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BRAZIL DIARIES #1: A month with the Moitará Group
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Moitará is a word which was used by a native
indian tribe of Brazil, and it stands for 'exchange'.
No
other name would be more appropriate for this welcoming theatre
company formed by Venício
Fonseca
and Érica Rettl 16
years ago. Based in Rio, the company follows their training from their
direct Master and
friend, the
Italian maskmaker Donato Salvatori.
Moitará has now a younger company under their mentoring, with whom we
shared training
and mask-making sessions taught by Moitará's
founders. In 4 weeks of daily exchange we have managed
to touch on training principles
and to start to understand the foundation from which Moitará
develops its
internationally acclaimed performance work.
Moitará's
investigation and commitment to the development
of theatre practice allowed us to share both
questions and discoveries of our short, but intense, path.
We wish to strengthen this relationship which has already started to
influence and generate
new work from both
parties. The creation process which will give
life to ZECORA URA's version of The Tempest
has already begun to put into practice the
fruits of this exchange.
Jorge Lopes Ramos
Rio, December 17th
2004.
Photos: Venício Fonseca e Carlinhos
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BRAZIL DIARIES #2:An Encounter with Marias do Brasil
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Last November, as part of ZECORA URA's exchange visit to Augusto Boal and his
Theatre
of the
Oppressed Centre in Rio de Janeiro (CTO-Rio), we were invited to participate in
a Forum Theatre performance
developed by domestic workers. These workers (pictured below in costume), most
of them named Maria, have left
their
homes in several different regions of Brazil to come to Rio in search of better
work opportunities. Without
much chance to study, as adults they decided to attend evening
courses to complete their studies. That's how
the 'Marias' met.
Claudete and Olivar (photo at the bottom) are part of the first group of 5 'curingas'
(jokers) to be
trained by Augusto Boal during the 80's in order to carry out the projects of
CTO-Rio in Brazil. They visited these
'Marias' at their evening school proposing a project of workshops.
This was the first contact the 'Marias'
had with
theatre. Some of the original 'Marias'
had to leave the group, but a core
remained and have met every Sunday
since that date to create and practice theatre through the tools of the Theatre of the
Oppressed.
Now, in their second production, they fight for the rights of domestic workers
to be respected.
By
dealing with issues such as sexual abuse, long working hours and no benefits, they
transformed their daily struggle
into upbeat, strong, vibrant, at times joyful, pieces of theatre. At the
end of the show, as in all Forum Theatre
performances, they invite members of the audience to take on a role of an
oppressed (one of the Marias) or an
oppressor (the lady of the house or her husband) in order to find new solutions for
delicate situations from their
daily lives.
'Eu também sou mulher' (I am also a woman) is the
title for this performance which was performed
in Brasilia for the President Lula last month. Together with the
performance, they brought him petitions which were
signed by previous spectators of that show, and suggestions to ensure the laws
are being respected. After the
Forum Theatre sessions, the audience and the cast gather around a table to
collect ideas for new projects of law.
These were part of the demonstration in Brasilia. We were enchanted by the
'Marias', their lives and their hearts.
We wish them strength, peace, and enough life to keep on generating such
inspiring performances.
Last Sunday, ZECORA URA was also present at an internal festival of CTO-Rio,
where Augusto
Boal proposed discussions about the role of 'aesthetics' in the making of the
Theatre of the Oppressed. On the
5th and 6th of March ZECORA URA will present demonstrational workshops, work in
progress scenes of 'The
Tempest' and discussions which will conclude our exchange with CTO-Rio in 2005.
But we hope this link is
strengthened and in the near future we can continue to collaborate with CTO-Rio.
Jorge Lopes Ramos
Rio, December 23rd 2004.
Photos: Palloma Menezes
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BRAZIL DIARIES #3: Touring Bahia with The Tempest
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Performing The Tempest on a street theatre tour of Brazil
by Solveig PedersenImagine the heavy heat of the summer in the Northeast of Brazil, on a 4000 km car journey on bumpy roads,
through incredible landscapes, past paradise tropical beaches, through so many small cities full of new
impressions, colours and smells. All the people who greeted us with smiles and friendliness, and all the
people stuck in the roadside petrol fumes, working on gas stations for pennies or stretching their empty
hands out to passing cars. Extreme poverty and extreme beauty mixed together. In the middle of all this
we arrived –a bunch of privileged Europeans and Brazilians full of expectations and ready to encounter
the people and places of Bahia, and to present them with our crazy characters.
Our final project in Brazil was a production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, adapted to our own street theatre
version. It was a culmination of all our experiences so far - the encounters with Theatre of the Oppressed,
Moitara and Lume, as well as our own training. The production was based on characters from The Tempest
and the story grew out of scenes we had rehearsed earlier and performed in the Feverestival in Campinas,
but the story we developed for the street became something different, independent of the play. We used
the idea of the magical island, the characters of the shipwrecked crew, and the master Prospero with his
slaves; Ariel and Caliban. However, our version was more like a popular soap opera performance; including
a fight, a wedding, a funeral and a happy ending - as a way of working with archetypes and accommodating
the production to the street.
We performed in three cities in the state of Bahia, Northeast Brazil and two cities in Rio de Janeiro state. Our first stop was Ilheus where we established two contacts - with a storyteller we had met earlier who helped us attract attention for the performance by taking part in the beginning scene - and with a student from a local school who invited us to perform there the following day. In the school we performed for a group of teenagers who were very excited to be introduced to our work.
Our next stop was the small island of Itaparica, where we immediately on arrival made a contact with the teacher of a local Capoeira group. When she heard we were an international company she instantly invited us to stay in the cultural centre and take part in a roda de capoeira, she organised an appointment with the local radio for an interview to advertise our performance, and the following evening of the performance the group improvised with us by playing capoeira instruments in order to attract attention for the show. What a welcoming gesture!
