A missão — Lembranças de uma revolução (2006)

Heiner Müller's The Mission: memory of a revolution evokes the story of a slave revolt in Jamaica in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Three men, Debuisson (a Jamaican land heir), Galloudec (a British peasant), and Sasportas (a young black idealist who wants to see the new Black Haitian Republic), were sent by the French Convention to lead a slave revolt in the English colony. A Missão is a reflection on how ideas get exported from the hegemonic space to the periphery, and on how memory, through the political eyes of the present, reaches us today. Müller's work explores the dialectic poetics of the fragment, avoiding totalizing accounts and inviting the active engagement of the audience. The fragment becomes a producer of content, in a political act that gestures against pre-fabricated clichés and media-produced patterns. The fragment provokes an instant collision of heterogeneous temporalities, combining a critical vision of history to the deconstruction of the discursive Cartesian language. The combination of the fragment and the theatrical poetics of the body opposes the language of power and of the concept, since the intellectual act comes second to experience, to something that cannot be immediately determined, and that precisely for that reason becomes a lasting experience.