Historical
HISTORICAL
by Cia. Mungunzá de Teatro
Historical
trajectory
CIA. MUNGUNZÁ DE TEATRO
It was born in 2008 with the combination of appropriate actors / artists of multiple languages who wanted to (re) think the panorama of contemporary art / theater in Brazil.
Our research encompasses three aspects: contemporary aesthetics, staging as dramaturgy and performing act as acting.
From this tripod are born the elements that will constitute a narrative.
WHY CHILDREN COOK IN POLENTA
In 2008 we gave the director Nelson Baskerville a biographical book entitled “Why the child is cooking in the polenta” and with the book the desire of birth. It was a double choice that, in the future, would have given us not only a new space of thinking not only about theatre but also about the contemporary art as a whole. With “Why the child is cooking in the polenta” we inaugurated a research along with Nelson Baskerville. A director that already had a notable research and recognition in the post dramatic theatre scene. A point that became essential to our approach and interest within this particular language. With him, we were able to research different ways of storytelling through different narrative elements such as: video, photography, music, dance, performance, in-scene cooking. A search that had as a pretext an approximation between artist and audience. Conquered not only by the story or reflection, but also through a synesthetic communication realized by the spectacle and its misé-en-scene.
TRAVELING
This work opened many doors. We became familiar with a new language and way of thinking the actor’s work and its function in contemporary theatre. It made possible to understand what and how to do it. Later on, we were also able to comprehend that our process of learning was empiric. The spectacle had 5 seasons in São Paulo and travelled around Brazil for two years. It was presented in many festivals and it has won a total of 35 awards. We found out that being in constant movement made a significant sense. To build and dismantle the same story, from stage to stage, from city to city, transforming the same story into something different made us feel completely appropriated by a hidden world. A hidden world that we were slowly entering and discovering. At the middle of this aesthetic and familiar misadventure we moved on to our next work. Which meant the consolidation of this process.
LUIS ANTONIO GABRIELA
Nelson brought us the story of his family and brother. We decided to get into the fight to take it to the stage. We deepened into the research of a theatre which was named “scenic documentary”. The spectacle “Luis Antonio Gabriela” was born. Luis Antonio, Nelson and his family stories shocked and affected all sorts of audience, each one in its own particular way. Counting with on a humorous and physical direction, which sharpened each character’s eccentricity and suppressed any possibility of judgement in the act of storytelling. What we had as result was real people on stage. People which are not necessarily good or bad, but human beings that coexist, relate and play their role in life, like everybody else. The commotion through which the audience connected with the play was surprisingly new and it taught us something about our language: trying to create a distance, we approached. Trying to put on stage a reflection of a social concern, we brought the commotion that stands in front of life.
Intentionally, we knew that the epic language makes the reflection easier and it also forces the audience to assume a critical position. It was beautiful to see this politically engaged spectator in front of the cause that is sexual diversity, but more than that, it was wonderful to see this spectator as someone that sees itself in the story. “Luis Antonio Gabriela” taught us that, more than art and intellectual engagement, the ugliness in the life of each person is deeply touching. We began to understand that more than having a spectacle to travel around with, we were providers of an experience. And with this self-knowledge, a new path within the company process was opened. The spectacle had 7 seasons in São Paulo, one season in Rio de Janeiro and it has travelled in Brazil, and overseas, for two years. Having along this period over 300 presentations. “Luis Antonio – Gabriela” has been largely awarded and it is considered the “best spectacles of the decade”. The spectacle was invited to be part of the Palco Giratório’s Program by SESC. We travelled through the backland of Pernambuco and through Bahia, Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte, Paraíba, Tocantins, Rondônia, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Goiás, Brasília, Minas Gerais, Paraná, São Paulo, Espírito Santo, Rio de Janeiro, Santa Catarina e Rio Grande do Sul. It was an indescribable experience. At the end, it gave us a whole another state of presence inside the company. The experience consisted in traveling around performing the spectacle, the workshops, exchanging experiences with other theatre companies that we would meet along the way, participating in debates and talks. We met many groups, each with its own unique way of doing and thinking the “theatre making”. We had the opportunity of experiencing a very diverse audience and its habits.
