ANTRO POSITIVO english

th e atr e a n d th i n k i n g b raz i l . s 達 o p a u l o

Dimitris Papaioannou Daniel Macivor Romeo Castellucci Felipe Hirsch Thomas Ostermeier Christiane Jatahy Arkadi Zaides

english version . exclusive interviews

04

dimitris papaioannou

26

daniel macivor

42

romeo castellucci

64

felipe hirsch

92

thomas ostermeier

112

christiane jatahy

126

arkadi zaides

4

antro+

dimi tr i s

PaPaioannou The body as time. The embodied time. Dance as an encounter with the possibilities of existing as both text

ruy filho

interpreter

kiko bertholini

translation

veridiana mercatelli

6

antro+

t

he first contact with his work determined how important it would be to bring this encounter to the magazine. It was not easy. Not because of him, but because of his time, because of his new premiere which was in the middle of the way, for being more on stage than free to the virtual world.

So I waited. Anxiously, I assume. Six months of messages and interruptions until the calendar was in our favor. Dimitris is exactly how I imagined him.

And what could be just one certainty is, moreover, the best of them.

Because the delicacy of his attention during our encounter was crucial to the depth of our conversation. Because you hope for exactly this from great artists, the tranquility of exposing their concerns and passions, while their work overwhelmingly explode the dimension of its potential. Man and work.

Talking to Dimitris Papaioannou made it easier to recognize

both and their sum is what we can call artist.

There wouldn’t be any other first approach than the body. The Greek choreographer and dancer who has already worked in a great spectrum, from assistant to the American director Bob Wilson to being director of the opening ceremony of Olympic Games, considers the body to be the most complex existing machine.

So let’s go there. “Primal Matter”, one of his most recent works, formalizes the composition of bodies recreated from a combination of their images, and for Dimitris the body should be treated as a battlefield on which it is necessary to understand the individuality of each one of them.

The discussion is not new, of course, but the fresh approach in his work looks into another way, a way that adds more interesting flavors to the discussion. In Brazil, Helena Katz and Christine Greiner

In the preceding pages, portrait of Dimitris by Elissavet Moraki and scene “Nowhere”, 2009, in photo

by Marilena Stafylidou. Here, “2”, 2006, by Lila Sotiriou.

antro+

7

Scenes of the spectacle “Inside”, 2011, in photo Marilena Stafylidou.

built a sophisticated discourse on bodymedia, which was named to emphasize the distance in the dichotomy that separates mind and self, like the reflection initially sugbody, understanding the gested, to be expanded to a biopobody equally as a subject litical body which, not necessarily, and not just as belonging turns into a mediatization of the to a subject. That is what politics which it represents. changes everything. But if Such distinction is essential to on the one hand the idea understand how different Dimiof a subject is increasingly tris’ work is from the foundacalled into question, then it tions which support a good part is also necessary to equally of the theory of contemporary distrust the body subject, dance. “I would not know or where the subject can be how to separate the person replaced in the concept of from politics”, he affirms, a body extended to another. because the demonstraIn this sense the bodymedia tions, both political and perstops being a medium to itsonal, are, above all, con8

antro+

“You onlY understand art when You understand the cracks of time “

antro+

9

“art helPs to fill the emPtY time. art accomPanies it.”

His production of “Medea” in 2008, photographed by René Habermacher.

10

antro+

antro+

11

structed by experiences of the body. So dancing also means, in his creations, to build relationships between bodies. Dimitris explains that politics are not represented in each of the participants, the whole thing is not so straightforward and predictable. ,The creation of political results lies in the reading of the provoked relationships, in the observation of how the relationships are understood.

Therefore, if the subject configured in Dimitris’ dance is the manifestation of an extended subject and not necessarily a medium, it gets closer to the base of the theory of bodymedia, which supports the look as a form of power in which the other is constituted. Dimitris redirects the dichotomy and brings the constitution of the body as another to attention, not anymore the observer as the other. So it is necessary to recreate and to represent the body, either as a structure or as a narrative.

We can say, to him dancing is, first of all the announcement of a process in which a possible political perception of existence is created. This is what inverts and paradoxically confirms the

12

antro+

bodymedia theory treating the body not anymore as a representation of something, but as a tool of constructing the possible representations of itself, from their own perceptions. The medium here is not the body anymore, it becomes the dance itself. And the subject is the totality of what is made to exist.

To Dimitris communication becomes essential to the process. Not necessarily in its informative quality.

Maybe that’s why he doesn’t have difficulties communicating without words. And he affirms, like in painting, that dance can also create thoughts without the use of speech. Developing mechanisms to generate more interest every time. That’s the point. It is necessary to create a certain suspense about the procedure without worrying to relativize the issue for its utilitarian expectations.

He reached the possibility of not waiting for the audience’s reaction, which has become in-

“Medea” in photo by René Habermacher.

antro+

13

The look of Rene Habermacher on “Medea”.

14

antro+

“art is a useless material, essential to the soul.�

antro+

15

creasingly rare, even among the big names. The performance “Inside� for example has another time, he explains. Being allowed to enter and exit the theater at any time, the work lasted for six hours as an uninterrupted performance. The proposal, he says, was to induce the spectator to leave the city and enter into a kind of bubble, the theater.

Acting on the temporal perception and the familiarity with time has a larger dimension in his opinion. Art helps to fill the empty time that we all have, living with ourselves. In other words, it gives you company. In his point of view, art can only be truly understood when one understands the cracks of time. The complexity in this argument, however, increases when you recognize that each person has their own time. This fragmentation of perception requires the artist to think of time as sculptural material, and shaping time becomes the function of interpreters. And as everything that is revealed is image in itself, Dimitris organizes 16

antro+

the time of the images , decomposing their manifestation in the creation, showing and fixing. Every human is able to create things, he explains, art explores this mystery and through it we seek to reach some sort of understanding of what it is and how you should deal with life.

Among the possibilities of this construction is the capacity to create discourses through the use of choreography. Abstract or formal are choices. For him, however, absurd simplicities turn into excessively abstract images. He prefers to include in

The spectacle “Primal Matter�, 2012, click of Mary Petinaraki.

antro+

17

18

antro+

The look of Nikos Nikolopoulos on the “Primal Matter.�

antro+

19

“You would not know how to do PoetrY without the bodY.�

his work shape, optical illusion, the inducement to be the image which belongs to a discourse, while what it reveals is the potential expansion of another observation of existence.

Asked if this movement is able to build another mythology of the contemporary, Dimitris agrees, explaining that the recurrent use of classical mythology in his work is almost a cultural obligation, a kind of neurosis for Greeks. What he acknowledges to stay forever is the tragic condition of the subject, also amplified by mythology in creation.

Clearly both aspects, the mythologizing of the contemporary subject and his tragic condition, reflect equally the socioeconomic situation of his country. This is also the reason why it would be

20

antro+

impossible that such reflections do not show in his most recent works.

The presence of the tragic is, in a way, also in its existence as a state of loneliness. The loneliness that devastates the individual, Dimitris calls it a kind of sad eroticism that can only be changed if you change the meaning of the separation which creates the loneliness and its erotication by multiplication, and this is made in the sphere of love.

To the dimension of contemporary mythology we will certainly not have any access. On the contrary. Every assault on its recognition is farcical. You can not recognize a mythology during the manifestation of its basic formulations. What we can notice is just its beginning. And our time yearns for this. To modify the existence through improving the human, the dissolution of the subject, the traditional spheres of what is recognized by society and economy. Obviously a process that began centuries

“Primal Matter�, in photo Miltos Athanasiou.

antro+

21

Scenes from Nowhere, 2009, in photo Marilena Stafylidou and Alekos Yiannaros respectively.

22

antro+

ago and which today raises its power as a mythical structure for the specific conditions of living.

By allowing that distrust circulates in his work, Dimitris extends the language of dance to the territory of the probable. There are no affirmations but experiences of certain qualities of energy in the form of discourse and aesthetics. This is a process he discovered while creating his own comics. The language of comics influences him very much, he reveals. And the energy that is expressed in comics is what he would like to do with people. This partly explains the sketched bodies in his work, the architectural environments, the structures used as three-dimensional interventions of the narrative space.

The work of Dimitris offers small frames of images, specific portions of the demonstration of a discourse in which a body reveals itself as an experience with the encounter of existence and time. The sketches dance. As we watch and coexist with the universes, we remain absorbed in their realities facing the inexhaustible creativity of a unique and essential artist.

antro+

23

Spectacle Nowhere in photo Marilena Stafylidou.

24

antro+

antro+

25

daniel Macivor

The inventor of a new way to recognize ourselves as humans text

ruy filho

photos

roberto setton

interpreter

translation

rachel ripani

veridiana mercatelli

d Photo essay in dependencies of the the SESC Pompeia in SĂŁo Paulo.

28

antro+

ramaturgy is more than just a strategy, a language feature, to know how to tell a story. This is relatively simple. But it doesn’t mean that it will work well or achieve excellent results. Quite the contrary. The writing restricted to the strategy sometimes manifests itself empty of content and signature.

When sustained only by language it runs the risk of turning into an equally superficial aesthetic exercise. And good stories can be obtained in a thousand ways, what by itself does not determine great discoveries. Dramaturgy, therefore, depends on something more to consolidate as a tool. And it starts exactly in accepting dramaturgy as a tool. By dramaturgy a perception of the world determined to aesthetics, concept and methodology becomes visible. Real dramaturgy, the one in which originality is possible in each of the already mentioned vertices, is rarely to be found. Imagine good dramatists. Imagine, moreover, the one who makes your view of the world something so genuine that it turns language into what is just his way. They are few and rare. And each period reveals its few dramatists. Because for every moment it is necessary to evoke a scene that holds the perception and at the same time is able to construct a unique dialog in the encounter. There are many moments in which a dramatist emerges, but not his director. Or great directors, but limited to superficial writing. That is not the case here. Enrique Diaz presented us Daniel MacIvor. There are three of the staged performances of the author until today.

