February Workshop programme 2012 – a reflection

Aha, just when you’d given up all hope of hearing from me again, here I am, back on the blog… With a little bit of hindsight, I’d like to take the opportunity to reflect on the February programme of workshops at LUME.

So, first things first. How does it all work? I feel it needs a little bit of explanation, as those of us coming from faraway lands don’t necessarily properly grasp how ‘February at LUME’ functions from the information we glean from afar.

For example, I thought – I don’t know why, my own misconception, no one else to blame! – I thought that what happens is that February sees the same group of people staying for the whole LUME workshop season. But no, although there are some who are around town for the whole kaboodle, the more common pattern is that people come for just one workshop, which is usually a six-day or nine-day affair. There is such a strong demand for places on the courses that it is often only possible to allocate one workshop per applicant. There are exceptions, and prospective students coming from very far away who wish to do more than one workshop are usually able to do so.

So over the month of February there are some consistent faces, but there is also a constant interchange as workshops end, students leave Barão Geraldo, and new students arrive in town. Of course, some people are having so much fun anyway that they stay around to hang out (usually at the Kalunga sandwich bar, which seems to become the epicentre of the universe in February) even when their workshop has finished. The Terra LUME programme of performances, seminars and events that runs concurrently with the workshops means that there are events to go to and shows to see, even if your workshop is over. Usually there is also the Feverestival – a kind of Terra LUME offshoot festival – but that didn’t happen in 2012. Hopefully, it will be back on the menu for 2013!

Also to say that if you are reading this and thinking about perhaps going to LUME for the February 2013 workshop season, rest assured that if you are coming from afar and know absolutely no-one, the company will do their very best to make sure you get housed somewhere friendly (although note that this isn’t a residential workshop, so accommodation and food costs have to be considered separately). Barão Geraldo is small and friendly and the residents are very welcoming. Oh and the aforementioned Kalunga sandwich bar is pretty cheap, so you won’t starve…

So now, back to the workshops.

Most are run by one of the seven LUME actors – namely, Ana Cristina Colla, Carlos Simioni, Jesser de Souza, Naomi Silman, Raquel Scotti Hirson, Renato Ferracini, and Ricardo Puccetti – although there are a few guest workshop leaders each year. The 2012 guest teachers were Lina Della Rocca (of Teatro Ridotto in Bologna, Italy) who led a workshop in the first week called In the Passion Labyrinth – an experience of the group Vindenes Bro, in tandem with Carlos Simioni; Jorge Parente and Tiago Porteiro (Portugal) who led a workshop called From Body and Voice to Cinetic Composition; and Clea Wallis and Paul Rous of Dudendance (Scotland), who took their participants This Side of Paradise.

Of the ten or so workshops on offer each February, you most likely do one, or perhaps two. I did three, which was considered pretty hardcore – but I was coming from a very, very long way away (England!) and I was also there on a mission to document and report on the February season, so special dispensation was granted! And I did survive to tell the tale…

Which is not to give the impression that it is easy. The LUME workshops are not for the feint-hearted! You need to come prepared to work. (‘This is not an interval’ became Ricardo’s catch-phrase, as he pushed us relentlessly on each morning of his Street Theatre course.) Also to say that I did my workshops consecutively – I did meet a few people who attempted to do two workshops a day, as each workshop is theoretically running either morning or afternoon. But what with things often running late (‘Brazil time’?) and sometimes not even at the same site as some get programmed elsewhere to LUME’s homebase – and also allowing for the fact that many of the workshops demanded additional research or rehearsal time – this is something I’d really not recommend.

So now, what did I do and how did it go? Let’s start at the very beginning. My first workshop was with Naomi (Silman), the ‘baby’ of the LUME collective. She has been with the company a mere 13 years or so. Hers was a nine-day workshop. From Action to Scene was billed as running 9am till 1pm 1 February to 4 February, and then after a day off on Sunday 5^th, running 1pm to 6pm from 6 to 9 February. ‘Plus extra rehearsal times outside the workshop’ was the small print to be noted! The first few days ran more or less to schedule, although we tended to run over. But there was no day off on Sunday as Naomi felt there was too much work to be done if we were to hit our target of making solo and ensemble public presentations on the last day. And the half-day workshops of the second week became full days as we split into sub-groups to discuss dramaturgy, to work on costume, or to hone our own personal presentations. See what I mean about the timetable?

Often I resist the idea of ‘workshop showings’ as these sometimes seem to switch the emphasis from process to product – but there was no sense of that here. Right through to the very last afternoon, the thorough physical training at the core of the workshop continued. Concurrently, ideas were developed and played with right up until the last day. There was an incentive to create something to be showed to an audience (and let’s face it, without an audience, what is theatre?) but there was no compromising the essential purposes of the workshop: to explore ways in which actions, images, ideas and forms could be worked into viable theatre scenes.

Sometimes this was a case of making ‘instant theatre’ as in twos or threes you are given a selection of props (a hat, a watering can, a bowl) and some written provocations and then thrown onstage in front of your colleagues, no idea what you might actually do once you step out from behind that curtain. Sometimes it was a question of coming back, day after day, to that one tiny image or feeling that you had gleaned from your chosen fairy tale, and working that image or feeling again and again – each new day of training adding the possibilities of further layering onto that ‘figure’.

The final presentations, made at sunset on the last day, 9 February, are documented elsewhere on this blog. See here.

Also running in the beginning of February was Jesser de Souza’s workshop, Technical Training for the Actor. Directed towards ‘actors, dancers and those interested in the practical study of the body’, the workshop offered ‘a general panorama of the daily training developed by LUME’s actors: recognising and dilating the expressive capacities of the body.’ Although not a participant in this workshop, I had the honour of being an observer for one afternoon. Having worked with Jesser very briefly in the previous year (at the DRIFT project in Rio), I knew that his workshop would very likely be pretty demanding physically! On the day I came in, they were in full flow – the group working on a ‘hunter and hunted’ development of the LUME ‘panther’ exercise, in which you need eyes at the back of your head and the stealth of a wild cat to stake your territory or hold your ground.

Crossing over between week one and week two, Renato Ferracini was tackling the Body as Frontier, setting out with his students to explore ‘body’ as an artistic and creative force. Not a body inserted into a fixed context, but the body as an expressive frontier that expands and perforates borders ‘creating a unique space, while at the same time intersecting the theatre/dance/performance relationships’. It was a course that divided into practical and theoretical sessions. The practice-based work came first, with an addition (optional) three days of performance theory to follow. I went to sit in on one afternoon’s practical session, and observed a very deep and intense exercise in which one participant at a time created a movement sequence that was then responded to/commented on by the group, then reworked by the participant, often this time round with provocations from Renato (a chair is added, or a scarf tied round hands, or an instruction given to move more, or less). It felt quite a difficult and intimate session to be witnessing as an outsider and I am grateful to Renato’s group for their tolerance of me as an intruder into this sacred space!

My second workshop came hot-on-the-heels of Naomi’s final presentation. At 9am on the next day (10 February) there I was: ready, eager and waiting for whatever might come next. The Actor in the Street – Part 2 led by Ricardo Puccetti, was aimed at students who had either already taken ‘Part 1’ of this workshop in a previous year, or who were experienced street theatre performers, and it assumed some experience at work in public spaces and knowledge of LUME”s processes.

