The title of this video is a reference to both the place where the action was filmed, the Students of Apollo Philharmonic Society in Lisbon, founded in 1872, where ballroom enthusiasts, many of whom also feature in the film, meet to dance, and to the Greek god Apollo who supported the women of Troy against the Greeks.

The video’s monologue, assembled by Vasco Araújo from various texts, includes passages taken from Euripides’ play, The Trojan Women (415 BC), which indeed relates the courage, resistance and intelligence of the women of Troy in the face of the massacre by the Greeks. These lines are placed in the mouth of a middle-aged woman who seeks an escape from loneliness and her husband’s abuse on the dance floor, and who is dressed in an ostensibly ‘glamorous’ way. This woman is presented to us through her voice – that of the actress Lúcia Sigalho – and through partial shots of a body; her face and entire body are not revealed until the end of the video, when we realise that it is Vasco Araújo himself giving an accomplished performance – the woman is, in fact, him. Self-representation and the playing of female roles are characteristics that the artist has explored since the beginning of his career, as is the theatrical and operatic dimension combined here with the legacy of the musical film.

Both heroism and comic tragedy run through Mulheres D’Apolo, a type of drama / musical comedy imbued with a deep sadness: a place which is apparently designed for romance and glamour is revealed as the location for fleeting, sporadic encounters which, for all the floaty finery of these dancing bodies, end in loneliness and despair.

Isabel Carlos

March 2013

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CREDITS

Actors: Albina Bileu, Ana Maria Alves, Fernanda Gama Vieira, Maria Adelaide da Horta, Maria Armanda de Almeida, Vasco Araújo

Voice: Lúcia Sigalho

Text: Vasco Araújo