And they are three immensely rich results, capable to offer us the greatness of an absolutely unique writing. So we went to him. We spoke. We laughed. We talked seriously. And we laughed. It was more than just a chat, we exchanged ideas and reflections. Backstage at the SESC Pompeia, where Cine Monstro would be presented, this time with the presence of the author, Daniel allowed a deep dive. And sometimes the wish was exactly to let me drown among such agitation.

There was a preview, that’s true. A day earlier, during the reading of a recent text of his, Daniel and Enrique talked with the audience. I did not introduce myself. I preferred to remain anonymous and to absorb everything I could for our moment.

There was a talk about how to draw the characters without disclosing their history and characteristics completely. And it was precisely this point that we jumped into our dive. About the provoked absences, I ask him if they are not attempts to find the essence in recognizing the human. Something like being incomplete or concealed could expose us through the absence to the most precise dimension of what defines it, but for not revealing itself, it becomes untranslatable in words and representation and essence. Daniel begins arguing that man, somehow, seeks a feeling of connection with something. This is the basis of his observation about the other. It is the presence of this sensation which explains society and behavior, he continues.

However, there is the fear that the connection truly happens while paradoxically the fear of being alone exists. This dispute between desire and aversion of connection requires man to replace the reality with a fictionalization of his existence.

antro+

29

And for that, the possible solution is theater, he affirms. “Theater gives us participation, gives us ourselves.”

For Daniel this is the argument why metalanguage is so present in postmodernism. Being on stage is a way to regain recognition of your own humanity. But it would be necessary that the recognition be immediate for us to access the present, and the cognitive sciences show that between the perception of something and its recognition we are three seconds away from reality. Which means that we live a continuous state of belief about the past and not about present, and of the capacity to recognize ourselves as real. In his texts the past exists as history, knowledge and recognition, almost like a structure. Asked if to him the theater would be the deepest experience in the construction of possible pasts, Daniel replies, after a period of silence, maybe three seconds, that everything in the world should be in those three seconds.

He advances by putting into question the fact that man is very attached to the material world. In his point of view, the metaphysical and the immaterial consider themselves as necessary opportunities. “Thought has a presence in them,” he explains. Understanding thoughts also as ways of possibilities and

88

Daniel on photo shoot inside the set design and lighting your play Cine Monster, directed and performed by Enrique Diaz.

30

antro+

antro+

31

88 32

antro+

lines, Daniel mainly exposes the structure of his writing. His texts can be seen as overlapping lines, structured in a way to compose accurate sketches of characters and moments. In tracing the possible image to an identity, the author presents another quality of the discourse. It is no longer to translate someone or something, but to sustain in the presence of space between the exposed lines the human dimension and the event as action to time. What Daniel writes, finally, are more the choices of traces in white than the definitive risks. Thus allowing an abundant range of reading and recreations.

For this dramaturgy of the spaces between the lines, it is necessary to understand the new time that manifests itself from this immateriality and metaphysics.

Time being the plural expression of events and attendance, it is the theater that rereads its configuration as a narrative structure. For him, theater is a time camera in which the narrative moves by columns in simultaneously occurring events.

In other words, the time should now be understood as a vertical construction, no longer linear and horizontal as we know it. This reversal also turns narrating from linear and consequential to coincident and multitemporal.

The perception of why theater remains as a possibility for man converses with his argument during the previous debate, that what exists would be the interval between birth and death, life. However, I teased him with bringing up Freud, this existence would be the slow start of the process of death. Daniel agrees and modernizes the Freudian saying of an “exciting process of death�. For him, theater is part of how much the process of living can be exciting.

He talks about liking the object of theater, so he is interested in increasing the feeling of an artificial environment. Exposing the stage and light, he raises time to a true and an authentic dramatic action. This authentic artificiality is what re-sizes the theatrical event to reality. They are forms of energy that can not be created nor destroyed, he explains. And the function of theater is to be like a power plant, to be the instrument by which the energy contained in this construction of reality arrives in the other, he concludes. This way, the excitement of living becomes its own dramatic expansion, exposed like an event of existence.

Living in Canada, Daniel chose to move away from the city and live in nature.

It may seem like a purely pastoral action, but turns out to have been exactly the opposite. Some of his sweetest works emerged in the big city, the dark, in the forests. By moving away from the major centers, isolation helped him to be more true, which he calls a perfect state of being. For Daniel, the brutality of the city is superficial, while in nature it is deeper, like a worm eating. What differentiates the existence between one environment and another also reveals the face of our humanity. It is like this that we are perfect, he says, in melancholia. This state which, unfortunately, is interpreted differently today. We live in a time in which happiness is treated as a commodity. Melancholy became something negative, and both took opposing positions, which is not necessarily true. It exists a concrete and noble being when speaking of happiness. Someone is making money from it, and I don’t know who it is, says Daniel ironically. The second issue raised by him refers to an induced necessity of being happy the whole time. This, for him, is one of the reasons of our miserable existence.

antro+

33

“The funcTion of TheaTer is To be like a power planT.” 34

antro+

antro+

35

36

antro+

“if we were in The TheaTer for years, we would noT grow old.”

In this misery that plagues us for making happiness a product, perhaps the way to go is to find in the other, aspects that resize your memories like genuine access to true feelings. Then I ask him if he prefers the memories of another or to invent memories. Daniel is straightforward to choose the second option. To him, our memory is false, because we color ourselves. Everyone that presents its history makes it in the most appropriate and relevant way to serve other interests. Just as the memory of historians are contaminated by their desires and fears, we also go through such sideways. “We are all historians and we need others to tell our story”, the conclusion he reached especially with the development of an opera and libretto which deals about Hadrian III. The writing of Daniel, however, is not set as a condition of constructing the political discourses. The writer claims to have difficulties in dealing with politics.

And I disagree. I tell him that to recover the understanding about humans is the most important political manifestation in art, what makes you review your position and accept your dialogue with the political situation of the subject. The human question can not be denied in dramaturgy, he says, but politics needs to be received by it without ideologies.

In other words: it is necessary that theater presents itself open to contradictions, because only they will be able to generate a wider configuration of what may politically be man, since such a stance has to determine the project of what might be our humanity. “At the moment you say you’re wrong, you stop hearing.” So it takes a certain amount of forgiveness and submission. I bring him the coherent words of two of the

antro+

37

88 38

antro+

“we are all hisTorians. we need ThaT oThers To Tell our sTories.”

greatest thinkers, the German Habermas and the French Derrida who, in New York after the attack of September 11, casually concluded that all forms of forgiveness would also be a kind of a self-assertion of superiority, and that it would be necessary, therefore, to take the limit of equality between the fractions to not accept what happened. Daniel explains that in his view, every act of submission can be political and direct, as far as the aggressiveness can demonstrate the opposite of its appearance. Like loving someone until you kill it, he exemplifies.

“In on It” premiered in New York two weeks after the attacks. The response was as if the show had been written for them. The projection of this feeling through the audience became part of the show forever.

There is a lot of building of dramaturgy in the way you put certain meanings in a work. The question is in the difficulty of accepting the enhancement of everything. Daniel teases when he affirms that if you want to feel more, you must feel everything else. However, we seek with a certain exaggeration the expansion of what suits us, as we avoid experiencing entirely all that is offered to us.

There is in cruelty somewhat of a pleasure and a delight, he says. Therefore, in his stories, cruelty arises more like an image of what potentially will be. This dynamic of offering the possibilities and not the answers, is also a certain tool of showing the existing cruelty itself in the spectator. All that is left is the condition of imagining. And nothing is more cruel and free than this choice. Daniel explains that a fact begins to develop from what one wants from it. In short, you can take the story, but you do not disappear.

To represent the human that we insist not to see, and by it to unravel the extent of our limits and consequences, as well as dreams and freedom. This is the universe brought by Daniel MacIvor. They are strong, ironic texts, poetic in the way of submerging our inside. And they are are also architectural powers of a precise and original writing, in which aesthetics, concept and methodology offer ways for us to occupy the stage with new resources. If theater can recover the reflection of being, then Daniel mirrors what is concealed. And in diving to untranslatable infinity of the human he makes the most innovative narcissistic picture visible. Reading Daniel is translating the face of what we pretend to forget. What now would be essential. Then came the meeting with Enrique Diaz.

And the stage became the possibility of the form, lacking the limit of infinity.

Each epoch had its few. And every few their pairs. Daniel and Enrique are there.

And it seems to be just the beginning. Prepare to sink even more.

antro+

39

88 40

antro+

“This way ecTius. weis remporem. are perfecT. porempore in dol melancholia. orum es nulpa siT aTia because we are volupTaTia Truly humans.” dade. Interessante, ao fim, perceber o quanto os julgamentos necessitam ser atribuídos pelos valores que norteiam as escolhas e não os trazidos por quem julga. Em uma espécie de círculo previsível, onde a espiral existe o retorno ao contraponto, sempre produzindo a renovação das estruturas originais.

Daniel shoots Depois de experimentar a dramaturgia contemporânea, os espeRoberto Setton, while it is clicked táculos criados a partir de Henrik Ibsen e William Shakespeare ofeby photographer. receram-lhe as aproximações necessárias ao entendimento de como a realidade poderia ser novamente aproximada pela estética, através do que denominou por Realismo Capitalista. Fundamental ao projeto dessa exposição realista está a formulação de uma poética do cotidiano, atuando por meios comuns em construções próximas as nossas ações e reações reais.

Para o diretor, os dois autores com quem tem mais trabalhado nos últimos anos somam a representação de como a consciência ocupa os espaços nessa nova realidade. A primeira, demonstrada em Hamlet, traz a consciência política como estado de inquietação e descobrimento, refletindo um indivíduo arqueado sob o peso das próprias percepções. A segunda difere-se exatamente por sua capacidade de reação, a consciência da ação política, como pode ser visto em O Inimigo do Povo.

A importância está no não se limitar à construção meramente tecnicista do realismo como linguagem histórica, tampouco como sua atualização. Não se trata tanto de realismo, explica. Os espetáculos são, ao seu ver, laboratórios do comportamento humano, pelo qual se busca pelo jogo a veracidade desse existir. Ou seja, conclui, a utopia possível de realidade no interior dos jogos travados com os espectadores.

