able to have while being part of highest society of Dinamarc (metaphor for England).
Ophelia has fallen from the willow and let herself down to deep of a river whose rapids maybe would conducted her to some place warmer, a beach of an utero, I guess. She was going deeper seeking truth, her dreams and peace. Death.
I realized that Ophelia has a mythic life cycle. She died in the same river that she used to play when she was a kid. Her madness was her path to transcendence and deep waters of a river has conducted her back for her resurrection.
Representing Ophelia’s madness has cured me. By holding hands with her, she became a sort of metaphor for all my artistic work I have been developing since then.
Related to this post's subject:
Ophelia celebrating 30 years of psychiatric reform in Brazil
Alexandre Illich - short film by Carlosmagno Rodrigues
