Rho Chung/The Skinny
(Edinburgh: theatre review)
"In the programme, I SEE RED. is called a 'love letter to the horror genre'. I think this is actually a bit humble – the multimedia piece, consisting of pre-recorded media and live performance art, is a vital addition to the genre. Equal parts performance art and moving image, the piece chronicles self-estrangement and self-knowledge.
Performer and director Silvestre Correia is uncanny in the best way – the piece comes to rest comfortably in what I would call mouth horror, as a subset of body horror. Using white and red light, Correia highlights and erases his red lipstick. His face, silhouetted against the projection screen, is more than enough stimulation for the audience. I can't look away. Correia's slow, drool-filled mouthography constructs a visceral reflection of the flashes played on screen. The piece is made with a rare sense of true artistic ambition, challenging the audience not to look away.
The piece is broken into two parts – two similar, maybe identical monologues adapted from works of literature, rendered unrecognisable behind Correia's milky grimace. The piece's greatest success is its embodiment of interiority; billed as trans horror, the piece certainly delivers. Sitting in the audience, knowing 'what's going on' seems overrated. I feel looked through, unsettled. George Murphy's airy, esoteric text provides cultural touch points through which the audience comes to understand the speaker's distance from himself. It is not a rejection of femininity, but a re-appropriation. Correia alienates the signs of femininity – sparkles, lipstick, and so on – from gender identity, showing the markers of gender to be socially constructed and policed.
The second movement of the piece centres on the film, which turns the space into something like an art installation. Over unsettling compositions by José Valente, the film reorients the mirror as a lens – through the mirror, we see how far we have strayed from ourselves. I See Red is an essential contribution to the growing field of absurdist trans horror – it figures transness not as a static monolith, but as a lived experience that cannot be simply spoken and understood."
Nelson Ricardo Martins
(Brazilian Art Curator)
"Still recovering from last night’s Film by Silvestre Correia. A critical portrait, raw and without compromise, in relation to the violence brought by the moment currently lived by humanity, with the growth of intolerance brought by the rise of the far right. Fascinating experimental piece that floods us with thoughts about our day-to-day, mediocre and disguised by vain desires. Besides author, Silvestre Correia is also the interpreter, in an act mark by tension, from beginning to end, as he’s able to, without uttering a word, keep his audience in a constant state of suspense. "
Pedro Gil
(Portuguese Actor and Theatre Director)
Hitchcock Blondes received the following review by Pedro Gil: “It’s always wonderful to witness something unique that is difficult to define or categorize because it didn’t exist until we see it for the first time”
Comunidade Cultura e Arte
(Online Platform)
The Woman Who Only Lived Once reached number 6 in the top 30 shows of the 2019. This was accompanied by: “The young art maker, using the idea of a absolute funeral for Joan Crawford that gives her no possibility of resurrecting as a phoenix, brings to life a shadowy and nervous and David Lynch-like show that attacks the centre of its viewers’ brains with logical sentences, shouts of terror and silent actions”