Reality Show

Strangers living together in a confined space. From breakfast to friendships and conflicts – everything is recorded on camera. For Reality Show, MEXA bring mechanisms well-known from reality TV onto the stage. Their living quarters become a film set. Furniture and cameras appear and disappear again one by one, live projections are edited in real-time. The collective was formed in public accommodation for homeless people in São Paulo. New people were constantly arriving, others were suddenly excluded because they had broken the rules – forced to live together under constant surveillance. Reality Show reflects both their earlier experiences of living together collectively as well as their current life in the theatre. The play creates visibility without power, glamour that leads to exhaustion and intimacy that becomes a transaction. MEXA also reflects on its own development through elimination rounds – working with their own autobiographies and forms of documentary theatre as well as inventing new ways of life on the stage, ones that would be impossible outside of it. Are stories of deprivation and lack precisely the ones that usually “win the show”? At the same time, the play suggests that fiction can become a strategy for finding belonging – and how we all sometimes perform versions of ourselves in order to be accepted. 

MEXA was founded in 2015 in public accommodation for homeless people in São Paulo. Since then, the collective has been researching the relationship between life and art, the street and the institution, and politics and aesthetics. Their work explores the boundaries between reality and fiction, and seamlessly blends performance, theatre, video and photography. They have already been a guest at Festival Theaterformen in 2024 with The Last Supper.