Todavia, nada disso faria sentido se não houvesse no movimento do jogo uma instância premeditada de configuração política sobre o outro. Por isso, o realismo capitalista redimensiona o outro a partir da nova lógica de configuração política, pela qual o capital econômico se impôs. Ao construir por tais argumentos sua arte, o

antro+

41

l e t s ca

photo peggy Kaplan

i c c u ll romeo

The image needs a hidden word to renounce to the obvious text

ruy filho

interprete

nathalie malveiro

translation

luisa micheletti

building the risks of talks about eo m Ro emshaped strucowing in art, ok at the cont lo kn to of y s ar ay ss w eudo ainties f it is nece to bring ps nce the cert h new optics r success, si ug ei ro th th to y it s re ne pora e from the g of tu ctures requir understandin ru e st th as to ed es at lu nsolid what proper va reaction to is the ar- co eating some , our time, it cr ct fa of in e , ur is st t ge wha arch for paed. sibility to se as was crystaliz tistic’s respon e be understood ue with thos og al di n eatre needs to ca th , at m th hi s r er rm Fo et ram ed fo s. e of ay from resign aw doubtedly, on un e, ac d, pl An ed s. ario a damag perception to be the scen s of today so, available cant scenerie ly ifi ul gn tf si gh t ri os d m An the . casion. tragic design s it mes of a poetic oc by s g en in be happ ut of thought co ho it that this kind slate that w ct an tr fa t a ar ’s n It th ca will be ose So how ustraoices. There nism or an ill ch io ar ct ul du ic re rt e er from pa ic and limited by m using rhetor themselves istence? e ex fin ic de ag tr ho is by recognizgoal w tion of th achieve this me the speech to co s er ay ov w n ho ai w me those One of the m . But, at no ti ion of relatic importance her formulat he ot st an ae r e c, fo th ti g ch he in as aest is the sear rs his choice r. fe to re ta ec or sp ct e re th e di ce of tionship with formation th ses the presen sting on the . That increa ic ve in et r, po te as ucat t m bu ns For the ount. in the co tr comes param and the word be e s ag ct im pe e as th plains his - both of the scenic ellucci also ex gaged on vari st en s Ca st e. ti en ar t sc curren tion of the s communicaMany are the . that renounce d es ti or ili w ib a r ss fo po e of ours, - search ations of thes e. This space nc ost representa le m si e s th te of ea e d on but cr es Antro+ invite ord, structur ntem- tion, e of poetic w tors of the co us ea e cr th nt om ca fr ifi s, by born tives and sign representation over those eply reflect ographies of de ge n to ow e cons en it of pable us and porary sc e geometry ca cci received is lu ec el pr st a Ca of eo ns m r in differat- mea questions. Ro the spectato ersation and ng nv hi co uc e to th d to g an lable even ductin r”, he says. had been avai rmical manne so we can dive de ns pi ea “e m s, e ay th w d ent municattempts to fin ation of com esentation. lig pr ob re e r th ou r ng fo of quest Not havi an anmore on the rtain problem , the poetic is n suggest ce or ca ct t re en di nt n ia co impor- ing For the Ital However it is of the crisis e. n io nc ns re te he c co ti h ursive aesthe achieved wit eatre. disc swer to the e western th nd the range th ta r rs fo de ct un pe to as ay rtain w , rs tant fundamental perience offe rence, in a ce ex he ic Co et . ce po oi e e th d ch a ch That is becaus of a given an nguage, su derstanding unter with la un co e en th e s th rce r redu lly fo the spectato by aesthetica the acquainity. Whether ructures limit al st re l na le io ab it st ad while tr ting it. not experimen tanceship to

I

Beside, “hey girl”, photo

by Di graz.

44

antro+

antro+

45

In this page, “tragedia endogonidia”, photo by luca Del pia. Right, “on the Concept of the Face of the Son of god”.

46

antro+

antro+

47

ext e to the cont g the spectacl in ur ct ru st By objective and not the the total cones by ur er ct th ru ei st t, fncep poetic something di malizing a co offering of ellucci offers s found. By st lt Ca su , re al ic of or n points to a hide rhet ceptualizatio ing glass that that do not fy ni ts ag en m om a m ive nt to ay, mbolic fere poetic narrat ebody. That w ctural and sy oment or som m ru a st g, st in ti n ia en ed ow - happ to our behind imm r of relating ches the real ne oa pr an m ap r i ou cc s lu stel ys, design coherence, Ca erefore, he sa Nagel, in he ize reality. Th pher Thomas gn so co ilo re ph to by or ts way ion of m al ity designed multiple poin the desecrat t by no so is al n e io ad nt t is m his inte ing what is no which reality ement of show ov m e s. th ew , vi es lu ity va of subjective he concludes.

York Univers the contraire, of the New n r O e. so ue es tr of pr , The of truth perm lativism e ethical re , the presence ks th or to w s lf hi se pr In m tivity of eciple opposes hi ity and subjec self as prin iv it ct d je he ob is bl th esta ined es bo which has century at ecepts determ of the 20th tations of pr re lf rp ha te in nd s co ou vi from the se privilege the d concepts. ocesses that pr e th tion, by establishe to so e th er and al ject in ques th ei comes the ob s, in which be on e ti tr ep ea rc Th pe t only disobjective recognized im etic power, no ly po s on hi e ar by or d te ec nied use values are de rations prot i affirms to ca e as demonst at, Castellucc rv th r se Fo at e. th r, iv es rs ta cu the spec to partial valu . lefield with em tt th ba s to s ou el ci od e self a cons of external m position of th eptual retreme the ex lack of conc ex in to be g in to ad s conflict the He claim made le her. He puts in iling a world ot nc an co to s re r ng fo lo le tion at be sources, suitab timate exposi s, the di- th ce with the in bjective fact en su es d pr an s e ut r’ iv ho he ct it need ot nties, w up of obje ns and certai thought their io e at th ct d pe se ex po im of his lemmas that s. on of the fact ti ep rc pe d for reduce 48

antro+

“tragedia endogonidia�, photo by luca Del pia.

antro+

49

“I work wIth Images that belong to all.�

50

antro+

“tragedia endogonidia�, photo by luca Del pia.

antro+

51

yet, making room for anyt hing to crysta as it happens llize, open almost immed to the maxim ia um, taking th te ly in a process an permeated by e spectator to other referenc hard speeches e of . dialogue with Watching on of his works is the speech. e However, he like resizing says, it is no your own pres t in a larger co en en ou ce gh to show the tragic. It ntext of belo is necessary nging and w to ing the tragic at tu ch- solitud rn the very , therefore, e of the view through the er into an ae manifestation poetic proc sthetical ess. And this of the sublim e way. way, making The director hi m share his own solitude explains that with others. the play “mus cause a distan t This search fo ce, take us to r a primary fo another plac lead us to an rm makes crea e, ing a pa other world”, tra do xi ca l re pr co oc gn es s iz to in wards the re g that, niti potentially, cogthe sublime on of contem poraneity, it can indeed come the be approaches th over- artist autiful in th e to Agamben eir ability to an d hi s st atement that poetic a stag make cont the emporaneity e of involvem can only be ent that ov comes the ne accessed if w er- move aw ed for comfo e ay fr om its core action rt.

It’s the need .

For Castellu for moving to cci , the art other perceptio does not need that makes trag ns be pres edy a more ac to en t, no t belonging cu ra te re so ur cause it is a qu ce. Be- but to this instan estion that ca with the ab t, nnot have an an ility to hold swer. time It’s up to the the weight of in spectacles to another time. work over th Nothing can structure, whi at effectiv be more ch he insists, e at that resizi is pr ev ng of time th ious to the tragedy (an etic as struct an poaesthetic man ure of discou ifestation of rse. exists as trag w ha t Therefore, ev ic in man) so en though th the form can e images that be brought are to the stage often seem to be rep-

52

antro+

“tragedia endogonidia�, photo by luca Del pia.

antro+

53

“the Four Seasons Restaurant�, photo by Christian Berthelot.

54

antro+

“theatre Is always an experment about the tIme.”

antro+

55

“tragedia endogonidia�, photo by luca Del pia.

56

antro+

being to be pacity of the of the own ca e nc ce no y of a e individual. e temporalit ent and to th th es pr y, e it al th re to of critic and qualresentations ow weakness ay the images w sh e ey th th by , ts eo . persis For Rom blished values vity or unique poetic ge and esta ch’s subjecti ua ee ng sp la e th of t de as si ity ou Thom are located in ise. connect us to non-literal no atter that re a m of tvec ce bj en Su es an anti relati d picby the pr hich proposes conditions an w e , iv ry at eo m th or ’s rf Nagel They are pe mplified as uage. bject is not si su e th verch m of the lang hi spectacles le tures in w ion of its is et pl m co on way, Romeo’s t n bu ow e, r ei en th sc In st moral t a presence in of immediati eds to coexis ty ne ili ho ib w ss po er im e a view the living with th is be- age observation by ics with what need the lone m e na W dy . l ts ra en upo m m mm judg in another te lues will be co ctively set trying to obje y then, the va nl ut O ho . it al es w ag d, cr im se form of itic ing disclo viewer in the ial meanings. e nt th ue eq to ns d ca co te logi l of nica up direct and any ability of the surprise ut ts ho se it e w s ag es im , the exnsciousn On one hand mething that it is nec- co . That is so on the other ns y; io it al at in re le rm dete ays. an imponderab many of his pl to the most d persists in viewer closer an e e th m s t to ke te ta ci s cci seek no essary to ng. hand Castellu s own mirrori hi e of on n e io th it n gn O fill the perordinary reco cles, the child truth, but to ta e iv ec at sp rr s na hi a on slate poRecurring code watch tran a subjective those who e potential of th ly h te it ia w ed n m io ic - cept this crit al recognizes im context para e handling of e th th r, to he ot ch e ta ; in th l as at what ild-sign etic them, as wel cur through efore, the ch can only oc er s Th es . sn ns io ou at ci cynical proof cons doxical connot ents us as a es e ordinary way pr th e in tl , fa nt Sa ce imir inno is not merely oral in- Vlad a kind of am as ts is ex it its pureness; antro+

57

58

antro+

“the spector does not have to recognIze the actIng elements that hIde.” Divine Commedia project, “Inferno”.