The key questions at the heart of Ricardo's workshop were: ‘How to cause scenic impact in the street? Which elements from the time and space dynamics of the street can be incorporated into the dramatic event and into the construction of images? What are the possibilities suggested by the actor/public relationship in the street?’ Further to these general considerations on street actions and performances was a stated aim for students to develop individual character works for the street. As someone with a lot of experience in street theatre, but with little knowledge of the native tongue (Brazilian Portuguese), this left me with a rather interesting dilemma. I realised that in a lot of my work in public spaces in the UK, I rely a great deal on spoken word to make contact and engage audiences, and the characters or performance personae that I develop are often quite forthright, cajoling audience and passers-by into the ‘game’ through strong personal contact that relies on spoken language. What could I do without these familiar tools? It is perhaps good to have your usual ‘props’ taken away – to have to go back to square one as a performer and work out what you want to do, what you are capable of doing, and how those two can meet.

So, in one exercise set in Barão Geraldo town centre, I threw myself back to a style of presentation that had once been my preferred modus operandi: slow, ritualistic, movement-based outdoor performance that relies on the creation of sculptural images viewed from a distance rather than obviously interactive performance. I’ll freely admit that this phase of my life was much influenced by the work of Pina Bausch! Thus evolved a piece inspired by the Candomblé Orixás, in which four of us enacted a ritualistic performance based on our chosen Orixá. Mine was Yemanja, mother of the seas (a long-time personal favourite), which gave an opportunity for meditative barefoot walking carrying a large, wide bowl filled with water, the making and sailing of small paper boats, and (as a last minute addition) the soft singing of childish rhymes about the sea into the ears of anyone who would let me.

I was fairly happy with this piece, but it felt a little like I was just falling back onto safe territory. It was stuff that I knew how to do, and just did… The aspect I was most interested in was the last part of the small piece – the intimate singing of these childish songs to passers-by. This felt new and interesting, and I particularly liked the fact that I had found a way to make very direct and personal contact with people using voice, but without feeling that ‘language difficulties’ were getting in the way – and without employing the rather forceful and chatty persona that often finds her way into my current street theatre/public space performance. Songs have a language of their own – the sounds of the words often more important than their semantic meaning. So it was this that got picked up on and developed in our next outing, in which we developed personal characters to be presented in the grounds of the massive and terrifyingly busy Unicamp hospital. I kept with the idea of the little rhymes and songs, and put together a small handbag full of teeny toys (including a wind-up frog and a butterfly on a string) and treasures (the sea shell, of course, silk flowers, coins, chocolates) setting myself up as a kind of instant-fairytale-magic provider.

Working with Ricardo also provided the splendid opportunity to take part in the Trueque, the LUME event that has come to be known as the unofficial opening of ‘Carnaval’. For more on that, see the earlier post on this blog, Carnival Carnaval.

So, whilst I was plying my trade on the streets of Barao Geraldo (now, that reads a little differently to how I’d intended it), back at the Sede do LUME, Ana Cristina Colla was leading her Wind Dance workshop. The Wind Dance uses a repeated rhythmic pattern of steps danced to a three-four time signature, rather like a waltz. The dance was created and developed by the international ensemble Vindenes Bro, under the direction of Iben Nagel Rasmussen of Eugenio Barba’s Odin Teatret. This technique was brought to LUME by founder-member Carlos Simioni, where its principles were worked and transformed to become an integral part of LUME’s actors’ training.

Talking of Carlos Simioni and his work with Iben: also running in ‘week two’ was In the Passion Labyrinth – an experience of the group Vindenes Bro led by Simi and guest teacher Lina Della Rocca, who have both been members of Vindenes Bro for 21 years. In this workshop, tastes of the corporeal and vocal techniques developed within this group over two decades were brought to the table; elements such as ‘the Wind Dance, Samurai, Geisha, Verde, Out of Balance, Lances’ all thrown into the stew. The title ‘In the Passion Labyrinth’ reflected an interest in the ‘tormented existences outside of the rules’ of Caravaggio and Pasolini, with the themes, obsessions and visual imagery from the paintings and films (and indeed lives) of these two artists providing inspiration for the creation of scenes. On the afternoon that I observed the class, I saw a hedonistic mix: tableaux vivants of murder, choral songs of love, a highly stylised funeral cortege, and a great many interpretations of the Geisha and Samurai archetypes! It all amounted to an exploration of a truly ‘total’ theatre – choreography of space and bodies, spoken and sung text, and a very beautiful scenography using a very limited number of carefully-chosen props (a basket of flowers, a terracotta urn, a chair…) and simple but sumptuous costumes of mostly white silk or cotton, with dashes of red and black.

The Wind Dance group and Simi and Lina’s ‘Caravaggio’ group (as they came to be known!) also participated in the aforementioned Trueque on 17 February, which marked not only the start of Carnival but also the finale of the Terra LUME complementary programme of activities.

The final block of workshops started in the week after Carnival, most of them six-day affairs taking us to the end of February. My choice was Raquel Scotti Hirson’s Corporeal Mimesis – a starting point. Corporeal mimesis is a methodology developed by LUME ‘where organic physical/vocal material is collected by means of observation, codification and theatricalisation of physical and vocal actions of people, animals, photographs and paintings found in daily life and/or the actor’s personal life.’ I had had a little taster of this strand of LUME’s work on a weekend workshop with Naomi in the UK in 2011. On that occasion, we had worked with paintings, photographs or images from art books or our own journals – focusing on the human figures in the images, working hard to replicate the position of each part of the body depicted – and more importantly, to really understand the essential spirit of the image. It was work I really enjoyed, and with Raquel, I had the opportunity to further understand and develop the technique.

I also had the chance to use my brand-new sound recording machine, bought for this very workshop! Early one Saturday morning, we were sent off on our own to observe, record, befriend, and photograph at least one member of the Barão Geraldo public. With my limited (OK, extremely limited) knowledge of Brazilian Portuguese, I wondered how I was going to manage this. I first decided that I’d do a kind of compromise that would take some elements of Raquel’s exercise and combine it with a personal desire to document one day’s walk from my house (that is, Simi’s house!) to LUME. So I did just that, recording little snippets of everything I encountered, from the birds in the front garden to the Real Gas van’s Fur Elise theme, to the barking dogs and laughing children. I just about managed to say hello to a few people I met along the way and to ask them to give me a few thoughts about their hometown, which they kindly obliged me with.

