VIAS EXPRESSAS
PALAVRA, A POÉTICA DO MOVIMENTO
EM TEMPO REAL
ACORDEI PENSANDO EM BOMBAS – EM PORTUGAL
ÁGUAS DE MARÇO
CIA NOVA DANÇA 4 – TRILOGIA REVISTA
O BEIJO
RE-ESTRÉIA “O BEIJO” no SESC Pompéia
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Critical Studies in Improvisation
Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation, Vol 7, No 1 (2011)
Improvisation in the Brazilian Theater: Inventing Tradition
Silvana Garcia
Translated by Micaela Kramer
In Brazilian theater, recourse to improvisation is naturally linked to the growth of what we today call group theater. At the end of the 1960s, artists and collectives involved with artistic experimentation started to reject the usual modes of creating scenic works and, as in other parts of the world, engendered processes with an improvisational basis, aiming for a renewal of theater. At that time, improvisation was understood, in a generalized manner, as a space open to the exploration of the actors’ creativity, through which one would promote a physical and spiritual mobilization, with the goal of unblocking internal foci of resistance, in search of free and genuine expressivity. At times, members of this group of actors gave themselves over to the exercise of spontaneous creation in a radical manner, circulating between the individual and the collective sphere, led by sensorial, textual, aural, and other stimuli that were offered to them by directors and other coordinators of the improvisational process. Sometimes, these moments constituted an end in themselves and only resulted indirectly in stage material. In most cases, however, they already were part of the process of putting together a performance.
The blossoming of these procedures coincides temporally with the diffusion of the ideas of Jerzy Grotowski, the Polish theater director whose work Brazilian creators were just starting to recognize and assimilate into new Brazilian practices. An example from this phase is the performance Third Demon (1970), staged by the Catholic University of São Paulo’s Theater Program, known as TUCA, then under the coordination of Mario Piacentini. A non-verbal performance, shaped through a series of improvisation “laboratories” with a group of young actors, it fully underscores the importance of university theater groups in the vanguard of experimental and alternative processes in the theatrical productions of the period. The assistant director of the project was Helena Villar, a representative of the first generation of dancers and choreographers trained by Maria Duschenes, herself a disciple of Kurt Jooss and the person responsible for introducing the Laban method to Brazil.
In the following decade, improvisation gained a wider berth as group theater became more widespread. In the shadows of the military regime, of censorship and of constant threats directed against cultural and artistic entities, and in contrast to commercial theater, group theater strengthened collective modes of creation in which improvisational games were naturally found. The break in hierarchy in the creative process, and the ideological and artistic commitment that brought members of the group together, were favorable to processes established upon an improvisational foundation.
The quest to constitute their own dramaturgy at a time when there was a scarcity of texts that could portray the historical reality of the country also helped to promote such improvisational processes and consolidated partnerships between actors and playwrights, either connected to the group or at the group’s invitation. Whether improvising upon texts or upon themes, it was up to the actors to extract the latent content from literary materials and from the motivations offered to them for a scene and to provide their best interpretations. Improvisation was thus a means through which the cast provided both plot and scenic life to the ideas contained in texts or chosen themes.
Enrique Buenaventura, the Colombian director, playwright, and founder of the Teatro Experimental de Cali, was an important mentor to the politically engaged Brazilian theater groups of the 1970s, promoting collective practices of textual analysis as a propeller of the creative process. His methodology of how to approach dramaturgical material strongly influenced the work of many groups. For Buenaventura, the aim of working with dramatic texts was chiefly to extricate the underlying framework of conflict and to establish a critical relation between fictitious material and the reality it supposedly represented. In this sense, he provided an instrument of analysis as well as a clear ideological orientation, to the extent that the aim was to determine the sociopolitical dimension of the themes and characters in dramatic fables. Several militant groups that acted in the decentralized neighborhoods and urban areas of São Paulo during the 1970s adopted this methodology, developing it according to their own specific experiences, yet always seeking a dialogue between the texts, the collective motivations, and the social environment with which they were engaged. The Núcleo Independente, coordinated by Celso Frateschi, and the TTT (Truques, Traquejos e Teatro), under the direction of Hélio Muniz, were two collectives that firmly established this practice and, in turn, influenced other groups of the period. From this so-called movement of independent theater, the only group that is still active in the city of São Paulo and still maintains practices of the period is União e Olho Vivo (Union and Live Eye), coordinated by César Vieira.
