Here I would like to suggest two episodes of the Cena Inquieta (Restless Scene) series. The first is about the experience of theatre groups Clariô (Clarion) and Capulanas Cia de Arte Negra (Capulanas Black Art Company). Here it is interesting to perceive the choice of a different geographic configuration: the periphery, in the Greater São Paulo Metropolitan Area, in the city of Taboão da Serra (Clarion Group) and the South Zone of the city of São Paulo in the district of Jardim São Luís (Capulanas Cia de Arte Negra). Inseparable from the geographic situation, we have the racial condition: Black artists of both genders. This configuration also defines the poetics and the choice of epic language, inherited from Brecht, which prioritises the capacity of action in relation to one’s own existence, rather than determinisms, whatever they may be.
The other episode consists of theatre groups As Bacurinhas (Minas Gerais), Mulheres de Buço (Rio de Janeiro) and the As Minas (The Girls, Rio de Janeiro). There is a gender configuration very well established in the research studies on these artistic organisations that has been very well thought out and disclosed by women in these three feminist theatre collectives. The search and affirmation of bodily liberation, the feminine, the expansion, and the ‘unblocking’ of feminist expressions is the centre of research studies by these artists, who call and hold meetings within and for themselves, and the urgency of being subject to their own actions, bodies, and futures. Performativity itself seems to find, in the intersections, fruits and dismemberments that connect and feed each other, at the same time as society as a whole is feeding and being fed.
In the documentary No se Mira Impunemente (One Does Not Look with Impunity), produced by SESC TV at the Mirada (Glance) of 2016, attention is called to life pulsating in this register and also some thoughts about some instances of doing theatre, gathered at that edition of the festival. The diversity of theatrical creations, the search and effectuation of live power are shown there, recorded through images that are very touching thanks to their sheer beauty and for bringing us a recent past moment of life, the search for meeting. Statements by national and foreign artists, and by intellectuals, sew up and have dialogue with excerpts from productions from Brazil and from abroad, thereby providing a brief narrative which allows us to re-experience some of the periods of restlessness and visions as contained in the performances as listed at that edition of the festival. In fact it is very emotional indeed to review this material at the difficult times we now face, after so much loss, so much vacuum, and so many absences. Being able to remember the power of meeting, art, presence and life, is something worth stopping for.
In the episode O Lugar da Diferença (The Place of Difference), from the series De Onde Se Vê (From Where One Can See), I stress the need to consider differences just as what they really are: singularities. There one can find a fight against transmutation of the difference into inequality. At the start of the video, we see a scene with racial overtones, and it is not by chance that this inaugural discourse gains a new meaning for different cases of oppression in part of Latin America and in Europe, specifically Portugal. The etymology of the word theatre, which in Greek translates as ‘a place from where one can see’, now becomes a space for questionings and thoughts about the urgent struggles for affirmation and recognition of differences, against oppression, be it racial, gender-based, class-based, or to do with ethnic origin. The statements made by the artists expand and deepen the content as presented, often intermixed with some performances shown in the 2018, the last edition of the festival before the stoppage due to the pandemic.
Finally, a presentation of the project known as #emcasacomsesc, the performance Traga-me a Cabeça de Lima Barreto (Bring Me Lima Barreto’s Head), with the majestic presence of actor Hilton Cobra, better known as Cobrinha, from the Cia dos Comuns (Company of Commons, Rio de Janeiro). The way in which the dramaturgy, made by Luiz Marfuz, found a motto so that the thoughts and situations brought by a posthumous Lima could land shows very powerful depth and intelligence, something that the direction of Fernanda Júlia Onisajé, of the NATA Group (Bahia), and the performance of Cobrinha, were able to make even more powerful. This is an autopsy so that a eugenist congress can analyse the writer’s brain, to understand how his creations were even possible, even though he would be intellectually inferior according to the standpoint and conception of the White doctors and social scientists of the 19th Century. The imagetic synthesis of a brain full of whelks, with and in a cabaça-cabeça as opele ifá, is so beautiful and so profound that it could even pull out the retinas, with layers of reading that are almost infinite, as deep as the pre-salt layer. Dominique Faislon was very happy in what he did and in the materialisation of this idea and concept. There is a lot of beauty right there...
Jé Oliveira
Social scientist, actor, director and playwright. Jé is also a teacher of theatre and a founder of the Coletivo Negro theatre group.