antro+

59

“tragedia endogonidia”, photo by luca Del pia.

cess of elimin

ation of exce ss. In this rega erything that rd, ev- cal is denied, co sense of Safa nfirms the po tle - the sam what remains w e relation to er of cynica , while what this l co ns tr uc is denied is pu ti on ac co mplishes its ow disregarded, rposely atio n creeven with the n process. W hy basketballs consciousnes value. The cr s of its twee ? - I ask. And itical consciou ben la ug hs fr om sn es bo s w th hi ch Castelsides, nothin lucci points to be more inte g could , suggests the resting than viewer to aban “I don’t have not only the ob don answer a smart jective interp to th at, you know re ta ti on s of codes, ba , they are ox but also any ot lls.” Interest ygen her quest diff ing descriptio erent from th of surrender n. Since it is e idea unco to emptying not mmon in the themselves of audience of hi diatist unders imme- to he s presentation tandings abou ar s pe ople saying th t the form. So ey lost their requires a m that their br ore open and ea th, air. So be it. directional po Next time, w ing to the re sition- does hile the oxyg ality on the sc n’ en t ge t to the lungs ene, than ex and the pulse the scene to pecting seek qu ic be an enlargem ke ing for assist ns ent of reality. ance across th The conversa e succession images presen tion was alm of ted instants, ost over. But I’ll remembe necessary, on it was ever r that e last questi ything is exac on yet, so w tl y as it sh find out thro e ou co ld ul be d . ugh it, where In case of asph - in the philo yxia and urge ncy, I can run sophi- oran ge basketball the and find a bit of myself agai n.

60

antro+

While all this invades me lik e potency, no ing can be m th- becomes ore poetic th vital to our su an seeing the rvival.

I lack bounci air that As a confused ng off distra cted from m an d po etic, real an Because on y need. fe d imperstage, things ct, necessary and painful, are and shou treated just m ld ag ic be al an ti d emoon like that. It al existence. is subjective As an existenc tive, deep, an , sensi- of e at the time a moment w d dangerous an hen significa d especially ne no further ex tion is not re ed s ni ze planation. An cogd by the usua d Romeo, un l forms. As th edly understa doubt- inde e sense of an nds this bett sc ri bable feeling. er than mos You don’t le the stage wit t. Fills tellu ave a Cash oxygens we cc i play without do n’ t le pe aving in the rceive we need. But, on theater a part of your ce discovered own being. and understo od, it

antro+

61

“tragedia endogonidia�, photo by luca Del pia, Berlin.

62

antro+

“It Is not enough to show the tragIc. the tragIc Is the own subject.”

antro+

63

hirs felipe

sch Creation as a gesture of restlessness text

ruy filho

portraits

patrĂ­cia cividanes

translation

valmir martins

HE

e wasn’t here. His meeting was in the United States and I was in São Paulo instead, going through the late night and waiting for Skype to let me know he had arrived. The talk with Felipe Hirsch had begun some time ago. It was in a certain evening, sharing laughter and thoughts by the bar table, that I started to be sure that going deep with that conversation would be worth it. So we scheduled the moment, unscheduled, rescheduled, and this text is also about the two hours we had talked.

And there’s more than the eye can see: the approach which led me to follow his creative process and to his work. Rubbing elbows with him during the rehearsals of the plays from the Puzzle Project made me find out a very much interesting artist.

An enormous pleasure emerged from the dive into his thoughts. Then let’s proceed to the attempt of translating this close contact into a story. So be it. Let yourself comfortable to follow us in these moments. et’s start by the fact that he is in the US. There are new perspectives of bringing his works to other countries.

Felipe weighs a series of aspects that glue this shift, differentiating Europe from the USA, pointing out that, even with his plays taking to several European

l 66

antro+

countries, America is much more restrict to its own interests. This means that it is not enough having a play of international level. What matters is how much conveyed in the performance is interesting for the confirmation of the local principles and values. Within two decades laboring as an artistic director within the Sutil Theatre Company, possibly Dropsie Avenue, from Will Eisner’s cartoon, instigates a more straight-to-the-point interest in Americans, because beyond a narrative which action is taken in New York, Eisner is doubtlessly one of the greatest American cartoonists.

But Felipe believes that Puzzle in a very peculiar way – especially after positive reviews published in important international media outlets – will stir up interest in the two main markets outside Brazil.

My

question, before going back to the Sutil Company, is about his stay in America, on how much that satisfied him as a strategy.

Felipe presents other issues complementing his thinking on how the international market works. “My way of making drama wasn’t exactly Brazilian”, he says. The statement

In the last pages, images of the play “Puzzle (d)”, 2014.

refers to the interest of other markets for certain tricks. Somehow, for a long time the foreignness in Brazilian theater was sought after; something representative of the cultural, aesthetic and dialectical specifics not so present in international production systems. If we go back in time, and check the statement from Felipe, it reveals the contradiction of our successes away from home. Two of our greatest creators, Antunes Filho and Zé Celso, made their journey around the world because their works displayed certain exoticism compared to European cultural hegemony.

Antunes, whose international framework was the remarkable play Macunaíma and Zé Celso, who stuffed his tragicomic orgies filled with symbolic devouring, are recent examples. When we take a look at Felipe’s path, however, such features are really nonexistent. His creations have always been

less regional and locatable on the specifics of a single culture. Being not recognized within the “Brazilian culture” theme, he has chosen to focus in Brazil itself. however, the contemporary theater definitely took the face of the staging as aesthetic construction closer to the visual arts. Although Felipe’s work maintains a strong presence in the use of aesthetics, especially from his creative relationship with Daniela Thomas, the world arises, in short, as a more conducive space to their noise. Puzzle, in its tetralogy, presents a Brazil through innovative and radically unexpected bias, without the need of the stereotypes of such brazilianness at any time. It’s about this country but not only.

Somehow, the project transforms the signature of Felipe into something even

today,

antro+

69

more special, even to US’ standards. If not for the aesthetics itself – since the way the scene is placed dialogues with a tradition started in Dadaists cabarets and Futurists performances, as he identified once while watching the audience coming into one of his shows – but for the way of discussing us Brazilians, including culture, politics, history, religion, behavior and art, validating itself for the originality of ownership and use. In short, he always faced a type of market predictability. With Sutil, the market itself was Brazil. With Puzzle, they also discovered the possibility of facing the international market without being exotic. This does not fit in all the many technical difficulties involved in their work and the everlasting constant creations which are demanded, what makes leaving home a process even more careful and responsible. Such is this correct and, unfortunately, rare stance. alking to Felipe about theater is to realize his interaction with the contemporary plurality. It is rare for a director to watch so many plays, attend various circles and not being limited to his own ones.

No, not him. Transiting through the main circuits, knowing the most interesting names, discussing his recent productions, questioning the trajectories, validating choices. And with such an ability to see the big picture of the market, he affirms that there is little originality in contemporary works.

t

To the right, show scene from “Dropsie Avenue”, 2004.

70

antro+

“

My plays were so cool that they weren’t even theater”, he says.

The difficulty in being fit in the current production is somewhat common to him ever since.

However, he reacts: questioning theater is stupid because it is the formation base of what takes place in his creations. For him, theater, as it is his main way of expressing himself artistically, is the mechanism to wonder where he is. The problem itself is to determine boundaries all the time.

Felipe explains: he suspects enormously of all borders and limits. It interests him even more when borders are cloudy. So he creates from an idea as the core, with no expectation for it to go right. Not knowing where to start, believing in the idea itself, more in depth than in result. Creation in this way demands extremely personal choices. There’s no problem in dealing with it. “My job is personal, but it is not solipsistic”, he explains. Making playwriting transform into life is a process of salvation.

The story of each one is also the story of their losses, it can be concluded. And Felipe states how easy it is to live losing things, friends, the essences of life. He answers regaining some precepts of Søren Kierkegaard: “In general, we lose living the small things. We win living big, but you don’t get to stop things.”

Felipe puts creation as a personal state of salvation suggests an inherent state to the creating movement into a deep melancholy existence for the

The way

“LIKE OUR BRAIN, WE EXPLORE

4% from theatre.

96%

IS OUT THERE TO BE DISCOVERED.”

Leonardo Medeiros in a scene from “Not About Love”, 2007 (top) and “The Book Of Items From Patient Stephen”, 2012 (right). Above, in detail, a scene from “The Miser”.

72

antro+

antro+

73

being. Maybe that’s why the loss is his condition to be overcome, the instant of perception of the human catastrophe inherent to be living. For the Catalan François Tosquelles, the catastrophecreation matrix reveals a broader role to man: anguish. However, it is not the end, but the proper condition for a new beginning. Creating thus leads the man to another beginning or into believing truly in building events, false structures of replacement to uncontrollable losses. But what reveals the event as an offshoot of

74

antro+

melancholy? Gilles Deleuze explained that we experience in contemporary time the reversing of the relationship between the event and the possible. While the possible gave way to an event, now the event is what creates a possible way. For the French thinker, an event has the power to generate a new existence, a new subjectivity. The immediate consequence is subjective mutation into what is presented as everyday and became intolerable. Thus, the unthinkable becomes thinkable, desirable, visible,

Picture from “Life is Full of Sound and Fury”, 1999. so he concludes. When we point out this thinking towards the need of theater to exist, which Felipe commented, we can see how much creating for him becomes a gesture of tolerance to the actual inevitable losses. he personhood of the choices may be the answer to the importance of the creation gesture, then. Felipe tells he always makes his own projects. Two, however, were suggestions from

other people. The production of The Miser, with actor Paulo Autran; Living Without Dead Times, with actress Fernanda Montenegro. He met Paulo at age 14 when he took his first play so the actor could read it. Twenty years passed before he could direct Autran. Finding a text that could meet the needs of the actor was hard. The classic play seemed to be the possibility to stir up both of them, and the production brought modernity to Molière.

With Fernanda, though, it was different.“I told her that I would start production with

antro+

75

“Pterodactyls”, 2010, a photo of Carol Sachs.

