A Lily Tiger is Hard to Find

Two boys and two girls run off into the forest. The forest! A place of mystery and enchantment, rest and adventure, games and pitfalls. On its winding paths, you might come face to face with a goblin or a queen disguised as a pirate, a wild animal or an actor absent-mindedly rehearsing his lines. The forest is the realm of beings who live between different worlds and will never be captured, like this dangerous beast made of imagination and claws: the Lily-Tiger.

A Lily-Tiger Is Hard to Find is a show about childhood, imagination and theatre. The inhabitants of this forest can move seamlessly from one state to another, from one character to another, from fiction to reality, from the everyday to the impossible. We envisage a show as a sort of hybrid being that changes shape, grows beyond the stage and threatens to swallow up the entire audience. We want the audience to leave the theatre wondering: ‘Did that really happen, or did I dream it?’

A memory to kick off the journey

The starting point for this expedition into the forest was a childhood memory. I grew up in the 1970s in a small town in southern Brazil. We lived in a residential neighbourhood with lots of squares and parks nearby. The other kids from the block and I would spend our days roaming free, testing the limits of our mothers’ instructions to ‘stay close to home and don’t be late for dinner’. We’d jump over walls and sneak through gates to reach small patches where the grass mingled with weeds and the trees blanketed the ground with leaves. Once, we discovered an abandoned garden at the back of a ruined house that was like a piece of tropical forest magically transplanted into the middle of the city – the sounds of animals, tall trees, narrow paths overgrown with vines and creepers, a feeling of being far away from everything.

I also remember the exceptional occasion when we set off on a long journey to a more distant square, where we would find the tallest slide in the city. We spent the afternoon wandering through streets in neighbourhoods we didn’t know without asking adults for directions (because, obviously, that’s something you’re not supposed to do), we ended up in dead-end alleys, got lost and were chased by a dog. In the end, we found the square, which had a perfectly normal-sized slide, of course. And we arrived late and dirty for dinner.

I felt like putting on a show about this sense of the unknown and discovery, of danger and complicity.

— Alex Cassal

Alex Cassal

Alfredo Martins, Binete Undonque, Crista Alfaiate and Daniel Pizamiglio

Kelly Freitas

Joana Frazão

Márcia Lança

Tomás Ribas

Aurora dos Campos

Ana Carolina Lopes

Saulo Santos

Daniela Ribeiro and Paula Diogo

Má-criação

LU.CA Teatro Luís de Camões

Museus da Universidade de Lisboa, Jardim Botânico Tropical; Direcção Municipal da Estrutura Verde, Ambiente e Energia and divisão de Espaços Verdes

LU.CA/Alípio Padilha