“This image I’m seeing, it explains what it’s like living with it.” On stage, Grace Passô, playwright and actress in Preto, discusses the image, the truth and the blackening through orality, body, and performance.
“It’s not just an image that I imagine. It’s the truth. I see it, I hear it; it’s the truth. It suggests a truth, it comes from a truth.” Art is an action of reality that reflects society’s experiences. It is society’s experience and, therefore, it transforms with and from it. During the formative activity held on the morning of September 11 on orature, the playwright reinforces this constant reinvention of theater, which bonds with the audience through its ever-changing profile and a unique and personal repertoire. The audience transforms the relationship with the scene.
“Fire reshapes what is about to be born,” said Grace during the meeting in the Communal Area of Sesc Santos. And the silence that follows in those who witness what is born after the fire is transforming. She ends her speech, which interfaces with Preto, by underscoring the fire and its power of transfiguration.
Image, performance. Truth, foundation. Fire, change. As the creator of the term and researcher of the manifestation, Leda Maria Martins states that orature is “the pulse of the rhythmic beat of the cosmic heart.” “Rhythm creates a grammar that reverberates throughout the cosmos” that the body, voiced, interprets, inscribes, translates knowledge. Bodies are dressed and wrapped in knowledge. They are places of transit, of transcreation, of memory.
And silence, the unspeakable? Leda continues: “you don’t hear the other’s voice.” But the silences, just like bodily manifestations, have meaning. Even when we don’t know what to say, or when it is not convenient to say it, adds Marcela Salinas, playwright and actress in Estado Vegetal, where she plays different perspectives of lifeless objects.
“I seek to listen to this body,” chants Grace in her play. Listen to your image. What is it like living with it?
Danilo Cava, Sesc Online Editor
