Umer Nangiana meets world beater Portuguese staticman
Antonio Santos and his artiste wife Susana to learn what makes
them — and their fellow performers — still with an enduring thrill
After one full year, the staticman is back. But this time, he has not returned to Souq Waqif alone; there are four of them, dressed in primary colours.
Antonio Santos, a world-record holder in motionlessness from Portugal, stunned Doha with his acts of levitation at last year’s Spring Festival at Souq Waqif, where he had performed for the first time.
Remember the bronze ‘statue’ placed in one corner of the souq, balancing on a stick with his feet well above the ground?
In place of the levitating ‘statue’, you will now find four in yellow, blue, white and red. They call themselves the Colour Brigade.
They attract people in dozens at a time, with their motionlessness and, then, surprise them with salutes and welcome gestures. Since the first day of their arrival at the Souq Waqif Spring Festival this year, the Colour Brigade has been attracting throngs as usual.
“I have done this type of performance before as well, but it was not exactly like the one we are staging here. You will see costumes created by mixing colours and it is an entirely new concept. I have created these costumes by mixing acrylic with latex,” Antonio Santos a.k.a. Staticman tells Community.  
“This is something new in the world. The idea was to do it in all primary colours and it is reserved for public view. It is only-for-the-eyes static performance to which we add a little daily life gestures like a salutation, welcome,  goodbye, seeing the watch gesture and things like that,” he adds.
Santos promises that each day the visitors to the souq will find something different in the statues as they love to improvise and come up with new movements.
“We have the best of motionless and living statue movements based on improvisation and these are different from the static living statue, one of which is the Colour Brigade,” says Santos, who scored his first Guinness World Record for Motionlessness in 1989 in Portugal.
Since then, he has performed all over Europe, parts of Middle East and Asia, Americas and other parts of the world.
His ability to suspend the body in air and stay there motionless in the form of different statues has astonished audiences the world over during the last 25 years.
However, this time he is not performing his popular suspended-in-the-air acts. Now, he is performing with a group that includes his wife Susana Bento, who is also an opera singer and a contemporary dancer, besides two other colleagues.
“Only I can perform levitation acts. All my colleagues here can perform different other acts nevertheless. Guilherme Ferreira is one of the best living statues in Portugal. He is younger to me, but carries on with my legacy very well,” says Santos, referring to the gentleman attired in white.
“He is an expert in living statute. He is not exactly my student in the art, but we have worked together. He saw me and started doing this and we share a lot of knowledge,” reveals the staticman.
The red ‘statue’, Joao Saraiva, is an expert in theatrical and visual performances with living statue idea. He is also a specialist in stilt.
“We are a group that works on the same thing but we have come from very different fields of art,” says Santos, adding that the audience at the souq this year has been incredible. “We thought (they) would have been more (into) levitation acts but people are just loving this concept,” says the man behind the idea of Colour Brigade.
“I think the colours pull them and provoke them to touch the ‘statues’. They come forward, touch it and take a lot of photographs. We are delighted as frankly we did not anticipate this big a response,” admits Santos.
He says all of them have the ability to stay motionless for half an hour although it is hard to do it for that long in the Doha heat and costumes that can test their endurance. “So we change our movements a little, but yes, we can stand still for half an hour. And we can make 10 different postures,” points out Santos.
“It is my first premiere with the group here in Qatar and I love the experience. I am enjoying being in Qatar,” Susana Bento tells Community.
“By profession, I am a singer and dancer so I mostly do this on and off, but sometimes regularly as well. It’s a way of being in the art world as (by) doing these acts, I can also be an actress besides being a singer and dancer,” says Bento.
But can she also perform levitation?
“If Antonio helps me and assists as a performer, I think maybe I would be successful in doing it as we are almost the same weight, but I don’t tell anyone,” says Bento, laughing.
Santos, leader of the group and the brainchild behind their multifaceted performances, has to his credit milestones like Motionlessness Guinness Record (1988), Motionlessness World Record (1997 and 2003) and Less Speed Walking World Record (2000).
From 1974-2003, Sontos attended superior courses in mathematics, geographic engineering and geology; expression and movement workshop with John Mowatt; mime workshop with Nola Rae; make-up workshop at Profestética school; and seminaries of Yoga.
He began the staticman performances in Barcelona in 1987 before going out to perform in the streets of Spain, France, Holland, Greece, Germany, United Kingdom and Italy. Soon after, he performed for the first time in Portugal at the Porto, Batalha Square, and followed it up with one in the capital Lisbon.
Santos’s first commercial performance came in Chiado shops in Lisbon after which he made the first Motionlessness World Record with a performance lasting 15 hours, 2 minutes and 55 seconds in Amoreiras Shopping Center, Lisbon.
He has performed in different television programmes besides regional and international fairs. Santos has made multiple tours of Europe and also performed his act of Urban Animation in dozens of Portuguese towns.
He established the Colour Brigade in Lisbon and went on to perform in the Parque das Nações, universities such as Clássica de Lisboa, Autónoma, FCSH and Coimbra.
The performers also participated in public festivals in Madeira Island. Santos made his second record in motionlessness with a performance lasting 18 hours, 35 minutes and 15 seconds while the Less Speed Walking World Record spanned 150 meters in eight hours. His latest Motionlessness World Record was made during the World Championship of Handball in Viseu, with a show lasting 20 hours and 11 minutes.