{"id":188190,"date":"2015-05-15T12:43:00","date_gmt":"2015-05-15T15:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=188190"},"modified":"2015-06-25T12:52:19","modified_gmt":"2015-06-25T15:52:19","slug":"balance-and-rigor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/balance-and-rigor\/","title":{"rendered":"Balance and rigor"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Arte_Barbara\"Gustavo Miranda \/ Ag\u00eancia O Globo <\/span>In the early 1990s, a well-known theater director was preparing for opening night of his version of Macbeth<\/em>\u00a0in Campinas when he noticed a woman seated in the lobby well before show time. When he found out she was waiting for the show to begin, he offered her a more comfortable seat.\u00a0 She refused, preferring to stay put.\u00a0 Neither her large glasses nor her white hair tipped him off to the fact that she was one of Brazil\u2019s most respected theater critics.\u00a0 A few days later, he realized who it was as he read the harsh reviews she had given the show \u2013 as well as other shows that would later be staged by him.\u00a0 It was at that moment that Ulysses Cruz launched his legendary rivalry with Barbara Heliodora, which got to the point where he barred her from future productions.<\/p>\n

That episode is not the only controversy in the career of the studious carioca<\/em> who specialized in William Shakespeare, to whom she devoted such commitment that she would take a bus from Rio de Janeiro to inland S\u00e3o Paulo just to evaluate the quality of an adaptation. Heliodora Carneiro de Mendon\u00e7a, better known by her pseudonym Barbara Heliodora, died April 10, 2015 at age 91, more than two decades after what you might call another episode of controversy. Gerald Thomas would repent and seek forgiveness from the critic but other notables in the theater world never change their minds and never came to accept what they saw as Heliodora\u2019s excessive rigor, expressed over a career in the press that spanned 25 years.<\/p>\n

Such aversion was compensated by those who admired her to the same or greater degree, and perhaps with the same exaggerated fervor.\u00a0 All of this is a result of the profession she commanded with the authority of one who deeply understood\u00a0 the works of the English playwright and the theater of Chekhov and Ibsen, among many others. Heliodora\u00a0 began her work as a critic with short stints at Tribuna da Imprensa<\/em> and Jornal do Brasil<\/em> in the late 1950s. At that time, she was already a decade removed from earning her Bachelor of Arts degree at Connecticut College, in the United States, a certification later revalidated by the School of Languages and Literature at what would come to be known as the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, (UNIRIO). There, after gaining experience directing the National Theater Service and giving classes at the Brazilian Drama Conservatory, she was admitted to the Theater School in 1971. Her formal academic relationship would end with her 1985 retirement, by which time she had earned the titles of professor emeritus and dean of the institution, but her love of teaching never faded. Classes given from her home in the Rio de Janeiro neighborhood of Cosme Velho became famous and were attended by actors such as Pedro Paulo Rangel and Marco Nanini.<\/p>\n

\"Tonico

Dalton Val\u00e9rio<\/span>Tonico Pereira and Vera Holtz in Timon de Atenas<\/em> (2014), a Shakespearean work translated by HeliodoraDalton Val\u00e9rio<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

The accumulation of tasks in which she engaged to supplement her income, or for the love of theater, would be a characteristic of this author of essays, books and translations, with Shakespeare always at the forefront.\u00a0 Her work as a translator is always remembered when some new staging of the playwright\u2019s work would use Heliodora\u2019s translations on the stage, such as last year\u2019s Timon de Atenas<\/em> (Timon of Athens) an updated adaptation starring Vera Holtz in the role of male protagonist, the millionaire patron.<\/p>\n

Less public were the university activities she discreetly carried out.\u00a0 While to the despair of many, she continued to write her criticism for Vis\u00e3o<\/em> magazine or O Globo <\/em>newspaper, where she served from 1990 – 2014, Heliodora also trained a generation of actors, directors and technicians at UNIRIO where she taught theater history, including to one of her three daughters, the actress Patr\u00edcia Bueno. \u201cShe was as strict with me as she was to the others, never making it easy for anyone, much less for me,\u201d she recalls.\u00a0 \u201cBut everyone loved her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Remarkable knowledge<\/strong>
\nAnother student became a dear and appreciative figure. Claudia Braga swears she was the only student advised by Heliodora while pursuing her master\u2019s degree at UNIRIO, where she wrote a thesis on Brazilian theater during the time of the First Republic.\u00a0 \u201cPeople were afraid of her and would not choose her,\u201d she says.\u00a0 \u201cAt first, she resisted me, saying she wasn\u2019t familiar with the topic, but I won her over with my persistence; she knew everything, but was modest and whenever she wasn\u2019t sure of something, she had me seek out D\u00e9cio de Almeida Prado.\u201d Braga, now a professor at the Federal University of S\u00e3o Jo\u00e3o del Rey, in Minas Gerais State, recalls that her advisor simply changed the direction of the proposed topic.\u00a0 \u201cShe had me read the scripts from that time period; she always said that if you couldn\u2019t understand the scenes, you should go to the scripts to find the truth.\u201d\u00a0 Braga returned the kindness of the past by editing an extensive collection of papers by the carioca<\/em> author.<\/p>\n

One of the few times when the critic actually left Rio de Janeiro was to pursue her doctorate at the University of S\u00e3o Paulo in 1975, partly because the program did not exist in Rio de Janeiro and partly out of affinity with her advisor, the American professor Fredric Litto, who was based there. \u201cI referred her for her remarkable knowledge and she ended up coming here to defend her thesis,\u201d recalls Litto. The thesis,\u00a0A express\u00e3o dram\u00e1tica do homem pol\u00edtico em Shakespeare<\/em>\u00a0(The dramatic expression of the male politician in Shakespeare) was later made into a reference book. Heliodora remained at USP for seven years as full professor and also taught some extension courses.\u00a0 Litto recalls her peculiarities. \u201cShe was a pragmatist above all else, inspired by the American rather than the French school, the latter followed by D\u00e9cio de Almeida Prado and S\u00e1bato Magaldi.\u201d He went on to say that this attitude, along with the fact that she did not adopt the popular viewpoint of the time when determining good theater, made all the difference. \u201cShe was committed to dramatic quality and was not unnecessarily moved; she had the balance and the rigor of not dispensing criticism that changes as the wind blows.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Barbara Heliodora was recognized for her harshness as a theater critic","protected":false},"author":571,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[154],"tags":[263],"coauthors":[1530],"class_list":["post-188190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts","tag-theatre"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/571"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188190\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188190"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=188190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}