Having completed that self-set task, I headed off to the Praça de Coco (where, surprise surprise, half of Ricardo’s class were also to be found). I thought I’d done my task for the day and was just planning on enjoying a fresh coconut juice, and watching how other people went about watching people – but I suddenly found myself carefully watching the waiter who’d served me. On the surface, a straight-forward character – a youngish man, polite and efficient, seemingly confident and looking very slightly bored as he waited for the next customer, exactly as you’d imagine a waiter to be – but little discrepancies in his posture and facial expressions were intriguing me. For example, he was of average height, yet had a slight stoop to his shoulders of the sort that overly tall men have. Did he grow to his full height early in his life and feel awkward about his body? He also had an odd little gesture of flicking a cloth against his leg that intrigued me (a mildly masochistic image!), and every so often his eyes went into a glaze, as if he was dreaming of something far, far away. Without me deciding, he’d become my ‘case study’. I called him over, asked if he was happy to be interviewed (using my tried-and-tested ‘Desculpe-me, eu sou um jornalista Inglês…’ technique – works every time), asked if he would let me take his photograph – and suddenly there was the task, done! And just to add that there were no big revelations, no great life-dramas to relate and work on. It would, in fact, have been so much easier to have picked a big, brash character to caricature – what was offered here was an opportunity to work harder on the nuances of physical expression and the subtleties of difference between this body and my body.

On other days, we found ourselves imitating, exploring, and extracting the essence from buildings, monuments, natural and man-made objects, and more… Eventually all of this work was combined with work on texts that we had brought to the workshop. I’d brought a few different possible texts related to research I was doing for a project about the sea (themes I was working with in both Naomi and Ricardo’s workshops) but the night before we had to share our texts, I found myself reading The Shadow by Hans Christian Andersen, the disturbing story of a shadow who swaps lives with his master – and made a last-minute decision to use this. With Raquel’s guidance, a short extract was chosen and was developed into a ten-minute performance incorporating elements of all the work we’d done so far. So: electricity running through a telegraph pole and bringing it to life, the burning heat of the midday sun, the shortness and darkness of the midday shadow, the determined masculine step of pedestrian depicted on an old postcard, the stylised poise of a lady tango dancer aware of her own beauty, the enlarged sunflower and oddly-poised somnambulist of a painting by Surrealist Dorothea Tanning, that young waiter I’d observed, and the Music Hall song ‘Me and My Shadow’ all meshed with Anderson’s text in the making of this little piece. The point about using material in this way is that of course often the audience is unaware of all the points of reference. It is not that it is important for the observer to know what you are using as your invisible ‘props’. What is important is that you find something within your research that has resonance, that informs and enlightens you as the maker in your process of creation. Yes, I could, at the start of the week, have made a small performance piece based on The Shadow without this research – but I like to think that the questions raised by the research (questions that included reflection on the notion of ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’; on the life-giving power of fire/electricity; on posture and its relationship to status, power and gender; on the balance between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’) made for a deeper physical embodiment of Hans Christian Andersen’s ideas.

Also in this final week of February was a second workshop from Carlos Simioni, The Voice’s Body, which I had the privilege of sitting in on for one afternoon. This workshop took as its starting point the notion of the voice as body. Such necessary ‘voicework’ exercises as activating and developing the muscles that give power to the voice, and exploring the vocal resonators and vibration of the voice, were not seen as somehow disembodied from the other physical actions and movement motifs of the actor, but to be worked on holistically. In one exercise, a series of movements, working ‘top down’ head to feet – from a head-butt movement down to a foot flick, via a chest thrust and a twist of the hips– takes on different impulses and qualities as it is actioned in different ways: with full force and a jump off the ground; with restrained force; with a slight, hardly visible, impulse; with just the mere intention. Later, voice is brought consciously into the equation. An exploration of the resonators of each section of the body (belly, chest, throat, back-of-the-neck, nasal cavity, and more) gives rise to some beautiful spontaneous choral work, and I find myself surrounded by the sounds of what seems to be an evolving crowd of liturgy-reciting Medieval priests, Mongolian throat singers, plaintive angels, bleating goats, and gossiping villagers. It was interesting to me to notice just how tempting it is to create narrative from what you perceive to be the meaning of a certain timbre of sound. If a picture tells a thousand words, a song tells ten thousand.

This might perhaps be the moment in which to note that the particular style of voicework that is the LUME way – the integration into physical action, the love of popular and folk songs from across the world, the belief in the power of the song chorus, often acapella – that is perhaps one of the most distinctive elements of LUME’s performance and teaching work. And all the workshops that I took part in or observed used song as an integral part of the practice.

So now, back in England and back into the hurly-burly of making my own theatre work, I can reflect on how the LUME February workshops were for me, and start to see the enormous value they have as professional development.

The first observation is to say that having this time away from home, divorced from the usual pressures of making professional theatre/performance work (having to work to a fixed timetable, the time punctuated by the demands of administration, teaching etc; pleasing one’s colleagues if you are part of an ensemble; satisfying the demands of funders and bookers), not to mention the demands of home (mother of three sons, need I say more?), is such a gift – a truly wonderful gift.

I also really valued being thrown into the situation of working alongside people at all stages of professional experience – from newly-graduated twenty-somethings just starting out on their careers as actor-creators, to part-time performers who normally spend most of their time doing other work, to seasoned actors from all over Brazil (and sometimes elsewhere). This melting-pot of ages and cultures and experiences amongst workshop participants makes for a dynamic mix of ideas and ways of working – often throwing up ways and means different to the ones you are used to, which can only be a good thing. If you are of a certain age, and have worked with the same people for a long time, you can fall into habits (not ‘good’ or ‘bad’ habits – just habits) and it is great to have those habits shaken by the tail.

Although the workshops are there to be a respite from daily life as a theatre-maker, a breathing space, it is also satisfying if there is some continuation of work started at LUME. In my case, there have already been clear examples of continuity into work ‘back home’. The Little Mermaid, developed with Naomi, has already found her way (albeit as a disembodied voice!) into a piece called Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter, being made for the Brighton Festival Fringe, May 2012. Relationships developed with some of Ricardo’s street theatre group are being nurtured with the intention of future work – and a possible involvement in a show I am bringing to Rio in June (called, oddly enough, Flying Down to Rio!). And as for all those on-site Barão Geraldo recordings made for Raquel’s workshop – well, I have plans! Ideas are bubbling under, ready to spring up sometime soon…

Watch this space!

Trueque! Ricardo's Street Theatre Group in Besame Mucho mode

Tout Bouge

Time never stands still, this much we know. Whatever is our current reality – pain, pleasure, joy, suffering, indifference, frustration – we know that it will pass. ‘Tout bouge’ as Jacques Lecoq would have it. Everything changes, flux is the status quo.

Which is all a rather flowery overture to me saying that today is my last day in Barão Geraldo, and so this the last blog ‘diary’ entry – although I will continue to use this space to post up documentation and reflection on the wonderful month of February in the company of LUME Teatro.

As I sit here in the morning sunshine, in the garden of my delightful and generous host Carlos Simioni, I am thinking now of all the small changes that have occurred in the past month, reminders that the flow of life moves relentlessly forward.

It was the pre-carnival height of summer when I arrived, and now there is a sense of autumn in the air. Not autumn in anything like the English sense – no cold nights and misty mornings – but most definitely a season of mellow fruitfulness. Recent storms have brought down great flurries of leaves, brushed into neat piles by the street cleaners. Brazil summertime ended last week with the clocks turning back one hour, meaning that it is now dark before 7pm. No more twilight garden parties, candlelight is needed now.