76

antro+

antro+

77

h

what was closest to her bedside.” The play emerged from Simone de Beauvoir’s letters to Jean-Paul Sartre, in a time when Fernanda had lost Fernando Torres, her husband. Unlike the production with Autran in grand setting created by Daniela Thomas, working with Fernanda was different, with rehearsals with both of them in hotel rooms, proving a chair and the whole stage empty to be enough.

“One way or another”, explains Felipe, “it is beautiful when it encourages creation, the get-together of ideas.”

The director learned to deal with actors with themselves, “accessing the most childish passion of portraying drama”, he comments. Since then, he realized the importance of accessing in the other person some kind of game that sensually awakens the memory “why did I decide for theater?” This is the childish point of creation, the inciting of the casual, the unknown, the emotional. “After all, as I said to Fernanda, she was already over 80 and she had the mind of a teenager.”

Then it is common to understand emotion as opposed to awareness and to give the childish the synonym of the playful.

owever

David Lapoujade, from the studies on the reflections of Henri Bergson, explains the misunderstanding. The French philosopher points out emotions, firstly, as the immediate data of consciousness; that is, the length itself which in us is emotion. If all experience is emotional, as John Dewey says, then according to Lapoujade, emotion ensures to every experience its own specificity, so it is always immediately aesthetics.

78

antro+

,

Above, scene from “The Book Of Items From Patient Stephen”, 2012. At the top right, the rain scene from “Dropsie Avenue”, 2004.

Therefore, the immediate data of consciousness arise to the being as alive syntheses, as aesthetically experienced emotions structures or, in other words, representations. “That’s because the Man only perceives life through the shapes in which his intelligence exhibits to him�, the philosopher concludes. In this sense, to cause in the other individual a childish emotion of creation, Felipe builds accumulations of immediate data, alive syntheses in his own consciousness. The idea of the game, then, is more of a provocation and interference than necessarily the playful without deep interference.

In order

to obtain new representations, different knowledge must be stirred in the viewer.

Jorge Albuquerque, linking art and complexity, explains that the artist is the one who is different, exactly for trying other representations of reality, while art, in its power of experiencing emotions, is taken as a refined form of knowledge. Art arises from our need of complexity against reality because we cannot get it directly by reality. So simplicity, for example, is no longer likely and the Man, recognizing himself, becomes somewhat more obtuse.

antro+

79

“SITTING IN A THEATER CHAIR IS A

t

wonderful problem.”

homas Nagel points a way to understand a little more. The Man recognizes perceiving and thinking the world through a perspective marked by his own willingness as individual members of a species. And all recognition leads to the perception of a category; in this case, the own subjectivity. For art, following the proposed thinking, the reality is confronted with the possibility of other subjectivities. Recognizing, then, is an objective impulse, the perception of being able to understand unlimited emotions.

And, therefore, aesthetic experiences are the fundamental mechanisms.

I bring this up

because the language developed by Felipe has always been and remains radical and structurally aesthetics and imagistic.

Theater for him is not necessarily the means to investigate an idea, but it is possible to be one of the features which most appeals aesthetically in this investigation.

So theater happens due to an interest, never ordinarily speaking. Evidence for this argument can be found in the immense distinctiveness in Felipe’s shift among other languages and expressions. Opera, cinema, radio, TV miniseries, newspaper articles, book curator, shows… “If it was very pragmatic”, he says, “it would be limiting.” And, among the experimented languages, he confesses a wish for filming

80

antro+

more. All these years inside theater limits built a purposeful way of also being inside the movies. He goes to the set with no screenplay in hands, he explains.

It allows him to discover during the creation itself. However, the difference is in the enchantment brought over by the cinematographic ceremony to the process. Without it, he doesn’t mind getting involved. Examples are the musicals. In recent years, he has been systematically invited to direct Brazilian productions, especially because of the specifics of their performances. Nevertheless, these are shows in which the ensemble performances are the main attraction, not the ideas, and especially the vanity of the performer.

It’s not the musical language itself that is unattractive to him, he explains adding that he will at some point experience it, but not in the format the market is imposing right now. his awareness was made to time. In twenty years of the Sutil Company, since the company’s emerging in Curitiba, he explains he was very controlling and emotionally aesthetic over the accomplished projects. He even got sick facing panic and depression of losing control and being exposed to chaos.

After his most recent works, especially in Puzzle, he understood the importance of gaming with the risks and provocations.

In Puzzle (d), for example, the fourth

t

Images from “Dropsie Avenue”, 2004.

and most recent performance, there was the presence and interference from a different guest, resulting in unpredictability, since the mere presence invariably induced the work to enforce conditions and natural emotions in each presentation. I ask him about how to make it happen in an opera, as it is much more rigid in structure and process. Felipe reveals that his previous five directions, being his favorite The Bluebeard’s Castle

by Béla Bartók, won’t be the same as the next ones. New ones will be under the views of risk and provocation, inevitably, he confirms. About what composer he would like to direct an opera of, the

answer is straightforward: Arthur de Faria, with whom he has worked in several performances. Felipe sees in him a differential artist, whose research includes the interest in atonal music broadening from Radames Gnatalli to Villa-Lobos. “You want me to be stirred up by opera”, he says having fun. in many works from Felipe, literature is most commonly used to build narratives than playwriting. He started in theater because he was used to reading, he explains. Having contact with Happy Days and Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, theater proved able to

featured

experience ideas. He describes his youth as a complementary dyslexic moment, where he lived with the literature of Dostoevsky and Camus, for example, and also with the punk rock scene and even with the marginal carioca samba.

The wide range of interests – those who minimally live with Felipe know of his deep interest in music – increasingly widened to literature. At the turn of the century, he started reading the plays produced by the British Council and he investigated the Anglo-Saxon playwriting. However, he explains that he grew bored with German, French and English redundant theater seasons,

always returning to or using the same playwrights. So, his journey back to literature was a natural way, starting, over time, to be more interested in the “Brazilian pearls”, as he describes them, extending increasingly to Latin Americans. he Puzzle tetralogy radicalizes his experience in the use of literature.

The Frankfurt Book Fair invited him to create a unique performance for the event, where Brazil would be honored, situation which made the argument for literature as creational friction fully justified. “The idea already existed”,

t

antro+

83

Scene from “The Memory of Water”, 2001. In detail, above, “Flu Season”, 2003, a photo of João Caldas.

84

antro+

freedom IN BRAZIL BECAUSE “ART HAS

market.”

THERE IS NO

antro+

85

86

antro+

Frames from the series created for MTV, “The Girl Without Qualities”, and the movie “Sunstroke”.

t

he confesses. Not the chance. The four plays together unite big names from Brazilian and Latin-American literature, and with the text display and the speech of actors, turns into a surprising urgency dimension. eleuze wrote that literature, cracking the words, releases Visions and Hearings. This would provide the subject a way of existing outside language, which, however, can only emerge through it. For the philosopher, the image resulting from the word appropriation defies the language that imprisons and suffocates us. For it is the language: full of calculations, memories, stories, meanings, intentions, habits. Remembering Lapoujade on the aesthetic being the space of emotion, we can then establish the correlation between the two thinkers. In this approach, literature, when becoming free of its own language structure, can equally provoke words to gather power enough to build aesthetic emotions, not literal ones. Therefore, as he begins to make literature and the word part of his process, Felipe performs the making of aesthetics into challenge in reaching the extreme determination of the indefinite as pure intensity, in the same way Deleuze points out to.

D

he new instances are always something that interests him.

So it makes sense when he directs his speech to the, about the and in the shape of the young. However, how do you deal with young people less and less interested in deep reading? Felipe starts his thinking stating, for example, that he likes lecturing and not conducting workshops because he likes talking. So his plays talk about this issue: means of talking to the audience about certain ideas. But he recognizes a gap in how this dialogue exists in a generation less and less interested in reading, and by extension, knowledge, information and imagination. For him, the situation is more complex when it comes to the young artists themselves. “Theater schools should teach the artist to learn how to read”, he affirms. The problem lies in the fact that young people are ashamed for not knowing how to read, then they hide this difficulty and choose lack of interest as an excuse when facing natural difficulty every reading. That is, it is not about not having interest, but not knowing how, and then the lack of interest is pretended. We live in many ways, today, these false scenarios. And saying that it is exclusive of one generation, well, it is a misconception. “The issue is more

antro+

87

“I LIKE ARTISTS WHO ARE WILLING TO GO DOWN TO THE

s

depths”

cultural”, he concludes. In the perspective of the enlargement of the consciousness, the artist ends up limited to replicate the processes to which they have some empathy.

“What is not realized”, he says, “is Brazil’s difference from other markets.”

In the United States, for instance, the artist would have the obligation and the condition for his/her work to achieve certain objectives set by the market. No, not here. We can play it out in the most unpredictable way. You can do everything and that’s because the country is wrong in every single aspect. has freedom in Brazil because it doesn’t truly stands for a market”, he says. The dilemma is possibly in the ideological use sought to employ to the construction of this local market. Thomas Nagel questions this approach when differentiating realism and idealism. According to his theory about the nature of reality and our place in reality, recognizing our subjectivity as an instance of a phenomenon reveals our relationship with the world, our mere insertion, in which we are part of the world and with which he get into any other more specific relationships. The dilemma is not being limited to a single subjectivity. Comprising a multiplicity of points of subjective views, Nagel points out to what he classified as paradoxical twist. He concludes that we

“Art

88

antro+

are integral parts of the reality, but the understanding of this relationship is more informative about ourselves and the world than necessarily the means to act on it. In other words, realism is where and how we are and our recognition of that. Ideology is trying to reform this existence, which is paradoxically impossible for even the action over reality to happen only in the permissions offered by it. he theater of Felipe Hirsch faces both the condition of being real, surpassing the image on the emotional approach of a unique and unexpected experience, as the determinist ideology which implies a specific role to art.

