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Towards a Poor Theatre in Brazil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

David George
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Extract

São Paulo's Grupo Macunaíma has established a paradigm for a unique form of poor theatre, which has had a marked influence on alternative troupes in Brazil attempting to break the commercial mould and to return to a social vision, lost during the darkest years of the military dictatorship. Grotowski's Towards a Poor Theatre outlines the abstract formulation and practical applications of the method he elaborated in his Polish Laboratory Theatre. The director-theoretician proposed first and foremost to overturn what he called rich theatre: a form of staging using ‘borrowed mechanisms’ from movies and television and expensive scenic technology. The Polish Laboratory was also an actor-centred theatre in which the stage was redesigned architecturally for each performance to allow the performers to interact with the audience and in which there were no naturalistic sets or props, no recorded music or sophisticated lighting. The actor, through a complex system of signs, continually created and recreated the meaning of text, constumes, set, and props. ‘By this use of controlled gesture the actor transforms the floor into a sea, a table into a confessional, a piece of iron into an animate partner, etc.’ (Poor Theatre, p. 21). Grotowski's plays were filled with costumes made of torn bags, bathtubs serving as altars, bunkbeds becoming mountains, hammers used as ‘musical’ instruments. ‘Each object must contribute not to the meaning but to the dynamic of the play; its value resides in its various uses.’ Other tenets of the Grotowski system germane to this study are a return to mythical and ritual roots, the theatrical remaking of classical works, and the collective basis of stagecraft.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , Summer 1989 , pp. 152 - 164
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1989

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References

Notes

1. Grotowski, Jerzy, Towards a Poor Theatre, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968.Google Scholar

2. The Grotowskian sign refers to the gestural elements the actor creates through intense physical and vocal training to compose his/her role; it means the actor's elimination of the distance between outer and inner impulse. This article focuses on other aspects of Grotowski's method, however, and hereafter when the term ‘sign’ appears I mean it in the Barthian sense: a ‘healthy sign’ is flexible in that it calls attention to its own arbitrary nature; it is not fixed by ideology; it is ‘unnatural’. I utilize the term in this article to refer to a single word (e.g., popular) or a cultural mode (e.g., carnival) or an object which changes meaning in varying contexts.

3. Flaszen, Ludwik, ‘Akropolis: treatment of the text’, in Towards a Poor Theatre, p. 75.Google Scholar

4. Augusto Matraga, presented by Grupo de Teatro Macunaíma, directed and adapted by Antunes Filho, Teatro Anchieta, São Paulo, 1986–7. The observations and interpretation of the stage production are based on my own viewings, the playscript and conversations with Antunes Filho in 1986 and 1987.

5. Guimarães Rosa is the author of Grande Sertão, Veredas, a novel whose influence is equivalent in Brazil to that of Márquez, Gabriel Garcia's Cien Años de SoledadGoogle Scholar (One Hundred Years of Solitude) in Spanish America.

6. Rosa, João Guimarães, ‘A hora e vez de Augusto Matraga’, Sagarana, Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio Editora, 11th edition, 1969, p. 319.Google Scholar This and other translations in the article are my own.

7. The myriad processional forms in Brazil demonstrate the importance its people give to ritual and myth. Many processions belong to Catholic liturgy, some are folkloric, others pertain to Indian and Afro-Brazilian religious tradition, and as the reader will see in the section devoted to the staging of Macunaima, there is also a strong carnivalesque tradition related to processions.

8. Saint Francis is considered a local patron saint – the São Francisco river is named after him – and in the folklore of the region he is said to have travelled through the Sertão.

9. Amado, Jorge, Gabriela Cravo e Canela (Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon), Lisbon: Publicações Europa-América, 1978, pp. 80–1.Google Scholar

10. Nelson z Rodrigues, presented by Grupo de Teatro Macunaíma, adapted and directed by Antunes Filho, Teatro Anchieta, São Paulo. My interpretation of this production is based on several viewings in São Paulo in 1984, video-taped scenes, the working script, and conversations with the director and other participants in the project.

11. My analysis of Macunaimaíma is based on several viewings of the play from 1980 to 1984, the working script, video-taped scenes, and conversations with company members.

12. Mário de Andrade called his Macunaíma a ‘rhapsody’ rather than a novel because he based it on variations of pre-existing texts, both popular and erudite, and on the rhapsodic principle of the suite, widely used in Brazilian popular and improvisational folk music. See de Mello e Souza, Gilda, O Tupi e o Alaúde: uma Interpretação de Macunaíma, São Paulo: Livraria Duas Cidades, 1979.Google Scholar

13. I have utilized the following work for this section of my analysis: Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, Iswolsky, Hèlène trans., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.Google Scholar

14. Macunaíma, theatrical adaptation by Jacques Thieriot and Grupo Pau-Brasil – the company's original name – 1979. Carnival sambas typically deal with historical subjects and are frequently parodic. The blocos or bands of carnival revellers dancing in the streets represent the genuinely popular dimension of the yearly festival. While even carnival has been usurped to consecrate officialdom – I refer here to the lavish Rio parades with their expensive floats and costumes – the blocos, which persist in Rio but are more characteristic of cities like Bahia and Recife, are spontaneous and unorganized celebrations where nothing is sacred and all can join.

15. In this regard, it should be noted that Bakhtin's theories turn upside down the Socialist-Realist categories of the Stalinist era. Michael Holquist, prologue to Rabelais and His World, xvii.Google Scholar

16. Holquist, , xxii–xxiii.Google Scholar

17. But perhaps there is no irony here: the social transformation of Grotowski's methods is akin to what Latin American magic-realist writers have done with surrealism. Writers like Julio Cortázar and Garcáa Márquez have taken a European mode based on abstract notions – the magic, as it were, like carnival, long absent from surrealist artists' lifes – and have fitted it to a reality where magic still operates.