Icaria, Icaria, Icaria: A ______________lecture about a desire called utopia and other superpowers is a performance-lecture about books. Worse, it’s a performance-lecture about just one book. A relatively unknown book: The Voyage to Icaria, by Étienne Cabet.

In 1840, the French writer and philosopher Étienne Cabet (1788-1856), one of the most famous utopian socialists of his time, published Voyage en Icarie, an allegorical work strongly inspired by Thomas More’s Utopia. In this novel, the explorer Lord William Carisdall discovers a Republic on the Island of Icaria, ruled by Icarus. Icarus’ regime is based on egalitarian principles, in a society that dispenses the existence of money and private property; where there are no courts, no police and no crime; where science is applied to agriculture and handicrafts; where food and clothing are provided free of charge to all citizens; where education is universal and free for all sexes; and where a community library gathers carefully selected books, among other utopian proposals.With this “creative utopia”, Cabet criticised the social order of the time and proposed the creation of a model agrarian community, seen as the starting point for transforming the world. The novel, which was very popular among Parisian workers and artisans (it was the best-selling book among French workers in 1845), led Cabet, in an attempt to put his theories into practice, to move to the United States of America in 1848, founding the Icarian Movement.

Reading and studying this novel is the starting point for Icaria, Icaria, Icaria, a project interested in discussing the possibilities of political theatre for the 21st century. Faced with scenarios of climate apocalypse and the apparent end of the world, what role can Utopia and Imagination play in redesigning the world?The project concludes in 2026 with the premiere of the durational performance-lecture Icaria, Icaria, Icaria: a __________ lecture about a desire called utopia and other superpowers.

by Rui Pina Coelho
scenographic assistant Catarina Barros
production TEP – Teatro Experimental do Porto

duration 60′


Rui Pina Coelho (Évora, 1975) is scholar, playwright and dramaturg. He is an Assistant Professor at the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon. He has a PhD in Theatre Studies with a work on the representation of violence in post-WWII British realist drama. He has coordinated the volume Contemporary Portuguese Theatre: Experimentalism, Politics and Utopia [working title] (TNDMII / Bicho do Mato, 2017) and coordinated the Theatre Writing Laboratory of the D. Maria II National Theatre from 2015 to 2019. Since 2010, he has been collaborating regularly with TEP (Oporto Experimental Theatre) as a playwright and dramaturgist. As a playwright, he has published Karl Marx reconté à mes enfants et rappelé au peuple (Les Solitaires Intempestifs, 2022); Tudo é um nada novo: textos para espectáculos na era da economia da atenção (Douda Correria, 2021); Este título não que é muito longo: textos para teatro (2011-2018) (Companhia das Ilhas, 2020); Às vezes quase me acontecem coisas boas quando me ponho a falar sozinho (Companhia das Ilhas, 2013) e Já passaram quantos anos perguntou ele e outros textos (Húmus/TEP, 2013), among other titles.