There is also a post-carnival mood of determined purpose as people return to work; school and university students return to their studies; and new theatre projects are launched or developed – at LUME Teatro, the February workshop season has finished and the whole company are, this very morning, meeting to discuss the plans for the new show Os Bem Intencionades, which is now going into a two-month intensive rehearsal and production period, with a premiere planned for June.

Meanwhile life in Barão Geraldo goes on, subtly shifting and changing with each passing day. It seems like a long time since I took that first walk from Simi’s house to the Sede do Lume. On my last morning walk, I mark the differences. The lovely blue-and-green bird grafitti on the wall of the house at the bottom of Rua Abel Jose Bonhomi has been whitewashed over – probably because the house is for rent. I mourn the loss of the painted birds, who now live only in my memory and as an image on my mobile phone, although on the wall you can almost see their outline through the whitewash – ghost birds. And the geese – where are the geese in the little park by the lake on the farm road? They seem to have disappeared; maybe they’ve moved home. In their place yesterday was a flock of pigeons, so maybe the geese have morphed into this new form. And here are no more of the luscious fire-flecked orange flowers falling from the trees – I never did learn their name. And I haven’t seen a fallen avocado for at least a week.

I see many of the same people that I have seen most days on my morning walk over the past month – but over that time my relationship to them has changed, sometimes overtly, sometimes in more subtle ways. The man walking the twin Labrador dogs (one black, one golden) now nods to me, although he still doesn’t speak. The dapper man with the pork-pie hat and the stiff little moustache says Bom Dia in a surprisingly deep and booming voice. The jogger smiles as she rushes by. The woman with the Sysyphean task of sweeping the leaves from outside her gate greets me loudly like a lifelong friend. Her dogs are ever-more determined to drown out her voice. Many of the other dogs have given up on me now – I am no longer fresh meat and they just eye me slightly disdainfully rather than bark madly, although this is not true of them all. There are a couple of houses with particularly insane small dogs – daschunds, terriers – that still have something to prove. “I may be small,” they seem to say, “But I will damn well do my duty as guard dog here.”

The house by the bus stop that seems to be some sort of informal garage – either that or the owner is a car obsessive who has decided to dedicate his days to tinkering with engines – still plays the local commercial radio station at full volume. Perhaps he feels he has a care-of-duty to entertain the passengers waiting for the ‘onibus’. At the place I have dubbed ‘The House of Men’– a corner building inhabited by a group of at least twenty men who are obviously on some sort of manual labour contract – there are gruff nods and even the odd half-smile as I pass. I am no longer quite the novelty I was in late January when I arrived, just part of the Barão Geraldo landscape.

Oh and the man in the Real Gas truck seems to have taken me to heart as an ally – I quite often pass him (or more accurately, he passes me in his slow-moving truck) at least twice on any one journey to LUME, as he circles the streets with his distinctive Fur Elise calling-card. He not only says hello, but leans from the window of the truck grinning and waving at me. I feel that all of these people are part of my wider circle of Barão Geraldo friends, and I shall miss them all.

Closer into the centre of that circle are the many artists, theatre-makers and other people that I have met at the LUME workshops, or at carnival events, or at theatre or music shows, or in bars or restaurants – sharing experiences together (be that theatre training, dancing, eating or drinking!), learning something of their lives and work (often through action rather than word), and feeling a lovely sense of connection.

And then, right at the heart of the circle are my beautiful friends from LUME Teatro – actors Naomi, Ricardo, Renato, Raquel, Jesser, Ana Cristina, and Simi; producers Dani and Cynthia and production assistant Margarida; PR and press officer Carlota; technician Maria Emilia; documenter and designers Poeta and Luiz; 'Barba' and all the administrative staff.

To LUME I offer a very big thank-you for your hospitality, love and support – and for being such an extraordinary inspiration as an ensemble theatre company operating as one great big wonderful extended family. I have very much enjoyed being part of that family for one short month.

It is sad to leave my Barão Geraldo and LUME extended family, but I leave with a wonderful gift – my head, heart and soul full of ideas and inspirations, and many many happy memories of my time with you all.

Carnival Carnaval!

Carnival! Or, should I say – Carnaval!

Well, it has been and it has gone. Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent. Forty days in the desert, sackcloth and ashes etc etc.

And you heard nothing from me during said Carnaval days not only because I was without Internet access, but also because – to paraphrase the old cliché about the 1960s – if you were there, you were too busy doing to remember or record it…

But record I must, so I now lay down my net frock, fascinator and feathered mask and take up my pen (or keyboard at least) to try and make some sense of the past five days of madcap musical activity.

It was when I was with Naomi at the Praça de Coco on Sunday– we were there ‘en famille’ for some low-key afternoon carnival activity in the form of a band of drummers, dancers and pipers playing music from Recife – that we were reflecting (as outsiders, both being English) on the fact that for Brazilians, music and dance are the most prominent form of artistic expression. Naomi mentioned that when she had travelled to Mexico she was struck by just how visual a culture was to be found there – the place being like one giant visual artwork.

Brazil in general – and ‘carnaval’ in particular – of course has its visual motifs. See, for example, the extraordinary animations and constructions of the samba school parades in Rio. Although I’ll say here that when I was in Rio for Carnaval 2011, I didn’t see any of the carnival displays that are beamed to TV sets across the world. That carnival is hidden away in the Sambodromo, a massive stadium where tickets costing a fortune are sold months in advance to visiting tourists, or ringfenced for corporate hospitality. There is a sense of cynicism amongst Cariocas I know about the invisibility of this famous display, the majority of the people of the city excluded from its most famous cultural activity…

Where they and other Brazilians throughout the country have their carnival experience is in the street ‘blocas’. And yes, there is of course a visual element in the costume of the samba bands and accompanying dancers or walkabout characters, and in the fancy dress of every conceivable type on display in these street events – vis, the sequinned hot-pants, Harem pants, blue nylon wigs, angel wings, devil horns, halos, funky shades, Hawaiian leis – but the essential element of the experience is the music and the dance. And true to the origins of carnival, the street bloca is a collective experience in which there are no onlookers, all are participants to a greater or lesser extent, and in which the roles of ‘performers’ and ‘non performers’ merge and cross.

So let me give you some idea of how these work. A carnival bloco is scheduled to start at, say, 6pm. Should you turn up at the designated starting point at 6pm, what you will find is a truck with a sound system playing some recorded music, and a bunch of musicians ambling about, chatting to colleagues, drinking beer, trying on band t-shirts, changing strings on their cavaquinhos or guitars, tightening up the skins of their snares – or whatever. There will be some small children in fairy wings or Superman outfits running round and through their legs, and a spattering of other people lounging around smoking and drinking. A police car will be blocking the road to traffic, and a few policemen will be leaning against it, arms folded, bored expressions on their faces.

At some point a while later – maybe an hour, maybe more – the band will have taken up their cortege formation – cowbells and tamba and bass drums and snares, with the stringed instruments to the rear, a snake-nest tangle of leads trailing from the PA truck and plugged in to the pick-ups on the instruments. There will be a few low-key guitar-and-voice based songs (mostly as a sort of rehearse-in-public soundcheck, I suspect), but then we see the band leader go round and shake everyone’s hand or hug them intensely, so we know something is about to shift.

