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

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!

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.