In Lencois several children and the local drunk took an active part in the performance, and we also experienced this when we finally performed in the towns of Paty do Alferes and Miguel Pereira, back in Rio state. Being outcasts ourselves – the strange European foreigners – local outcasts like street kids and drunks seemed to like us.
Why did we choose The Tempest for a street theatre performance? Initially, the idea of working on The Tempest simply came from the wish to develop a project to bring back to London, but as we started working on the play we were strongly influenced by our experiences in Brazil and felt the need to incorporate some elements of Brazilian culture and things we had worked with in connection with our exchanges. After a while we decided to use the work on The Tempest for a performance project in Brazil rather than bringing it back to England. We felt it was more relevant for us to bring something European to a new context and adapt it- stimulated by the Brazilian culture we were experiencing and learning about.
We began creating various versions of selected scenes and characters and started finding costumes and props that influenced the process. Later, this work was further developed by Jorge in his Butoh workshop in the Feverestival, where he directed a performance in collaboration with participants from the workshop. With this performance as a basis we started redeveloping scenes and characters into a new structure suitable for street theatre. Roles were swapped, and characters changed but the basic ideas remained. In order to create a street performance we chose to find easily recognizable stereotypes (The drunk, the lovers, the master and slave) and this helped us to create a story and a structure that was accessible for an audience in the street. Trying to portray complex plots and relationships between characters would not have worked for the street forum, and we wanted to tell a story that any by passers could stop and watch without having to see the entire performance
How did we, as an international group approach a Brazilian audience with a Shakespearean text? The underlying idea of The Tempest as a meeting between the foreigners, i.e. the people from the ship, and the inhabitants of the island, was also an interesting subject in this context of us meeting with the local communities (although in this sense The tempest is rather ambiguous because it can be seen in relation to colonial conquests at the time.) We did not come to demonstrate or teach or take anything – our aim was to share something with the communities of the towns we visited through telling a story and through music and song. We usually began the performance by walking through the main streets, trying to gather people by greeting them in various languages and both acting as the foreign group presenting ourselves and as the characters acting surprised and excited about encountering the new place. And as a consequence of us offering our performance to the communities, the cultural exchanges took place.
Influences
The idea of doing a street performance initially came from the wish to explore culture and folklore of the Northeast and the idea of proposing a project for exchange with the locals of the area we wanted to visit. We chose Bahia because there is a strong tradition for folklore and religious ceremonies / cultural festivities, and we wanted to explore this "popular culture" further. We were interested in taking theatre out of a theatre space, and we were hoping to reach a different kind of audience with a different style of theatre.
We were also influenced by our visits to the Theatre of The Oppressed in Rio de Janeiro. - while their work is completely different in the sense that the main purpose of the groups involved is creating a debate from political theatre, there are other aspects of that type of forum that we were directly influenced by, for example the direct contact with the audience as opposed to the clear division between stage and spectator, and the wish to involve the audience. We saw that several CTO groups used stereotypes to portray their case, in order to make the issue easily recognizable and accessible, which was a concept we took onboard for our performance.
Moitara was also an indirect influence in this sense as their contact with the audience is very direct, and their work is open, accessible and engaging.
Lume was perhaps our greatest inspiration with regards to the street performance because they have a lot of experience in this field and we had the opportunity to watch videos of their street performances around the world, to observe their workshop participants perform in the street, and to see how Lume work very directly with their audience. They continuously develop the same performance - using cultural elements such as songs from each country they go to, which is something we can learn from as a group. Seeing their students develop a performance was extremely useful and inspirational as we could observe the audience reactions in different situations and draw on this experience.
How did we include Brazilian cultural elements into the performance? Knowing Shakespeare or the plot of the play was not an issue because we adapted the story of The Tempest to our own version of events - a popularized soap opera version. Soap operas are very popular on Brazilian television – and our performance became a type of live soap opera, which we found was a suitable means of expression to entertain people and create interest in us. Crucially, we performed mainly in Portuguese to avoid the language barrier, and we sang traditional Brazilian songs that people could recognize and relate to. We were also strongly influenced by the concept of the roda - the circle that gathers people in capoeira, in samba and other folkloric dances.
The audience reactions
Performing in the street is a completely different concept than performing in a theatre space - and you can't make assumptions about the type of audience you get and how people will react. The audience was not expecting a performance, and not necessarily used to seeing theatre and therefore not accustomed to theatre practices. Furthermore, we were not very familiar with the places before performing so we didn’t know where it was best to gather an audience. Generally, our experience was that people were very open, interested and non-judgmental about the work. For example in the school in Ilheus where we performed we were positively surprised to find that a group of 15-16 year old boys and girls would react with such genuine curiosity and enjoyment. People appeared more ready and happy to receive a foreign group of performers than Zecora Ura experienced while performing site-specific/street theatre in England. The best experience was when we performed in the space we knew, our local town of Miguel Pereira. Knowing the space, and drawing on the experiences we made performing in Bahia helped us engage the audience.
Looking back on this time when we were performing in Brazil and encountering all these new places and people I can only conclude that it was a unique learning experience - an out of the ordinary meeting between a group of European theatre artists and the locals – people of all classes and ages - who seemed to enjoy the spectacles of these strangers appearing in their communities where we were trying to approach a different culture and its people through theatrical events.
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BRAZIL DIARIES #4: ZECORA URA Theatre Café
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Coming up...
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BRAZIL DIARIES #5: FEVERESTIVAL & LUME Theatre Company
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Coming up...
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