And suddenly there is a great surge of energy, as following the whistle blow and fingers-in-the-air countdown from the bandleader, the batteria thunders into action, and the ever-growing crowd starts dancing. But we are still, as yet, in our starting spot, no forward movement. Usually there are a fair few tunes played at the starting site, and these attract more and more people in – the first things played are often popular songs that everyone knows the words to, or perhaps songs newly-written for this year, with helpers passing round sheets of paper with the words on.

Once the band are fully in their stride and the unifying first few songs have been sung, the whole cortege starts to move forward along its designated route. Which may well be a mere mile or so, but it’ll take us five or six or more hours to do that route, in a kind of ‘two steps forward, one step back’ pattern of progressing and stopping.

Along with musicians and accompanying crowd – some dancing wildly, some kind of edging along in what we might call the ‘carnival two-step shuffle’ – will be a whole army of drinks sellers, their beers and water and energy drinks (and in some cases, spirits and cocktails too!) housed in a variety of ways, from the simple polystyrene ice-box carried on the shoulder, to the shopping trolley filled with cans, to the rather more sophisticated fridge trolley and umbrella contraptions. Sometimes these get caught in a kind of bottle-neck, and have to edge their way to the side of the crowd.

There’s all sorts of unwritten rules about the blocos. If you are right in front of the band, then it is customary to dance backwards, so you are kind of paving the way for them rather than holding them up, as you might do if you had your back to them. This way, the band (and any ‘official’ dancers or flag bearers the band carries with them) can set the pace of the forward movement rather than the crowd setting it – although it is always a give-and-take situation. This front row of backward-facing dancers often hold hands and get into little patterns of forward and back runs or grapevine-like side steps weaving from left to right, as well as the legendary faster-than-the speed-of-light on the spot footwork the street samba dancer is renowned for!

If you stay right in the thick of things you really need to keep dancing and go with the flow – although I did, at one bloco, see a very tall man with a child on his shoulders stand resolutely still right next to the band, people weaving around and past him as if he were some sort of civic statue or sculpture to be negotiated.

If you feel that your energy is flagging, then you can ease your way out to the edges and take a break, walking slowly alongside for a while, or even just watching the parade go by, then working your way back upfront, should you so wish, once your energy returns. These slower and calmer edges are where much of the meeting and greeting goes on. In a place the size of Barão Geraldo, everyone at any event will know a great deal of other people there. What I found most amusing and lovely was the excitement with which people greeted others whom they had seen a mere 24 hours earlier – hugging and kissing each other as if they were long-lost brothers returned from a great sea journey lasting many years…

In Rio, I experienced blocos day and night – a complete carnival immersion, with little chance of escape. Barão Geraldo is a lot different, with one main bloco each carnival day, which lasts a good long spell of up to eight hours, and a number of smaller events (such as the lovely Sunday afternoon in Praça de Coco mentioned earlier). I went to two of the big blocos. Saturday evening’s event was led by the extraordinary and redoubtable Altaneira, who played for an astonishing and truly marvellous eight hours without a break, cleverly shifting rhythms and speeds to accommodate traditional carnival samba song, hardcore percussion-led battatuque, axe style music from Bahia, sinuous African rhythms – and a whole host of other things I couldn’t name but loved.

Monday evening saw the turn of Cupinzeiro, who had a slightly more laid-back and melodic style, and who paced their bloca in a different way. Rather than the relentless build of Saturday’s event, in which Altaneira never stopped playing, but found ways within their eight-hour set to give some musicians a short break, for example by having a number of vocal-and guitar based tunes as an interlude for the percussionists – Cupinzeiro’s event scheduled stops along the way, where the whole band came to rest for a while, and everyone had the opportunity to sample the delights of the downtown ‘portaloos’. Not the grandest of toilet facilities, but a step up perhaps from the alternative option, which is behind the trees in the parks alongside Avenida Santa Isabella. There are stories to tell on that front, but you are not going to hear them from me here…

Both these two blocos start early evening, and there is a family-friendly feel for the first few hours, the children weaving in and out of the crowd of dancers or excitedly poking at the sculptural decorations that were wheeled along the streets at the head of the cortege (the Alterneira event on Saturday had some sort of evolutionary theme, and featured models of space rockets, dinosaurs and a rather fetching monkey writing the works of Shakespeare on a word-processor!). But as the night progresses, it gets a little more adult and earthy, as more and more people join the throng, and more and more drink is drunk. Yet despite the high volume of alcohol being consumed, I didn’t see one moment of bad humour from anyone.

I should also mention here that apart from the street events there are also, of course, special carnival bills at the usual live music venues, such as Casa São Jorge and Bar do Jair, for those who prefer a more sedate carnival experience. For some people it is enough to party in their gardens with friends. Carnival is different things for different people.

For LUME and friends, the big event is the Saida do Cortejo Trueque that ends the Terra Lume season of participatory events. It is held from 5pm on the Friday that kicks off carnival – and although the official carnival start is the big late-night bloca of that evening, the Trueque is viewed by many in the town as the unofficial start of carnival.

Directed by Ricardo Puccetti, and using students from his Street Theatre course – as well as the LUME actor/dancers, friends and associates, groups from other LUME courses, and members of other theatre companies – the Trueque is something rather more than a carnival cortege, although built around that principle, integrating street theatre action into the carnival model.

The Trueque starts in the regular carnival way, with a samba band at the heart of the cortege (Cupinzeiro are the band in question). The cortege is made up of the performing groups, each in their own block, with ‘audience’ walking alongside them as they progress. There are also numerous floating elements: costumed bearers of colourful wind-socks; winged LUME company members who dart and weave around the cortege, helping to move people on or stop them as needed; and a group of blue-cloth waving dancers who fly like birds around and through the groups and, when needed, create a human wall designating the various allocated performance spaces along the route.

The theme of this year’s Trueque was The End of the World (cheerful, no?). As one of the participants in Ricardo’s Street Theatre course, I’m involved in the Trueque anyway, but invited also to contribute some ideas and simple choreography for a ballroom dance scene. We decide on a Rumba Bolero to Besame Mucho, and although originally plan to work with dancers from outside of the LUME groups, in the end Ricardo decides that it makes most sense to use the existing Street Theatre course group. As we are also committed to making another piece, which means participants in his course have two Trueque pieces to be slotted into the afternoon’s parade.

The Besame Mucho piece has a ‘salon’ style bolero dance as its centrepiece, choreographed with the thought of it being the last dance as the world ends, the performers changing partners throughout the dance and bidding each other desperate farewells. Before the dance is a movement sequence that uses ‘flockings’ from one formation shape to another – from arrows to lines, lines to circles – and the dance dissolves into a butoh-esque crumbling to dust, and a resurrection into a Pina Bausch-inspired forward-moving formation of tiny syncopated steps, with still upper halves, glassy eyes, and rolling hips.