It escapes to both of them because it relies mainly on theater as an end to an idea. And you can only build so many ideas during time if you are in constant and critical interaction with both relationships. An artist before being a director, then. fter two hours and a little more of conversation, it had to reach an end. The late night progressed through the next day, it had been a while. But the will of new meetings remains. As the table of the bar caused the desire that brought us into this meeting, this meeting causes the desire for new bar tables. Let’s hope them to come. Having a conversation with Felipe is to be closer to the world without so many previous certainties and concealments. And this has been incredibly amazing and delicious.

t

a

Scene from the opera “The Bluebeard’s Castle”, 2006.

vanity, “I WILL NOT DO THEATER FOR ANYONE’S

NOT EVEN MINE.”

samoht

ostermeier The appearance of a current theater by encounter with a realistic manifestation text photos

renato parada e arnod eclair

interpreter translation

ruy filho

isabel hรถlzl

veridiana mercatelli

88

Thomas Ostermeier during his visit to Brazil, in an exclusive interview to Antro Positivo.

94

antro+

m

aking a deliberately political theater requires acknowledging the quality of how specific the present moment is. That’s nothing easy though. And settling for drafting something simplistic and superficial is impossible. Instead we need to go beyond the initial questions, invade other perceptions of the moment in order to structure - starting from a different angle - a discourse that is, at the same time, an aesthetic statement in full dialogue with the principles that guided previous creations. That’s really nothing easy. Taking advantage of the presence of Thomas Ostermeier in São Paulo, the magazine Antro Positivo was talking with the German director. Late in the afternoon, the sky in twilight, we accommodated ourselves on one of the outside tables of the Goethe Institute and shared our reflections with the help of an interpreter. He – still accompanied by a small cup of coffee. Me – with a double shot, no sugar. But - I confess - it had already been the third of the afternoon.

I begin with his latest remarks in European newspapers about living in a period of crisis – of aesthetics and of content – but not necessarily of theater as a medium.

Complexity, to Ostermeier, is made in the moment, when dramatic theater and postdramatic theater are set against each other, leading to a kind of short-sighted contentment with the formation of affirmative aesthetics. His arguments, however, need to be based in time and space to be better understood and not to appear as mere generalizations. He claimed to be surrounded by various movements of theatric deconstruction and of establishing authentic aesthetics that flee the dictates of conventional theater in Germany. This was when he was still a college student, decades ago. So, his choice was to escape from new patterns that became equally referential, and to construct the de-constructed. To restore the essentiality of a reality, when put on stage. Therefore, the correct question should not be anymore about what aspect of realism, but which understanding of reality.

In Brazil, we experienced the opposite way. The last decades were affirmations of increasingly realistic texts with everyday scenes under the pretext of social repreantro+

95

96

antro+

The actor Lars Eidingeren Hamlet.

antro+

97

sentation, to start we have to artistically oppose this with the deconstruction of drama and of reality. It is interesting, in the end, to notice how the judgments are being attributed to the values that guide the choices and not to those who have made those judgments. In a sort of predictable circle, where the spiral produces the return to the counterpoint, always producing the renewal of the original structures.

After experimenting with contemporary dramaturgy, the plays created after Henrik Ibsen and William Shakespeare offered Ostermeier the needed approaches to understanding how reality could be approached again by aesthetics, through what he calls Capitalist Realism. Fundamental to the project of this realistic presentation is the conception of a poetry in everyday life, being performed by ordinary measures and in structures close to our real activities and responses.

98

antro+

Actress Jenny König performing “Mesure for Mesure”,

by William Shakespeare.

For the director the two authors with whom he has worked the most over the last years sum up the representation of how the conscious occupies spaces in this new reality. The first, demonstrated in Hamlet, brings political awareness as state of agitation and discovery, reflecting an individual, arched under the weight of its own perceptions. The second differs exactly by his capacity to react, an awareness of political action, as can be seen in “The Enemy of the People”.

The importance is neither to limit yourself by a merely technical construction of realism as a historic language, nor by updating them. It is not so much about realism, he explains. The plays are, in his view, laboratories of human behavior, by which he searches for the authenticity of this existence. That could be, he concludes, the possible utopia of reality inside the games created by the spectators. antro+

99

“ClassiCal texts must be more disrespeCted.”

However, none of this would make sense if there weren’t a deliberate instance of political configuration about the other in the game. Therefore, the Capitalist Realism resizes the other from the new logic of political configuration, on which the economic capital is imposed. By building his art on such arguments, the director creates a panorama of the most relevant contemporary thoughts, which emerge from, among others, Antonio Negri – as one of the most significant ones.

According to the Italian philosopher, we experience the progressive decline of the sovereignty of Nation-States in recent decades, leading to the factual subordination of social existence under capital. The new individuum, now decentralized in its participatory capacity, is being kept hostage by economic desires, without many possibilities to act or to resist.

It is necessary that the individuum accepts its condition as a form of awareness of its reality, in order to find mechanisms of destruction of this separation between the social and the political. Negri calls this Multitude. To the thinker, the Multitude is a constituent power of desired masses, relying on the perspective of being the expansion of democracy which will be common to everybody.

The language of Capitalist Realism designed by Ostermeier then correlates to the need to perform in the present instant of events. He isn’t interested in building a future as something that needs to be invented, by the use of artistic reflections as sidewalks above all in aesthetic originality. The present is his state of presence and action. It is necessary to be real on stage as much as you want the discourses real 100

antro+

antro+

101

Above, stage of “Crave”, by Sarah Kane. Right, the actor Stefan Stern in “An enemy of the people”, performed in São Paulo in 2013.

and representative in what is exposed. Thus, what Ostermeier sews is the reality as a manifestation of an identity, which is imposed on the present by forces in conflict with power.

No wonder, Ostermeier spells out theater as the realization of a box-fight between the stage and the audience.

Not by direct physical conflict, but by letting the presentation of reality emerge as a farce, directed by other interests.

Negri says, however, that to reunite the social and the political should not create yet another unity. On the contrary. It is necessary to search, in the words of the philosopher, the production of differences, of inventions, of modes of living, of explosions of singularities. If we bring this to art, then Ostermeier’s choice of negating the avantgarde conglomerate seems to escape the principles of the Multitude. But this would be a simplistic interpretation of the literal combination of a concept and a practice. The theater of Ostermeier reproduces the human inability to achieve these conditions, exactly by the domination of politics by interests of capital. The lack of action, as can be seen in Hamlet, does not imply unawareness, but the referential loss of the current human state in how to respond to such an imperious system. Ostermeier’s realism produces a 102

antro+

antro+

103

104

antro+

Martina Borroni, Marcela Giesch, Rosabel Huguetem in “Morte em Veneza / Kindertotenlieder�.

antro+

105

Above, Franz Hartwig, Bernardo Arrias Porras performing “Mesure for Mesure”, by William Shakespeare. Right, Katharina Schüttler e Jörg Hartmann in “Hedda Gabler”, by Ibsen.

perturbation effect of this inability to turn the social and capital into action in an aesthetic process. And it is by this aspect that the difference required by Negri is not necessary anymore as an invention or creation of new ways of living, but by the vertical dive into the essence of what prevents the Multitude from its full existence.

In other words, even though the texts of Ibsen and Shakespeare chosen by Ostermeier, and also his contemporaries like Sarah Kane, expose the structures of this capitalization of reality, the most important in Ostermeier is the human resizing of what remains or fails to exist. This is not treated like a realism or as a moral search. If something can be more specific to his invention it might be referred to as a post-dramatic realism. But that would require many more pages, in order to turn our attention to the creational coherence of this concept.

Asked about the ease in his venture to and letting go of texts, Ostermeier answers about the importance of understanding narrative as a collage process, an the freedom in handling the elements allows you to get to the core of a appropriate dramaturgy. It bothers you how overly respected classical texts are. It is not necessary to modernize

106

antro+

them. But to recreate them from recognizing their cores, in reverberating discourses throughout history and in their present formats. Therefore, the collage does not specifically refer to the re-union of codes of representation. They are, above all, the appropriate codes expressed in modern clothes. This approximation with the urgency of the moment offers more design to Capitalist Realism, as it sets the scene brought by the immediacy of events in full presence of their imaginations.

Maybe that’s the possible starting point for a dive into understanding what a possible post-dramatic realism could be, since the simultaneity of real occurrences and their representations cannot account for sustaining the involved dramaticity in the consequences assimilated by individuals, since they, to prove fact and scene, are confused by the possibility of real creations and of possible realities. The correct procedure of recognizing the real fact exists in the involved subjectivities only as an aesthetic demonstration, even if it is a copy of what has occurred, an affirmation of subjective interpretations of reality. Not necessarily as truth, but as fact; therefore, without his immediate relation to the subject and to the corresponding dramatic values in this relationship. antro+

107

In this page, Katharina Schüttler and Annedore Bauer in “Hedda Gabler”. Right, Lars Eidinger in “Hamlet”.

“theater presents itself as a box fight.�

“making art is already a sort of utopian promise” If, for Negri, the imagination of the Multitude predisposes the subjectivity for a common action in the face of crisis, the Capitalist Realism amplifies the common action to the crises of content and aesthetics, believing in the importance of provoking instants of utopias about man and society in the spectator.

Before we finished our coffees and continued to the farewells, I ask Ostermeier if that didn’t mean that the most important utopia of our time was to believe that possible utopias still exist, whatever they may be, about whom and for what. The eyes of Ostermeier loose themselves in the depth of the night sky. Moments like these, silences in search for precise words, were the ground of the entire meeting. Ostermeier is careful about taking the risk of reaching conclusions. It’s night. We are all tired. Ostermeier stays silent for long minutes. And then simplifies everything with a hopeful “I think so.” So what theater can be is the possible utopia for the design from a current reality. I like that. Coffee finished, hugs.

Last words. He, on the way to Buenos Aires. Me, homewards. But on my walk back, a doubt. I don’t remember having paid the drinks. And I realize how fundamental it is for each individual to broaden their awareness of the small intricacies which determine their own reality. Whether on stage, in the audience or buying a coffee.

110

antro+

antro+

111

112

antro+

chris jatahy visitando

between the expanded theater and the staged cinema text

ruy filho

translation

valmir martins

antro+

113

T

heater and cinema have met in many ways in recent years. And the processes already stand as recognizable events. In a way, even though we have become accustomed, from the encounter results the stimulus and the surprise as arguments to experience creations. It is important, however, to differentiate the video on scene from the intersection between the languages. Video, placed in a corner or merely projected, structures its scenic condition and not the cinematographic one. The common misconception reiterates the high degree of conceptual development necessary to merge theater/cinema.