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Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation, Vol 7, No 1 (2011)
Outside of the militant circuit—and constituting another facet of the collective production of the decade—are groups that adhered to experimentalism through improvisation as the most legitimate form of self-expression. Combining their own material and bringing to the stage their experiences as young people from the urban middle-class, groups such as Asdrubal Trouxe o Trombone (Asdrubal Brought the Trombone) were able, through their performances, to achieve a strong connection with their audience, typically of the same social group and age range as them. Giving continuity, in a way, to the exploration of the self as thematic archive (albeit in a frankly personalized key—if compared, for example, with the proposal of an anonymous collective as practiced by TUCA), the actors of the Asdrubal troupe turned Trate-me leão (1977) into the theatrical anthem of the Rio de Janeiro generation that came of age during the military dictatorship’s anos de chumbo.1 Despite Hamilton Vaz Pereira’s authorship of the text, and his role as director, the play was put together through the individualized work of the actors, who loaned their own names to the characters.
From the beginning of the 1990s, after a less active period in the tradition of collective improvisation, group theater gained a new thrust, becoming the largest and in some cases the most instigating segment of current Brazilian theater. Improvisation found itself firmly established as a privileged practice and was invigorated by a mixed methodology that, in some ways, developed syntheses of older practices. Today, the so-called “collaborative process” predominates. This process presupposes collective creativity, but it subjects the final product to the control of “specialists”: the playwright, the director, and the technicians. The actors, as well as the remaining members of the group, are responsible for providing the textual-scenic materials that the playwright and the director subsequently re- elaborate. In this exploratory process, actors work on their own repertory of life experiences and the memories that make up their personal testimony regarding the themes of the day. In the Teatro da Vertigem—certainly the most representative group that uses these procedures—the field of research of the actor’s artistic, authorial deposition is developed in workshops the group promotes during the process of creating a performance. Under the supervision of the director Antônio Araújo, the actors elaborate suggested improvisations and the scenic text emerges from the sum and selection of this improvised material, molded by the hand of an invited playwright. In the concluding phases, the actors lose authorship over the material they originally produced, since it is incorporated into the final, collective product. There is, therefore, an appropriation of the originally personalized creations, which become the collective’s archive. The second and third parts of the “biblical trilogy,” The Book of Job (1995) and Apocalypse 1,11 (2000), finalized by playwrights Luis Alberto de Abreu and Fernando Bonassi respectively, can be regarded as a maturing of the Vertigem Group’s working methodology.
Another tendency, situated on the frontier between theater and dance, involves the use of improvisation in a production’s staging. For the company Nova Dança 4, coordinated by Cristiane Paoli Quito in association with the dancer and choreographer Tica Lemos, improvisation is the very language of performance. The sources that inform the company’s work range from the tradition of mask drama (in which Paoli Quito was trained) to contact improvisation2 (introduced to Brazil by Tica Lemos), aikido, and parkour. From 2008 to 2010, the collective presented the trilogy Influências (Influences), assembling references to cinema, theater, and literature—as exemplified by the second performance in the series, O Beijo (The Kiss, 2009), based on Nelson Rodrigues’ O beijo no asfalto (The Kiss on the Asphalt) and also influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Beckett, and François Truffaut. Basing the performance on the materials referred to above, and on the fragile skeleton of a script that gave them direction, the group’s performance sustained itself exclusively on the improvisational interactions of the actors/dancers.
Along the thread that internally connects the improvisational tradition of which they are exemplarily a part, we find the same references, or related references, in the aforementioned performances, distributed over a period of four decades. These references find echoes in other parts of the world. Here in Brazil, however, they are adjusted to other sources and to our specific expressivity. The influences that we recognize—among others, Buenaventura, Grotowski, performance art, Laban, Pina Bausch, Steve Paxton, and, with an even more distant link, the commedia dell’arte— manifest in renewed versions on Brazilian stages, where they are mixed with the reality of our production, in the bosom of an extremely recent tradition that is still in a phase of self-recognition, in search of its own vocabulary.
Notes
1 Translator’s Note: The anos de chumbo, or “years of lead,” of the Brazilian military dictatorship refer to the more repressive period of the military dictatorship in Brazil, which took place from the end of 1968 to March 1974.
2 T.N.: In English in the original.
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Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation, Vol 7, No 1 (2011)
Works Cited
Araújo Silva, Antônio. A gênese da Vertigem: o processo de criação de O Paraíso Perdido. Master’s Thesis. Escola de Comunicações e Artes/ Universidade de São Paulo, 2002. Print.
Fernandes, Silvia. Grupos Teatrais Anos 70. São Paulo, Editora da Unicamp, 2000. Print.
Garcia, Silvana. Teatro da Militância. São Paulo, Perspectiva, 1990. Print.
—. “Improvisando O Beijo: A dramaturgia em movimento do Nova Dança.” Revista Folhetim 29 (2010): 62-75. Print.
Rinaldi, Miriam. O Ator do Teatro da Vertigem. O processo de criação de Apocalipse 1,11. Master’s Thesis. Escola de Comunicações e Artes/ Universidade de São Paulo, 2005. Print.