Immediately before our elegantly clad ballroom dance group in the cortege is Naomi’s team of fan dancers – usually, I am told, they dress in white, but this year, in honour of the End of the World theme, they are all in black as The Widows of the World, their pitch-black lace and net offset by dashes of bloody red. Theirs is an elegant choreography of swoops and flutters and melancholy sweeps of feathery fans, as like a flock of witches turned to birds they create an ever-morphing series of group shapes – walls and spirals and blocks – then suddenly dispersing to fly through and around other groups.

Elsewhere in the parade come scenes, set amongst the trees, of Arcadian delights that turn to passion, death and (inevitably) a sorrowful funeral line – ‘tableaux vivants’ with song, inspired by and created in homage to the paintings of Caravaggio. These short interlinked scenes are enacted by students from the No Labrinto da Paixão |In the Labyrinths of Passion course run by Simi and Lina (Carlos Simioni of LUME and Lina della Rocca of Teatro Ridotto in Italy). They make a very pretty picture, in white muslin and cream silk, offset by dashes of red and black – and they give us rousing and full-throated versions of such Latin classics as Gaudete, as well as some very nimble dancing.

There is also a delightful display of the Wind Dance, enacted with rhythmic zest and gusto by the students on Ana Cristina Colla’s workshop dedicated to this lovely movement work – the Wind Dance being based on the three-four waltz time signature, and very similar to waltz in many ways, with a strong relationship with the ground on the downbeat ‘one, but danced with a strong spring into the air on the second and third beats, giving it an almost lamb-like gambolling feel.

In a completely different tone, there were some delightful interventions along the way from esteemed clown Lily Curcio (Seres de Luz Teatro) – who I discover later is a friend and erstwhile colleague of Angela de Castro, another wonderful Brazilian woman clown, who lives mostly in the England, and is very well known on the UK’s physical theatre, circus and clown scene…

Other contributions I missed, as after the Wind Dance, as with Ricardo’s group I got whisked away ahead of the crowd by the blue-cloth-waving dancers – taken off to have time to prepare for our final scene, which would also be the last theatrical intervention of the Trueque. This piece being a very different interpretation of the End of the World theme to our salon dance scene!

In a style that for me had strong resonances with some aspects of Augusto Boal’s Forum Theatre and Newspaper Theatre work, the group (under Ricardo’s direction) used information gleaned from news reports and photojournalism on the web and in magazines to devise a response to an appalling incident that had happened in the Sao Paulo region a month or so past. In Pinheirinho, a shanty-town (favela) community had been ordered to leave their makeshift homes, and had resisted. The police had then stormed in, attacking the community and destroying the homes. Seven people lost their lives in the incident and many hundreds were displaced. One of the most disturbing aspects of the incident – and almost as much of a scandal as the horrifying invasion itself – was that it wasn’t initially reported on mainstream news media, it was only through web reports and magazine features did the story start to emerge.

For our street piece, we split into two groups. Roughly half of us represented the Pinheirinho community, carrying our cardboard box homes on our backs, seeking out a space to settle, singing as we travelled the road. The other half of the group were the police invaders – arriving with loud rhythmically stamping to round us up (literally, with a rope) – although not before a stylised battle enacted as a tug-of-war with the rope and a clownish intervention from two of the actors, playing Money-grabbing Landlord and Government Official as two merry buffoons. The piece ends with a nod towards Brechtian techniques with a dissolve into a song celebrating the end of the world – and as the samba band picks up on the chant ‘dance on for the world is ending’, we lead the cortege off to the park which is to be the site for the final flurry of music and dance.

Taking part in the creation and enacting of this piece is a good reminder that ‘street theatre’ has always been a strongly political form: from Commedia del Arte to Punchinello; from Punch & Judy to the post-Stonewall Gay Liberation Front street actions; from the Bread and Puppet Theater to Boal’s Invisible Theatre – across the globe over many centuries the ‘non-legitimate’ theatre of the streets has been the place to re-tell hidden news stories, lambaste and mock politicians and government officials, and to spread the message that the ‘personal’ and the ‘political’ are forever intertwined, and that liberation from oppression – be that oppression on the grounds of gender, sexuality, race or social class – can be fought for with song and dance and humour.

From Action to Scene

Now that the Terra Lume programme has finished and the February workshop season is coming to an end, I will be using this space to post documentation and reflection on many of the events I participated in, or witnessed, over this past glorious month.

First up is From Action to Scene, which was the title of the nine-day workshop led by Naomi Silman at LUME, 1 - 9 February 2012. On the evening of the ninth, there was an open invitation to participants in other workshops and residents of Barao Geraldo to come to an end-of-the-course showing of work, documented here in images.

The first part of the evening saw a serious of solo pieces set in and around the buildings and gardens of Sede do LUME, each piece inspired by a fairy tale character, developed from stories brought to the workshop by participants. We thus saw LUME awash with petulant princesses, sanguine storytellers, and bewitched beasts. Audience members were led astray by a world-weary Pied Piper of Hamelin, seduced by a masochistic mermaid, and bedazzled by a wild man of the woods. Weaving through this LUME Wonderland was a very skittish Alice, who eventually led the audience into the Banqueting Room, where they encountered not only the to-be-expected Mad Hatter and a Dormouse (well, lots of dormice actually, very drunk ones they were too) but also lots of surprise guests at the tea party, as a whole host of fantasmagorical characters enacted their strange rituals amongst and around the audience.

For those of us taking part, the evening was an opportunity both to show off some of our individual work, and to showcase some of the ensemble techniques that grew from the training.

The solo fairy tale characters were inspired by the texts we chose to bring to the workshop, but each of us found that our delivery of our texts and images were informed and moulded by the daily workshop material. As a personal example, the text I had chose came from The Little Mermaid. On Naomi s instruction, a long section of text and action was reduced to three key moments: first, the Mermaid s desire to be human and her willingness to suffer for her heart s desire; second, the taking of the potion that would enact the desired change and the terrible painful consequence as her tail rips open into two legs; and third, her arrival at the ball in the Prince s castle where they meet, yet he is unable to see her as a potential lover.

Having, in an earlier workshop, worked on the development of human-animal hybrids, Naomi suggested that I play the Mermaid with that energy - so my presentation became the story of Little Mermaid, as played by an adoelscent cat!

Other of the training exercises that we had used made their way into the presentation: our chest-thrusting stacatto-actioned Torero poses were used as a short ensemble transition moment, as was a nebulous slow walk to the song Row Row Row your Boat...

The Banquet scene was an opportunity for many of the improvisations that emerged from the workshop to be built into one mad-cap mellee using a variety of techniques. from the first Tableaux Vivant of characters pursuing surreal individual actions with an odd-bod assortment of objects (umbrellas, tea pots, lanterns, hats, toy guns, fruit crates) - which the audience encountered in action as they entered the space, set in the round - to the last nonsense-language song and dance, via a percussive laying of the table, a nightmarish Riddle guessing game, and an interactive band of banditos doing dirty deals with the magic potion...

What was really astonishing was the level of complicity developed between the performers in just nine short days -all down to the tough love and tender nurturing from Naomi in what was a very intense but highly satisfying workshop experience.