And there are many theater makers confusing the possibilities. To understand these and other issues, the magazine invited director

114

antro+

Christiane Jatahy for a chat. Her works act in the theatrical ambiance generating the scene as the epicenter between cinema and installation. During our meeting, she offered a valuable glimpse into the making, adding also her availability to the labyrinths of the most complex reflections. So let’s head to them.

We begin addressing exactly her choice in approaching theater and cinema. To Jatahy, it couldn’t

to the left, Utopia.doC, created especially for the Frankfurt Fair, in 2013.

Below, in the outside.

be different. She confesses to being fundamental to her directing work in the theater her experiences as a cinema spectator.

Starting initially from the installations, cinema gradually came to occupy the scene as a structure of the shows. Not only as an artifice but as a concept of language use. It interests her offering the viewer a series of points of views from the scene in the face of the narrative event. She works,

antro+

115

therefore, from structures which dialogue with the subjectivity of the viewer. “It’s like it’s inside the camera”, she sums up.

In order to achieve this, shows were gaining a dialectical interplay between observer and stage, to transmute it into the receiver.

That changes everything. When you have the other as an observer being your principle, the way traditional audiences are treated, one must lead the narrative through the premise of the other

116

antro+

one being out of the theatrical process. It is the other one the only one who spies theater as an event. In contrast, the other one as a receiver becomes the final focus of the process. The atonement, yet necessary, is now on the aesthetic and structural mechanisms by which the narrative is justified. This inversion between stable narrative and the narrative offered as a result of external presence generates another state of presence to the observer mediated by his or her possibilities of choices. The movement is similar to the camera and to the principle of framing. While the film is part of the image; in theater, it is done within the story.

The accomplice relationship of narrative significance needs even greater approach precepts. In this case, being the theater a living present expression, the closer the condition of the receiver/ observer, the better. Maybe this was why Jatahy has gradually ap-

“I feel less and less a theater dIrector�

Portraits of the participants of Utopia. doC, in sĂŁo Paulo.

proached her shows to human stories. It means that the individual is the central event. The Between, as called in the dynamic stagespectator, in this case, acts from new territories. It is not only about being theater or scenic installation, but the discovery process and understanding out of the scene itself, in real time, empirically. She says she no longer knows if what she does is theater, and confesses to feel less and less a theater director.

The process of telling stories led to the importance of developing a biographical playwriting, from the artists and casts involved. The Self as the poetry of the now, making the documentary context bring real quality into the drama, setting new places for creation. Dividing in two moments, Jatahy points out the differences in the very understanding of this trajectory. In the first one, the writing looks outside, as documentary filmmaking does,

antro+

117

still establishing a fiction as a support. It’s like the fictional was drenched in reality, she explains. In other words, bringing into fiction the possible biographical documentary feature allows appropriation. There is a clear value for each element, overlapping the fictional condition as the first support.

So, life is brought into the context of the show, and to the public remains understanding how symbolic and metaphorical transposition had occurred. In the second moment, it introjects the present, away from the theatrical text, especially the classics with which it has worked more, so, by the intrusion of reality, it becomes able for it to return. The movement, which has been called sling, meets the need of betraying theater fiction to retrieve it from reality. Now, the viewer is the centrality described before, it is the pivot to escape from theater and where

o olhar de René Habermacher sobre “Medea”.

118

antro+

the meeting with its reality will offer the decisive approach.

Jatahy’s shows passed since then to be a collection of possibilities of looking at reality and man. “Stories are inherent to human beings. People fictionalize their own stories”, she says.

The approach of the other one as well as the narrative would be the most consistent step. Bringing to the scene, not the observation and reception anymore, but the particular state from the

other one makes a point. Through conversations, meetings and various exposure mechanisms of the subjectivity of the viewer/ character, Jatahy pierces fiction with the exposed and conducted reality. It is and it is not a fiction then.

Supporting the unprepared other one to the scene and keeping him/her at the disposal to reality without artificialities requires interaction. The span of time, she explains, made the guests forget the camera. In the end, the work begins to occur more in the relationship than the individual. And the centrality of the process revealed itself in how the image which was recorded and projected in the show-installation could capture the invisible.

The paradox is in the condition of being the whole image a representation, that is, the realization of its presence. Bringing the invisible is like defining nothing. Any definition will determine

scene from Julia, directed by Jatahy.

antro+

119

something, leaving it, therefore, to be the nothing. Just as nothing can be appointed by itself, without adding concrete developments of the representation, also the emptiness can only be represented imagetically by its no presence. Finding in the other one the particular face of emptiness means represent it with its

120

antro+

unrepresentable substance. After all, the emptiness presupposes being something, unlike the nullity of nothingness.

However, theater itself is representative, in so far as the code agrees with the viewer being everything in it provided therein an appropriation of the reality and not the actual reality. It means that the emptiness, or the subjectivity of the other one, to be brought into the stage, needs to be artificially constructed to provide a sensation and never a real photograph. This is a theatrical condition from the documentary in playwriting and it has been mistakenly used with mere talk in first person.

on this page, Julia Bernat and Rodrigo dos santos on a scene from Julia, and on the left, the Book, with actor Eduardo Moscovis.

“Medea”, em foto de René Habermacher.

8

121

3

antro+

Chris Jatahy reaches the poetic dimension of this artificial state of subjectivity as to believe in the power of its truth.

The director explains working with the actors by the assumption that there can only be truth in the scene when the audience and the actors are seeing the same thing. The theater, for

Her latest installation, and what if they were headed to Moscow?.

her, is rather an event for which it is essential to seek again the other one, recovering the Between lost by this kind of split between stage and audience. The audience, she explains, “is made of individuals.” “And we can only understand ourselves if we look at what is not in ourselves.” This principle of identification entails the need for another quality of scene, narrative, of playwriting, actor, and direction. Therefore, these are new approaches and intersections.

So cinema is used as an interface to drive the gaze to the multiplicity of a narrative. Jatahy also emphasizes the importance of differentiating hermetic and profound. The theater, she explains, “doesn’t need to be mind-boggling.” But it doesn’t need to be superficial. It is possible to find the boundary where both of them collide, the instant when the scene is accessible and deep. And nothing is truly viable to bring this meeting than representing more directly what is recognizable to the other one: his or her own humanity.

Christiane Jatahy is undoubtedly one of the most interesting artists to this time we’re in. Her works recover existence as something unique and common, establishing through aesthetics the processes of experiencing the present as a very instant of the sublime. With their pains, shadows, yeah, it is true. But what would be more appropriate for the present, if not the nebulous state in which we have imposed? If humanity is hidden by the presence of a confused and strange present to man himself, art is the broadest way to translate and represent their hiding places. And Jatahy invites us, like few others, a walk through the darkness, made as the most beautiful way leading against ourselves.

122

antro+

“to what extent should we use what we understand as real?”

antro+

123

“how can the pIcture capture the InvIsIble?”

Espetáculo nowhere, em foto de Marilena stafylidou.

124

antro+

isabel teixeira in and what if they were headed to Moscow?.

antro+

125

arkadi visitando

Dancing as a way of building experiences in the other one por

ruy filho

interpreter translation

126

antro+

gustavo vaz

valmir martins

antro+

127

128

antro+

a

t the end of Archive, the wistful look of Arkadi Zaides further extends the sense of what was shown on stage. It was not only about being tired. It also reveals the exhaustion when dealing with the broadness of a topic that required him an emotional level of involvement beyond ordinary dance. Living in Israel, bringing to his own body shapes and movements from Israelis filmed by Palestinians in the West Bank forced him to dive into a deep state of deconstruction of himself. It is as if only when the body was transformed, the other one could be recognized. In Itaú Cultural’s auditorium, sitting very close to the stage, it was not only the other one that Arkadi presented me, but also the story in its wider dimension, in its most terrible events. That’s why, past MITsp, we looked back for him to get on a chat, now more distant from the experienced sensations and emotions. Until the morning with Gustavo Vaz as our guest artist, we talked about dance, body, image and especially about violence.

Before talking about the meeting, however, it is fundamental to understand the complexity of the conflict in Palestine. I have no intention to diagnose, conclude or explain too much. We are in Brazil, far from the region; us Brazilians are even more distant historically and religiously in these issues so many times intertwined throughout the conflict. This is this way because we’d rather have this way, not getting involved in what seems to be a problem on the other side of the planet. This is a huge mistake. What happens in Palestine and Israel does regard all of us, because it reveals crueler aspects than the conflict itself, not just as an event, but as a failure of our civility.

Therefore, without taking any short-sighted and simplistic side of it, I take two scholars who recently agreed to put their views aside and exchanged letters of replies and rejoinders. All this material is gathered and published in the same book. On one hand, Dan Cohn-Sherbok, a Jew, with academic experience at the Cambridge University; the other one, Dawond El-Alami, a Palestinian, Oxford academic. For Cohn-Sherbok, our attention is required to the fact that Jews were being persecuted for centuries, even more after the moment that Christianity became the dominant religion in Europe centuries ago. Another moment of horror, even fresher in our imagination, is the Nazi massacre and the attempted extermination of all Jews, the creation of the concentration camps that permeate the deepest horror ever created by man. Then, it would not be unusual to reach an international consensus, during World War II, on the urgency of creating a place for the Jewish existence in search of their safety, he said.

in the preceding pages, arkadi is on stage with archive, through the lens of Gadi dagon. on the left, his portrait by Joeri thiry.

antro+

129

“the danger of theater, of the performance, etc., is only presenting something and not showing the thing itself” However, El-Alami questions the way and the consequences of this creation, not the threatening condition. He explains that the Jewish Palestinian history ended in 137 BC and that until the mid-twentieth century, Jews were not the majority in the region. These 1800 years, between Jews having lived there and no longer lived, gave room for new people and societies. Thus, the creation of that place as a sacred place for Jews, to where they should return, was based on the memory of a particular people and not also of those who were already there, leading the urgency of the arriving movement to a kind of colonization of a inhabited land, while, paradoxically, the world was turning against colonialism.

