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.