Street Life

It s dangerous on the streets of Brazil, I can report. Take my daily walk to the Sede do LUME along the road that skirts the old farm - it s fraught with dangers. There are the geese, for a start. It s their territory, and they will defend it, honking furiously. One morning I saw a showdown between the geese and the RealGas truck: both stood their ground, wild honking versus the endless electronic rendering of Fur Elise. Really, it s too much at 8 o clock in the morning. A little further along the road is the avocado tree. Beware of falling avocados, they are pretty heavy things. Then there s the jogger in the blue tracksuit - she s very determined, and you could easily get mowed down if you stepped into her path. Oh, and the man with the machete - he s pretty terrifying, although he is only cutting back the undergrowth, nothing to worry about. On some days, there are the garbage collectors to avoid. Unlike dustbin men in England, who are a pretty slow breed generally, the Brazilian rubbish collectors treat their job as a kind of competitive sport. Dressed in blue and orange T-shirts, shorts and knee-high footballer socks (I kid you not), they leap from their speeding van to each side of the street and race each other back to the cart with their booty. Of course, the driver doesn t slow down for them, and they leap back on, hanging on for dear life and hollering loudly. Oh and the dogs. You know about the dogs... apparently people have them for security, but as they bark continuously day and night, how would anyone know if there was an intruder? I hear that there used to be a lot of burglaries in the neighbourhood, hence the dogs, although no-one is quite sure if there are many nowadays. I did hear one story of someone whose children were disturbed by some men in masks - but this being Barao Geraldo, the children just assumed they were witnessing yet another clown show...

The fact that I know this road so well, and others in Barao Geraldo so little, tells a tale in itself. I walk to LUME, I spend the day in workshops, then in the evenings I get whisked away to symposiums or lecture-demonstrations or shows, getting a glimpse of other streets from the back of a speeding taxi. Bizarrely, the only time I seem to go to centre - a park square surrounded by banks, restaurants, cafes, and newspaper kiosks - is when I m performing in the streets. I get brought there in a car, I step out, I perform my solo or group actions in character, I leave. It s an odd relationship with the place and people! Some day soon I ll take a stroll to the bank just to see how it feels to be standing outside it in regular clothes, behaving normally (well, as normally as I can manage anyway) rather than dressed in net skirts singing sea shanties and nursery rhymes, or invoking the spirit of Yemanja and floating paper boats in puddles.

My first such outing was with Naomi Silman - although her course wasn t specifically about street theatre, she felt it would be good for us to try our figures on the streets... hence a gang of fairy tale princesses, mermaids, and matadors descending on the town centre. So now that Naomi s course has finished (and watch this space for a report soon on the ending!), I ve moved onto Ricardo Puccetti s Street Theatre workshop. We ve been taken for a couple of outings to the town centre - this time, instead of making solo figures, we worked in groups of three or four. My group explored the Condomble Orixas (hence my manifestation as the watery Yemanja, the mother goddess, patron of the sea and of sailors). In our post-outing discussion, our group reflected on some of the key issues in street theatre: making an entrance, taking and holding the space, maintaining an onstage attitude throughout, transforming both the environment and yourself, seducing the audience into the action through either direct or indirect means, being adaptable and ready to change what you are doing in response to the environment, taking calculated risks, staying in constant relation with the audience, and - most important - really believeing in what you are doing!

On Tuesday last (14 February), Ricardo decided to take us somehere different - to the Unicamp university hospital, apparently the biggest hospital in the Sao Paulo region, a place that sees a heaving mass of humanity coming and going in buses, cars, and ambulances to the warren of buildings on the campus - clinics of every sort, accident & emergency departments, Brazil s most renowned specialist plastic surgery unit for burns victims, and consultancies for every possible chronic disorder imaginable. It seems a daunting proposition, but in reality it turns out to be one of the nicest environments to create theatre in a public space, as here is an audience that is, for the most part, really receptive and engaged in what is being offered. Some of the provocations offered included: a fortune teller, who was particularly popular with the hospital cleaning ladies, especially as she promised them all good fortune to come; a near-naked man in search of a shower, singing loudly as he scrubbed, provoking a lot of giggles from passing nurses; a patient on a strike against disease who rallied the real patients waiting for the home buses with great aplomb; a soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder who garnered sympathy from the old ladies; and a purveyor of tiny toys and rhymes (me!) who had a lot of fun with the children in the cafeteria and at the bus stops, with the help of a wind-up frog, a sea-shell, a silk flower, and some merry ditties...

Cowboy Country

Well, I didn’t expect to come across cowboys in Brazil. Shows how much I know. On my first weekend here in Barão Geraldo, I found myself invited to a birthday celebration at the Casa São Jorge – a jumping joint downtown on the main drag, as our American friends would have it. I was expecting Samba – well you would, wouldn’t you? But no, it was Country & Western, Brazilian style. A very odd hybrid of maudlin waltzes and polkas and electro-country pop. Special guests were a cowboy-hat-clad entourage of ‘dancers’. I use the term loosely. At various points in the evening, three or more generations of the family group on the top table sheepishly (or perhaps bullishly) shuffled into position – two lines facing each other – for a few choruses of a clapping and tapping song that someone explained to me was representing the hoof movements of the cattle… Apparently they come from the countryside west of São Paulo. Or perhaps from the next state along, Minas Gerais. No-one could be completely sure. But given that beef is big in Brazil, ergo there are a lot of cows – and someone has to take care of them, I suppose.

So the following Tuesday, I’m invited to the Bar do Jair. Mine host Simi explains that this was once a tiny bar – right next to LUME’s first home in the church hall – but it has grown and grown over the years, and is now a fashionable bar and restaurant that people drive out from Campinas city centre to visit. It’s certainly got quite a very different vibe to the Espaço dos Amigos (see earlier blog). No yellow plastic chairs here: it’s all tasteful wood and tiles. The extensive circular bar services an enormous number of tables in interconnecting rooms. The bars are decorated with busts (and really, this is the only word) of smiling ladies from different regions of Brazil, the colourful statuettes set into the bar top. There are also great swathes of cloth hung across the ceilings – those lovely fabrics typical of Brazil, in deep earthy reds patterned with yellow and white flowers, or rainforest greens printed with turquoise and red parrots.

They serve Caipirinhas (city style – with a choice of liqueur bases, and all the fruit and ice trimmings) and are famous for their Coxinhas (which English readers of this blog can imagine as a kind of posh version of the Scotch Egg) and their Escondinhos (which English readers can imagine as a variation on the Shepherd’s Pie idea, although rather a lot spicier). Inevitably, there is live music. But is it Samba? No, not on Tuesdays – it’s cowboy country today, featuring two gents styled under the title Moda de Viola, wearing the inevitable Stetson hats, and plucking away at the Viola de Gamba and Brazilian Guitarra. Actually, they are very good – and certainly know how to keep the crowd happy, playing tunes the names of which I do not know, but which everyone else in the bar is obviously familiar with. Should you wish to make music of your own, there is a ship’s bell hanging from a rope in the bar that clients can take a swing on whenever the need takes them.

