Thais Di Marco

Welcome to a one-hour session with director Thais Di Marco, who will share a bit about their upcoming group piece, The Obsessors (more info on the piece below).

In this session, we’ll experiment with a simple creation tool that’s currently being developed for the piece, and we’ll also leave space for an informal chat.

The Obsessors is a co-production between DE SINGEL ON_OFF_Space / Theater Arenberg (Antwerp) and Stichting The Goldfish Bleeding (Amsterdam) and sponsored by AFK Amsterdam Fonds Voor de Kunst. The premiere is planned for early 2026.

Welcome!

The Obsessors is inspired by the ancient Umbanda ritual of desobsessão, a Brazilian spiritual practice that takes place every Friday in open, free-of-charge sessions. This ritual cleanses individuals of 'lost dead souls' that fuel obsessive behaviors such as power struggles, gossiping, opportunism, lack of desire and sense or purpose. In these ceremonies, spirits perform their final dance and negotiate their liberation, simultaneously freeing the person being cleansed.

The project explores how to translate this dramaturgy into a contemporary popular performance capable of 'cleansing' theater spaces and institutions - transforming them into more welcoming environments for all while releasing lost souls. The work reconnects artists and audiences with practices lost due to historical fractures like forced displacement, adapting them to contemporary issues such as ecological mourning, neoliberalism, and burnout.

Thais employs their methodology, Retelling Structures, which replaces key elements to destabilize dominant frameworks. Through critical entertainment and comedy, they make space for reenacting social conflicts, creating a window for grief, release, and dreams of the future. One of the core principles of Thais’s work is 'to mobilize pain until it turns into possibility'—to keep looking at the invisible and, through artistic gestures, make what is unseen yet deeply felt - manifest.