In the performance Bardo (Bard), inspired by the writings of Antonin Artaud, Marcondes Dourado integrates the languages of video, dancing and theater. Dancer Sandra del Carmen prances naked about a stage, amidst 40 basins filled with water and hair, with music, lighting, images and video projected onto a big screen. Bardo was commissioned by Associação Cultural Videobrasil.

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Liberty's many shapes

Marcone Dourado is a young, 22 year old, “Baiano”native of Bahia, Brazil) who tends to brand his multiple artistic manifestations with his strong personality. Uninhibited by conventional concepts he is a researcher at heart, and is constantly seduced by means or instruments which give a free rein to his unique and innovative aesthetics. He works with video and photography, but his fascination with theater and dance cannot be denied – it is this combination of elements which produces his unusual performances, which at times he calls spectacles. But, whatever he does call them, names, labels and formats don’t adapt themselves to Marcondes’ universe. It  took only a year of formal academic studies at the “Escola de Belas-Artes de Salvador” for him to decree a total incompatibility with conventional paths of learning. He questions regimes and adopts the courage and creativity of Glauber Rocha.

Bardo is a combination of the artistic expressions found in video, dance and theater, used here to promote and provoke new insights in the spectator. It is, according to the author, inspired on texts in which the poet Antonin Artaud describes the sensations he had as a patient in different psychiatric clinics.

To revoke our annihilated bodies. “Reconstruct our dismantled interior being, recover what is left of ourselves”, as Marcondes puts it. To this effect he uses the allusive nude body to represent our fears and secrets. Set in an inhuman environment made up of containers full of water and hair he creates a sensation of cold-steel discomfort. To create a sense of loss and emptiness he uses music, lights and video images projected on a big screen – all united they produce a peculiar and instigating aesthetic image.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, "11º Videobrasil": de 12 de novembro de 1996 a 17 de novembro de 1996, p. 81, São Paulo, SP, 1996.