Two days later – Thursday 2 February – it’s music of a more refined kind over at SESC (the Campinas arts and sport centre). We’re here for a concert by Carcoarco, an ensemble of four, one of whom is a percussionist (playing a basic drum kit embellished with tamba, bells, rain-makers, xylophones and more), with the other three playing stringed things of all sorts – violins, violas, violin-cellos, guitars of many sorts, and all sorts of variations on the ‘rabeca’ (an instrument that probably originated in the Middle East or North Africa, finding its way to Brazil many centuries ago). And masters of their instruments this quartet certainly are…

The music is a hybrid of contemporary and traditional forms – a touch of Samba or Tango here, a jazz improvisation there – and self-penned numbers, such as the rather wonderful Tem Carrego? by percussionist ‘Magrão’ Roberto Peres, this a whimsical composition that gives him the opportunity to whip out his bird whistle mid-way through the tune… I also enjoy the group’s Tico Tango No Fuba, a variation on the theme of Tico Tico, composed by Esdras Rodrigues, and made famous worldwide by the magnificent Carmen Miranda. I’m less taken with the variations on JS Bach (too much of a hybrid jazz cliché), and find the lengthy chats inbetween numbers a little wearying – although of course my limited understanding of the language didn’t help. But quite a few of the Brazilians present got a little swamped by detail too. That said, I know some people who would be very interested in the detailed explanations of types of wood, thicknesses of strings, and tunings! In fact, when my concentration drifted, I’d find myself looking up at the array of instruments strung from the ceiling and thinking that it looked a lot like my front room at home up there…

The following night, the music is provided by the natural world in a sunset walk through the old farm of Barão Geraldo – which companion Simi describes rather charmingly as ‘the hotel for horses’. At this time of day, the horses are stabled, but we can hear them whinnying behind closed doors. As for the rest of the live soundscape, it’s a pretty heady mix of clicking crickets, barking frogs, hooting owls, and honking geese – accompanied by the gentle rush of water from the stream that feeds the lake, and the rustle of birds in the trees. And what trees! Tropical and ‘cross-Atlantic’ varieties jostle for space – young trees and old trees alike. My favourites are the ‘Butoh’ tree with its dislocated limbs extended to the sky, and the enormous ‘old man’ tree, bent double with the weight of the years.

Later on Friday evening, it’s back to the Sede do LUME for the 11pm showing of A Beira do Nada, directed by Claiton Manfro and performed by Eduardo Aranbula, with an eclectic soundtrack that includes tracks from Tom Waits and Radiohead, found sound, and Japanese Koto. It’s something of a tour de force, taking the form of twenty short pieces on a connected theme – a study of the effects of dementia and the physical manifestations of learning disabilities. In each of the twenty vignettes a character (or ‘figure’ to use the LUME vernacular) is presented as an abstracted observation, judgement free. It’s often uncomfortable viewing, raising questions about the morality of the portrayal of so-called ‘vulnerable adults’. But although it sometimes provokes discomfort, I have every confidence that the director and performer are engaged in a project driven by love and respect, not mockery.

Eduardo Aranbula has a very strong stage presence, and delivers the work with physical prowess and an admirable care and attention to detail. I particularly enjoy two scenes that feature a pair of highly polished black patent shoes. In the first, the shoes are handled with almost fetishistic desire. The second circles round the desire to wear the shoes vying with the worry of putting dirty feet into such lovely new footwear – resulting in a painfully, poignantly funny repeated ritual of trouser removal, foot washing, shoe donning, and attempts to get trousers back on whilst wearing the shoes – then taking the shoes off, but dirtying the feet in the process of putting the trousers on, this setting up another desperate cycle of foot washing etc…

The piece ends with an empty stage, save for a tiny music-box figure, turning to the tune of Für Elise. A song I am very fond of, although it must be said that one can tire of it in Barão Geraldo as it is the jingle for what I took, on my first day, to be an ice-cream van (Brazilian friends: yes, in my country we encourage small children to run into the streets to buy candy from strange men in vans), but which turned out to be the ‘Real Gas’ truck which tours the streets day and night.

All together now: La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-laaaa la-la-la-laaa la-la-la-laaa…

Animal Magic

It’s a strange thing, taking workshops in a language that is not your own. When I arrived here a week ago I had maybe two dozen words in Portuguese – mostly useless words not used in Brazil (I have never, ever heard anyone say ‘adeus’ but that’s how the dictionary translates ‘goodbye’). Either that or words pronounced completely differently to the versions on my ‘Learn to speak Portuguese in just 60 minutes!’ CD. I could just about manage to say ‘olá’ and ‘tchau’ and ‘obrigada’ without making a fool of myself, but that was about it.

But after just three days with Naomi Silman on her February workshop at LUME, my vocabulary has extended considerably. I’m quite good on body parts, for example. I know pé (foot), joelho (knee), quadril (hip), ombro (shoulder), peito (chest), braços (arms), and cabeça (head). These crop up a lot – the methodical working through of body parts and the play on certain correlations between body part and virtue or vice (the chest with pride, for example – developed by Naomi into a play on the figure of the Matador) reminding me of the corporeal mime techniques of Decroux and Lecoq.

I’m becoming quite at home with the animal kingdom, too. In the past three days we have been sapos velhos (old frogs), cordeiros jovens (young lambs), panteras furtivos (stealthy panthers), ratos adolescentes (teenage rats), as well as caranguejos (crabs), macacos (monkeys), and moscas (flies). Oh, and we have not only been flies, but we’ve had flies inside us too. So handy phrases I now understand include ‘a mosca está dentro de sua garganta’ (the fly is inside your throat), and ‘os ratos adolescentes está descansando, mas não estão dormindo’ (the teenage rats are resting but are not sleeping). Well, they’ll be useful in the local bar!

The world of the elements is also opening up – the earth (terra), the air (ar), the wind (vento), water (água), and stone (pedra). We’ve been learning to move with and through these elements – flowing or staccato, fast or slow, with external energy or internalising the expression.

Moving into the man-made world, I’ve become very familiar with the word chapéu (hat). That one has been a constant theme (what’s a physical theatre workshop without a box of hats, after all?). Today saw an excess of hats – and sticks, and umbrellas, and buckets, and bowls, and teapots, and suitcases, and chairs.

Sometimes the objects are just themselves, but at other times they get a little cheeky and take on false airs and graces – a suitcase that thinks it’s a boat, say, or piece of wood that thinks it’s something tasty to eat.

Sometimes it is the people who have the upper hand (as, for example, when Naomi places a tower of hats on my head), and sometimes it’s the objects that call the shots (as, for example, when I sit on a suitcase wearing my tower of hats, and the suitcase collapses). As is so often the way, it’s the accidents in devising and improvising that make the moment.

So here we are, living in a material world…

Terra Lume 2012 launched!

So, Terra Lume 2012 well and truly launched! Here's some images of Wednesday's launch event, taken by Lais Marques.

Last night also saw the inauguration of The Living Room / Sala de Estar – a physical space at Lume's HQ for the documentation and sharing of materials actual and virtual, to be displayed on our fireplace 'shrine' or (for electronic material) broadcast on the TV. If you are here with us in Barão Geraldo, feel free to share your photos, videos and comments on the Facebook group page Terra Lume 2012.