{"id":7492,"date":"2012-02-27T20:05:42","date_gmt":"2012-02-27T23:05:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/2012\/02\/27\/criando-sobre-o-palco-vazio-2\/"},"modified":"2013-08-27T18:21:24","modified_gmt":"2013-08-27T21:21:24","slug":"criando-sobre-o-palco-vazio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/criando-sobre-o-palco-vazio\/","title":{"rendered":"Creating on a empty stage"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Scenes

Emidio Luisi \/ Collection GEDES SESC Mem\u00f3rias, 2010<\/span>Scene from Policarpo Quaresma<\/em>, 2010, shown on TV Sesc in JanuaryEmidio Luisi \/ Collection GEDES SESC Mem\u00f3rias, 2010<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

An actor aiming to feel emotion to produce a character\u2019s feelings cannot be on a stage directed by Antunes Filho, aged 82. Since 1978, the oldest Brazilian director still alive turned against the realism clich\u00e9s that he himself embraced during his immediately preceding phase, which was underscored by the opening of the play Macuna\u00edma<\/em>, his historical adaptation of the work of author M\u00e1rio de Andrade.<\/p>\n

It was precisely this passage that, as some Brazilian theater theoreticians recognize, formed the entryway of Brazilian theatre into contemporaneity. The critic Sabato Magaldi, in his book Panorama do teatro brasileiro<\/em> [Overview of Brazilian theatre], for instance, advocates that the Macuna\u00edma<\/em> staging was the main candidate for this landmark.<\/p>\n

Restless by nature, Antunes is not satisfied with any position that he has already achieved. In each of his works, he tries to outdo himself. He says that he is now facing one of the greatest challenges of his career: staging William Shakespeare\u2019s Hamlet<\/em>. \u201cI don\u2019t know when it will open, because I don\u2019t want to be rushed; I want to have time to pay homage to the theatre with this staging,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

This effort is arising exactly when his latest production is being reviewed by a TV Sesc project, thanks to which his last three productions were filmed: Policarpo Quaresma<\/em>, Foi Carmen<\/em> and Lamartine Babo<\/em>. The TV versions were aired in January.<\/p>\n

\"Scene

Paquito \/ Collection GEDES SESC Mem\u00f3rias, 1984<\/span>Scene from Macuna\u00edma<\/em>, 1978 staging and a landmark of contemporary Brazilian theaterPaquito \/ Collection GEDES SESC Mem\u00f3rias, 1984<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

However, what turns Antunes\u2019 work, to this day even, into a pillar of almost everything that is staged in this country? First, this legacy is based on avoiding the techniques of realism. Imitating life is not the prerogative. Recreating it seems to make more sense.<\/p>\n

At the time when Macuna\u00edma<\/em> first opened, the cinema was articulating the tools required to show the naturalist dream on screen, although Glauber Rocha (1939-1981) himself and other avant-garde film directors put their talent to work as a counterpoint to mimesis.<\/p>\n

Theatre was being reinvented, therefore, in the pursuit of unknown languages, given an awareness that something had been lost in parallel with the advent of the seventh art, and not only in Brazil. Experimentalism swept over the world, inspired, above all, in the work of certain European artists.<\/p>\n

Antunes tells us that from the very start of his career in the 1940s he complied fully with the methods of Stanislavski, as if they had been the gospel. The latter was a sort of father of naturalism. To this day, the methodology of this Russian director and theoretician is to be found under the arm of any student of the performing arts in the main schools of the world.<\/p>\n

One of Antunes\u2019 greatest successes before he recreated his own style in the 1970s is based on the technical fundaments of Stanislavski\u2019s theories. Detective Story (1959), by Sidney Kingsley, recreated scenes from a police station, groping with the verisimilitude typical of the cinema. The production\u2019s leading characters is a chief of police whose ethical beliefs are adjusted by a corrupt environment. The cast included Jardel Filho, Mauro Mendon\u00e7a and Laura Cardoso, among others.<\/p>\n

It is the style of Detective Story that Macuna\u00edma<\/em> rejects. The stage experiment inaugurated the Antunes Theatre Research Center (Centro de Pesquisa Teatral de Antunes), which still exists and which has Sesc-SP funding. The production resorted both to the critical distance proposed by Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright and theater director, and to the stylization of the gestures espoused by the expressionists.<\/p>\n

As Sebasti\u00e3o Milar\u00e9 reminded us in his Hierofania<\/em>, a study on the pathway and development of Antunes\u2019 creation method, the elements of the scene in this staging seemed to \u201cboil down to newspaper pages and long stretches of white fabric, which were transformed into forests, rivers, so many things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ever since, Antunes experienced a veritable creative surge, which resulted in productions such as Nelson Rodrigues, o Eterno retorno<\/em> (1981), Romeo and Juliet<\/em> (1984), and Nova velha hist\u00f3ria<\/em> (1991). In the latter, the director even created a specific language for the play\u2019s characters. Obviously, the audience could not understand what was being said, but followed the narrative line of an absolutely familiar fable [Little Red Riding Hood].<\/p>\n

In the pursuit of his own language, Antunes\u2019 path was then affected by major international influences, such as the works of Tadeusz Kantor (Polish set designer and theater director), the dance of the German choreographer Pina Bausch, or of the Japanese dancer Kazuo Ohno and his post-nuclear catastrophe Butoh.<\/p>\n

Antunes\u2019 obsession with efficient voice work for the stage (to this day, when he mentions the voice of an actor, Antunes points to the nape of the neck, not the mouth, as the main source of sound) led to historical stagings of Greek tragedies, such as Fragmentos troianos<\/em> [Trojan Fragment] (1999) and Medeia<\/em> (2001). His productions yielded actors such as Cac\u00e1 Carvalho, Lu\u00eds Melo and Giulia Gam.<\/p>\n

Today, Antunes is poring over Hamlet<\/em>, but is not yet sure of his path for this classic by William Shakespeare, the English playwright.<\/p>\n

He says that most likely, other stagings will precede Hamlet, given the complexity of the play whose main character is the prince of Denmark. While Antunes does not make up his mind, he observes the empty stage of his research center, where, over the entrance doorway, a small notice reads:<\/p>\n

\u201cOne absolutely cannot say that there is nothing on an empty stage, on a stage one might step onto improvisedly. To the contrary. There is a world overflowing with elements there. Or, better said, it is as if from nothingness an infinity of things and of happenings can arise, without one knowing how or when.\u201d This text is by Kazuo Ohno.<\/p>\n

Scenes from Policarpo Quaresma, 2010, shown on TV Sesc in January, and from Macuna\u00edma, 1978 staging and a landmark of contemporary Brazilian theater<\/p>\n

photos
\n1. Emidio Luisi \/ Collection GEDES SESC Mem\u00f3rias, 2010
\n2. Paquito \/ Collection GEDES SESC Mem\u00f3rias, 1984<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Creating on a empty stage ","protected":false},"author":49,"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":[336],"class_list":["post-7492","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\/7492","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\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7492\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7492"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=7492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}