Beckett's Endgame by Tania Bruguera premieres in Porto at TNSJ - National Theatre of São João

Endgame, directed by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera and co-coproduced by TNSJ - National Theatre of São João, premiers at the Mosteiro de São Bento da Vitória, Porto, on 20 and 21 April 2017, as part of the Biennial of Contemporary Arts (BoCA).

Tania Bruguera debuts as a performance director in Porto. The audience is invited to climb the stairs of the 17th-century monastery in Porto, Portugal, to take their seats and place their heads through holes in a huge installation of circular fabric. Below, an actor will stare out from the stage, pause and laugh.

Artist and activist Tania Bruguera takes on Beckett's bleak and tragicomic one-act play Endgame and elaborates a performance that encourages the audience to confront themselves with the meaning of human existence.

"We were very strict and completely respectful to the text and the staging, but we wanted to focus on the audience's experience, which is not in the directions of the play," says Bruguera.

Almost all Bruguera's productions rely on audience participation. This performance in the city of Porto is no exception. The stage is a post-apocalyptic landscape where Bruguera's reflections on her art are interspersed with issues of power and control.

"I'm interested in how Endgame brings power dynamics into our everyday lives," she says. "It feels relevant to see this piece today, when the world is seduced by so-called strong political figures and when democracy is abused instead of enacted. It feels like the end of a chapter", Tania Bruguera concludes.

The play revolves around Beckett's notion of a circular existence, the idea that beginnings and endings are intertwined, that existence is cyclical.

Bruguera describes herself as an artivist, the portmanteau word combining "art" and "activism".

Tania bruguera studied at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana and then earned an M.F.A. in performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.