Audio Transcribed

OX is a performance conceived by the actor Lucas Pradino, produced by the Coletivo Avôa, and developed in partnership with director Fernanda Machado and playwright Sofia Boito. The play was created from a scenic experiment called Where Sebastião Lives? - Crossing, which was also developed by Coletivo Avôa during a bicycle trip along the Rio São Francisco. 

The work revolves around a fictional situation: the return of a man to his childhood home, now in ruins. The text explores the creation of this man/ox, the man as a masculine figure immersed in a patriarchal and heteronormative world, and the ox as an animal subjected to servile living conditions that oppress its wild nature. Man and ox mirror each other, constantly blurring the lines throughout the performance. Set in a rural universe, the play also touches on other themes such as agriculture, the Anthropocene, the right to land and housing, religious extremism, gun ownership, and social violence, along with other environmental urgencies. 

In addition to the poetic nature of the text, the performance incorporates other visual and corporeal constructs. The staging takes place in an arena created by the author, made up of objects that shape the space—this space in ruins, with bricks and clay, fragments of memories of a life that no longer exists. Ox emerges from this ruin, from what remains when nothing else is left, to reconfigure another possible man, another possible world, shaping a body freed from trauma, stigma, and the shackles imposed by society. The audience is placed within this scene as witnesses to this dismantling.