THE ROTATIVE STAGE
On the 13th of June of 2013, 10 pairs of legs jumped from São Paulo’s floor. Destination: to everywhere and everything. To never be the same again. We had just born, we barely had our feet on the ground and still we saw ourselves off the ground (or of what we thought it would be the ground). We had a spectacle and arms full of intention that we did not yet know how to use it.
“-Do your company have a headquarter?”
We have heard this question many times along the workshops that we’ve made. All in the middle of an extensive debate of the group’s political engagement. And there it was, after constantly denying: yes… we have a headquarter!
Then, we had to realize what was to be thirsty and also in constant movement.
We have a thirst in the blow of the wind.
Our headquarter is Tico’s Truck. Tico is our truck driver and also our stagecraft technician. He owns the truck. Our headquarter is called Ieiri Express. Inside that truck our scenario – and sometimes ourselves – goes everywhere.
The hotel rooms suddenly were transformed into our offices. It was where we were and where we wrote a considerable number of projects. And let’s get a standing ovation to WhatsApp, a tool through which we could (believe us!) organize everything in the flow.
We decided to build stilts.
We started to build it up in Palmas and we have finished back in Jequié. It was the fullest stilts in the world in whole History.
We grabbed the wood from my cousin’s house in Palmas that was not fully finished.
We, then, wrapped it up and dispatched at the airport.
In Paulo Afonso, Bahia, we bought sandals and pinned them into the wood, to sustain our feet. There we also bought spikes.
In Salvador, Bahia, we bought safety devices to put on the stilts.
In Surubim, Pernambuco, we found a woodwork where we sanded and pinned the stilts.
We bought gaze so we could tight them up strongly on our legs.
In Arco Verde we debuted our stilts.
And everything in our lives was just like that, at least for almost 70 days.
Inhale in a city and exhale in another city creates new worlds.
Inhale a culture and exhale another culture it is alchemical.
From all the physics lessons back at school about movement the strongest one is the alchemy made of fluids.
For some reason we didn’t find our roots deep in the soil but flying with the wind. We cultivated ourselves in the middle of the movement.
We are not the ones that become sedimented in any single place.
Our sediment, our soil is the organic material inside our cells when we are experiencing something. Geography is an experience. History is an experience. The human being it is an experience in every single place. Made to sprout. We were made to sprout.
A SUSPENDED POEM TO A FALLEN CITY
AND
ONCE UPON AN ERA
Our backstage brought us a new way to think Art. Our fights and reconciliations, living together in each place that we have gone, every state, every city, every theatre that would welcome us. Our games, proposals of research in the middle of the process were growing and becoming part of another research that started in parallel with the spectacle. But its focus lies on the connections happening around the spectacle. We started to conceive the process as the final object. A large research through the visual arts has started to make sense in the backstage.
And two new plays were born: “A suspended poem to a fallen city” and “Once upon an era”.
Gathering pieces of stories from each artist, not to start a new sort of scenic documentary, but to have a visual shrine, as if we were in debt to our own stories as citizens of the world. Shrines that has intersections between people, situations, stories, time, space and geography. It is not only about personal memories, but to open a path where those particular moments help us to find a breach that shows what is universal to all of us. Through the keyhole of my story I can read the story of thousands of people and all of them can read mine.
With that material in hands we decided to write to the 24th edition of “Fomento ao Teatro”, a Public State Funding. And we were contemplated.
It took us 15 months of creative process. Now directed by Lubi (Luiz Fernando Marques) and Verônica. In those 15 months we developed two spectacles out of nothing. From zero. We went to Casa Amarela, then Casa das Caldeiras, we rented a hangar, we bought a scaffolding, we took NR35 lessons so we could be suspended in a rope 2 meters from the ground and we took the creative process to cultural centers in São Paulo. After that, through the workshops with children, teenagers, adults and elderly, we went back to our hangar full of experiences and we finalized both of our dramaturgy. When this was finished, we went back to the cultural centers and we presented over 30 spectacles in 29 days. We went back to the rehearsal room so that we could make 10 open rehearsals. The premiere of first season was at SESC Santo Amaro. We then made both of the spectacles at the São Caetano Theatre, in a free tickets season with 4 presentations available to blind and deaf people. All of it was an amazing experience and inspired us to work in a next project. Thankfully!
