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.