—. “O ator no processo colaborativo do Teatro da Vertigem.” Revista Sala Preta 6 (2006): 135-143. Print.
Tráfego no CCSP
Mais uma parceria de Diogo Granato (PLAY) e Bruno Peixoto (REC):
foto Otávio Dantas
Passei momentos a me perguntar: “o que seria, afinal, ‘Performativi-
dade Narrativa‘, e por que eu?!”. Fui à pesquisa! Externa e interna, em
mim… Será que, nesse início de século 21, o que faço é denominado
“performatividade narrativa”? Porque nenhuma borda me cabe… Em
princípio, o termo já guarda em si uma explosão de “cores”. Como se
“explodíssemos” um quadro renascentista e sua “narratividade pictóri-
ca”. Daí a “explosão de cores”. Em meio a tantas rupturas e reconstru-
ções, vivemos instantes de contradições.
Teatro pós-moderno e teatro pós-dramático, aqui, ganham o nome de
“performatividade”. Talvez por incluir a arte no cotidiano: a não-repre-
sentação, mas o ser, o fazer, o revelar, trazer o “acontecimento” para
o real. As sensações e os sentidos mais fortes que o significado. A inte-
ração e interfaces das outras artes. O Fim da causa e conseqüência. O
efêmero. A criação, o processo, e o resultado em carne viva; performer
e espectador em risco.
Narrativa… narrativa?! Narrativa é a história em si! Mas isso não foi
quebrado no teatro pós-moderno/pós-dramático? A estrutura clássica
da narrativa sim, com relação a personagem, hierarquia dos fatos, mes-
mo espaço e tempo. Hoje, a narrativa não se obriga a uma linearidade,
muito menos uma relação de tempo e espaço: ela se abre para um jogo
de “desconstrução” para que múltiplas leituras possam ser feitas. O
que seria um “ponto de vista” é, hoje, a aceitação das diferenças. As
maneiras de ver são infinitas. A narrativa pode se abrir a infinitos pris-
mas. A arte se abre, permitindo ecoar novas percepções.
Você pode não ter mais personagem, ou tempo linear, mas fato você
tem: sua presença já é um “fato”. Será que daí não se parte uma nar-
rativa? Ou a narrativa estaria no tema, no fato? De repente, o retorno
à uma estrutura clássica: uma contradição, uma incongruência. Posso
ter a estrutura, mas em ruptura. Vivemos em um mundo contraditório,
incongruente. Dessa natureza do “conflito”, ou do teatro, é que nasce a
cena. Ou do atrito que nascem as coisas.
Seria o “retorno à narrativa” uma “necessidade de comunicação”?
Talvez pelo encantamento da “borda entre ficção e real”. Muitas ve-
zes, a narrativa trata da ficção. Na maioria das vezes, a crueza e o
desinteressante do cotidiano não nos apresentam o “lúdico para o vôo”.
Então, depois de termos nos despido de “personagens”, das relações de
conflitos evidentes, dos gabinetes, e ido para o “nada”, para o espaço
vazio (das relações, dos “sem tempo”), realizamos um renascimento do
enlevo, da condução entre “falso e verdadeiro”, ou “mentira e verdade”,
ou ainda “lúdico e realidade”. Encontramos espaço de liberdade sem o
aprisionamento das personagens rígidas e suas histórias; para os de-
poimentos “inverídicos/verossímeis”; ou depoimentos “verdade/ilusão”
dos intérpretes.1 Performers que trazem, carregam toda a sua história
pessoal para se apropriarem de outros temas da vida.
Minha prática tem sido encontrar, na história desses intérpretes, movi-
mento poético que se reorganiza a partir de uma relação temática e
estruturas técnicas. O que vem de fora – tema e técnicas – e o que vem
de dentro – história de vida – entram em simbiose para a comunicação.
O que importa aqui é a necessidade de expressão, que não se limita mais
a se encaixar nos modelos ou “denominações de segmentos de lingua-
gens”, e sim conduzir/convidar o espectador a participar desse ritual
das interfaces das artes. Que ele não seja apenas uma interrogação
permanente e intocada, mas “comunicado”, cúmplice da criação.
Descubro agora que o que faço pode ser “performatividade narrativa”.
Na Cia. Nova Dança 4, e em outros trabalhos conduzidos sob minha
direção, a relação da improvisação temática é o eixo de realização. É o
que acredito ser o que aqui se denomina “performatividade narrativa”.
Será?
2009 – Cristiane Paoli Quito
texto publicado em VERBO 2010, do conjunto de textos do Verbo Conjugado 2009 / Galeria Vermelho e Centro Cultural São Paulo