It seems like we went through a lot and indeed we did. But everything came in a time that it was possible to work some concepts out and, mainly, our way to deal with the organization within the company. To start with the “craziness” of creating not one, but two spectacles from nothing, simultaneously. Not to mention that one of them was created to an age group that we had never worked before.
Less than a year had passed since our premiere and still both spectacles had reached the number of 150 presentations. Travelling to many cities in the State of São Paulo and having 3 seasons in São Paulo and one in Santo André.
After all this “sing and dance to the movement”, the spectacles “A suspended poem to a fallen city” and “Once Upon an Era” had brought us the necessity of a scaffolding. The scaffolding asked us for a specific space. The hangar.
THE HANGAR
The hangar surfaced in a period of our lives that we had the needing for a space to rehearsal two spectacles contemplated by the public state funding “24o Edição da Lei de Fomento ao Teatro” of São Paulo. A space where we could spread our things and set up the characteristic company’s paraphernalia. A hangar located in the neighborhood of Bom Retiro was our pick. Located in front of a rehab center for chemical dependents that live on streets and nearby the Prates Complex. Along the rehearsals the outside world was starting to present itself to us as the people that lived there knocking on our door. Starting with the kids that lived in the same street and would come every Tuesday night to watch our rehearsals of a children’s play. They appropriated our hangar for themselves and felt – what we could visibly see it - like it was a second home. We started to think in ways of continuing some of our works there, even after the end of the rehearsals. We decided to renew our rent in a year. This was when we started to keep the space focusing in researching also in the field of relational art. We established an extension of our ‘cultural space’ to outside, out of the boundaries of its physical limit. The final object of the space wasn’t to be a company headquarters but to expand the notions of art, cultural movement, space appropriation, space identification. In a way that this appropriation would hold not only artists and its cultural activities, but all of the residents: in streets, from the neighborhoods, shelters and institutions.
We realized then that, in fact, we didn’t properly have a headquarter or a place to create spectacles and we weren’t aiming for it. What we wanted was to stay in a space which was a work of art in itself. An open work of art.
That was our first insight to a research into abandoned public spaces which would end up reaching a container theatre called Teatro de Contêiner Mungunzá.
THE TEATRO DE CONTÊINER MUNGUNZÁ
The container theatre surfaced in a moment when we found out how many abandoned public spaces existed in the city. Simultaneously to this fact, theatre companies have to pay a considerable amount of money to rent a space, money that sometimes they don’t even have to rent places in which they have to pay social contributions to the city.
To occupy a public space with a private ‘equipment’ has its own dialectic. The space it is to and for everybody, however, there is a group that thinks about the programming and needs of that place. We thought we would finally have the company’s headquarters before we realized that in fact we had a cultural center. And it was simply because that was what the space asked for. It asks for a mediation. Mediation of relations and of conflicts. It asks for a free programming with free and democratic access. The territory where we are located, next to Crackland, asks for a deep breath and reestablishment of relations. It calls for a paradigms break. Since then, our work came from making art relating with this – a creative process that was set up in this particular location. Those connections worked as an opened piece of art. In this place nothing can be closed, protected, separated. The spectacles will be interrupted by the sound and streets view. Rehearsals will suffer the interference of fights on the sidewalk or by the kids playing soccer in the sports court.
The children come before us in the morning. They jump the metal grid knowing that the “metal park”, as they call, belong to them as well.
To be in this space, with those conditions, lead us, with no question, to the theme of our next play: “Epidemia Prata”, Silver Epidemic.
SILVER EPIDEMIC
Being deep inside the Teatro de Contêiner’s universe, in the Crackland, made impossible not to be contaminated with the stories we listen and see from the people living on sidewalks and crack addicts. Being inside, in this “artistic aquarium”, a region that is forgotten by the public authorities and, at the same time, is target by the housing speculation, was decisive for our artistic, political, ethical and aesthetical choices. The crack, the smoke and living statues walking on the streets, squares that became the new “Fluxo” (fluxo in Portuguese means flow, that is the name given to the concentration of people located in Crackland). That material gave us the will to go back to the rehearsal room and give life to our new company’s spectacle: Epidemia Prata (Silver Epidemic), which is expected to premier by May of 2018.