Cohn-Sherbok explains that the Balfour Declaration, crucial to the creation of the State of Israel in the Holy Land, with Britain as its greatest supporter, through the White Paper presented by Churchill, which proposed a peaceful coexistence between Arabs and Jews, beginning from a point of division, beyond the creation of legal councils to contemplate the rights of both parties. To El-Alami, there are two misconceptions at this point. The first one is the fact of Britain not being Palestine’s proprietary to decide on it, nor did the Jews had an international legal legitimacy to establish specific legislation. The second one is that the buying of authentic lands in a country by foreigners does not entitle them to establish a State in the acquired territory. And he reacts also explaining that a State based on ethnicity and religion created in an inhabited land can only be achieved through a degree of ethnic cleansing. Cohn-Sherbok recalls that all attempts to build a council or to establish a dialogue with the Arabs were refused, making impossible the relations of structural, legal and moral cohabitation. And he goes further by stating that Jewish security is not entire, and it remains threatened as it was in previous centuries. Finally, Dawond points out that if the threat to the Jews still stands as a latent possibility, the extermination of Palestine seems truly a real process.

The previous paragraph is not capable of handling not even close to the events and turns that built the conflict. It serves at least to show how many deviations

130

antro+

scenes from archive by photographers Jean Couturier and Gadi dagon respectively.

antro+

131

“you have to find out the violence in every person’s potential” scene from Land-Research with anat Cederbaum collaboration and performance from Raida adon, asaf aharonson, sva Li Levy, Yuli Kovbasnyan and Ofir Yudilevitch.

Photo by tami Weiss.

132

antro+

and interests there are in each of the arguments, as much as they are correct. It interests us here the understanding of how these events simultaneously got aside proponents and attempt deformers. For Jean Baudrillard, the problem is the feeling placed at any event. The greater the desire, the greater the disappointment. That sums up, in a sense, half century of disagreements and attempts building up and still accumulating even more disappointments and detachments. For the philosopher, humans dream of senseless events that will release them from the tyranny of meaning and from the ever-present limitation of provoking equivalence between cause and effect.

Added to this constant frustration is how much the information contents are desperately inferior to the power of the media. And he concludes that we live simultaneously in fear of excess of meaning and total meaninglessness. Arkadi performs a research in his own body movements to find the other’s body as a means of diffusion of these excesses and meaningless urges pointed out by Baudrillard. Parts of the bodies which were naturalized when living with violence. The gestures are there, he says, from others and from himself.

And, to use them as material, searches in the abstract movements derived from decontextualization symbols

antro+

133

and signs of representation, not of the being, but from violence itself as a real vocabulary of a body reframed and re-meant by war. If only represented, the everyday gestures would be reproductions of violence through dance. To go beyond, he utilizes video of real images which assist and remove gestures, and whose contexts are shared with the viewers. For Arkadi, the fact that the video material is present with him, confronting him, creates a greater effect of violence in his work, he concludes. Therefore, during the process, he asks himself what his own body can add to images of violence. He seeks to build poetry for the body and through it to be able to reach something more interesting.

By appropriating it, he sums up, new signs appear and make them new ones.

There is always the risk of any approach to this subject to be understood as a manifesto in defense or prosecution. Arkadi protects himself from history and events through artistic methodology. From his perspective, it breaks the subject as being only political, and the images end up being deconstructed.

An important point in his methodology is the video remote control being in his grasp so he can move it in the way it interests him.

134

antro+

However, an image is always more appealing to the viewer than the body on stage. He agrees that there is consumption of the exposed image, but without questioning its violence. But he is attentive not to generalize the viewer.

Although it is more attractive to the eye, image also connects more quickly. This happens because violence is no stranger to us as we would like. And, while many of the values and issues involved in the conflict are odd and distant, there is in the conflict something bigger and deeper reverberating in everyone.

The imagery of war pervades even those who are not in it. We are subjected to it by images, fictions, descriptions, testimonials, etc. We live therefore also with the sensations of terror. Jacques Derrida, one of the most influential contemporary French thinkers, tells that war leads to the intimidation of civilians and involves aspects of terrorism. And he expands the concept, even more, such concept by proposing the non-application of any strict separation between different types of terrorism, national or international, local or global. He concludes by arguing that, when attached to the traumatic memory, the victim tries to make sure of being able to withstand the impact of what is feasible of repeating. It is important to real-

archive, photo

by Gadi dagon.

Between israel and palestine, the complexity of the Beings in wars

scene from Land-Research, photo by tami Weiss.

136

antro+

antro+

137

ize here that the conflict in Palestine dimensioned the impact on war and terror arising from the possibility of being a possible war in other circumstances and place, in that the events, as Baudrillard thought, accumulate more by their disappointments than their solutions. In other words, the endurance of a conflict for so long makes the experience of everyone a convivial process to the existence of insoluble conflicts. That’s the biggest bully today, says Derrida. This occurs especially because of the way the media contributes to multiply the force of the traumatic experience, he explains.

Arkadi accounts for the unconscious relationship with the intrinsic violence already in our imagination, yet he realizes how much we do not know of our own part and responsibility in the making of such violence. So he appropriates of specific places and locations for global affairs.

There must be uncovered the violence in the person’s potential, he explains. So, he uses the body to dialogue not only with perception but with the very body of the other one. More technically, he talks about the mirror neurons to justify why he makes the body of the other one his own dialogue.

According to neuroscience, humanity learned to copy the action of a similar body, mirroring it, and so built the basic tools of language.

Representing the gestures of violence found in the videos, Arkadi causes mirroring of the action in the viewer, who comes to understand that unconsciously in his body the violence itself. So it is less a local issue and more of everyone’s problem, and it is independent of the specificities of history, understanding violence as a structuring code to man. He sums up thereby enhancing how much dance is able to do and building on the other.

In a way, Arkadi points to the gesture as a proponent of an objectified communication. The problem is in the generalization when we deal remotely with the referentials of the information. It is common for us to limit the extremes in the Middle East to the religious fundamentalism, be it Jewish or Muslim. But that’s little.

scene from Land-Research, photo by tami Weiss.

138

antro+

antro+

139

archive, photo by Jean Couturier.

140

antro+

antro+

141

Jürgen Habermas addresses both communication and fundamentalism in a same argument. The German philosopher says fundamentalism has less to do with any specific text or religious dogma, and more with the morality of belief and, therefore, the violent reaction against the modern way of understanding and practicing religion. As any religious doctrine is based on a dogmatic core of belief, modernity leads to a violent uprooting of traditional ways of life, leading to a panic reaction to modernity, perceived more as a threat than an opportunity. Violence is a communicative disease, he concludes. Summarizing, the process takes place by a spiral of violence which leads to a distorted communication spiral, and that one to a mutual distrust and then to rupture. When asked why taking violence to the stage, since it exists in one way or another in everyone, Arkadi answers he is not reaffirming its existence, but questioning how we are guilty and responsible. When dancing the very gestures of a moment of violence, we begin to observe it from another angle. After all, he questions, can we really understand what we see there? Reactions and paths differ in specific environments. If dancing in his own city, the relationship between Israel and Palestine is evident, ‘cause it is an Israeli dancing for them, he explains. Yet, elsewhere, the fast connection at home and his questioning of the present gives way to the attempt of building the movement the perception of being part of the present.

Finally, I tell him that being the gesture appropriated by him from the video a way to bring it to our own body, so it’s as if he took us to dance the violence and all the complexity that the conflict exposes so naturally. He laughs. He doesn’t know how to answer to that and suggests that this is the final remark of the article. But I would need to have an answer to that too to end it here. I prefer to give the role to another person. To the American writer Philip Roth who better answers us both: it’s about the taste to examine in detail at a social event (like the gesture of throwing stones or loading the rifle, repeated by Arkadi), as if it were a dream or a masterpiece. Life, I understand then, is the most appropriate material for the beautiful and the horrible needed words of the Art.

“can you really understand what you see?”

142

antro+

show publication image from Quiet, directed and choreographed by arkadi Zaides and with the collaboration of Joanna Lesnierowska.

antro+

143

144

antro+

P.S.: While I finish this text, Vatican addresses Palestine as an independent State and infuriates Israel. These are the desires and disappointments of new developments.

Baudrillard, wherever you are, you should be aware. archive, photo

by Jean Couturier.

antro+

145

a bit of our hist

bete coelho + ricardo bittencourt + emílio kalil + jô soares + marília pêra + enrique diaz + jaram lee win vandekeybus + denise fraga + antonio araújo +

www. antropo

tory in

3

years

+ carlos augusto calil + danilo santos de miranda e + luiz melo + romeo castellucci + thomas ostermeier + willem dafoe + mikhail bar yshnikov + robert le page

si ti vo. com. br

visitando

O outro.

Matéria única e intranferível.

Poética singular.

E teatro. por

camille o`sullivan

luigi de angelis

-

-

uk

italy

ruy filho

odyssey works

-

usa

the wooster group

-

usa

others exclusive interviews

willem dafoe e mikhail baryshnikov

jaram lee

-

south korea

wim vandekeybus

the toneel groep amsterdam

-

-

belgium

netherlands

creators and publishers

ruy filho

patrĂ­cia cividanes

is playwright,

is a graphic designer

director, researcher

and photographer.

and theater critic.

divides the editorial

is responsible

content with ruy and

for the editorial

is responsible for

content and

the art direction

interviews of antro

throughout of antro

positivo magazine

positivo magazine

c

a

m p

a

i

g

n

Freedom actresses aline fanju + camila biondan

in life in art

this is a campaign

positivo

design Ruy Filho and Patricia Cividanes. photo Alex Silva. assistant Bruno marรงal. beauty renatto souzza Studio coordination Andrea Silva. img treatment Giovani Ferreira

c

a

m p

a

i

g

n

Freedom actors caco ciocler + gero camilo

in life in art

this is a campaign

positivo

design Ruy Filho and Patricia Cividanes. photo Alex Silva. assistant Bruno marรงal. beauty renatto souzza Studio coordination Andrea Silva. img treatment Giovani Ferreira

theater

+

cultural politic

digital magazine free

+

quarterly

launched in october

2011

exists to talk about theater, art, culture and politics exists to be informal and profound exists to discuss and approach

w w w. a n t r o p o s i t i v o . c o m . b r