A WARNING SHOUT TO LEAVE OUR FOOLISH WAYS BEHIND

“The worst part is that I’m already sleepy,” said 73-year-old Izabel Suzuko Dias, when asked if she was ready to take on the challenge. She lives in São José do Rio Preto and came to Santos to enjoy the theater festival. It was a six-hour drive, the same duration of the performance that’s about to begin.

A Living Museum of Small, Forgotten and Unwanted Memories is the exotic play of Mirada 2018, the one that splits opinions, brings out passions, and entices those who are willing to venture into unconventional experiences. Especially because it is a monologue. Some say they don’t ever want to see it, while others come to the festival just because of it.

Expectations were high. In the antechamber where the performance is introduced, a sort of loose laughter was heard from many of the spectators, even in situations that weren’t so comical. Behind me, a person repeated supposedly funny lines, perhaps because of the Portuguese accent of Joana Craveiro, creator, director and interpreter. The general feeling around the room was like: “I signed up for this marathon, so I might as well live every moment to the fullest.”

The festival catalog read that the performance lasted for 330 minutes, including supper. “Since supper is included in this duration, the presentation itself should last ‘only’ around 300 minutes,” I thought. Just five quick hours.

In the show room, Joana Craveiro hits the stage with two suitcases, one green and one red, the colors of Portugal’s flag. It is an invitation to travel through a winding road that runs across through historical periods: the drawn-out Portuguese dictatorship (48 years, from 1926 to 1974), and the period that begins with the Carnation Revolution, on April 25, 1974, and stretches out to modern day.

As a teacher, Joana sits behind an old wooden table and starts telling stories, as she places objects from her living museum collection over a projector: books, vinyl records, documents, photographs, and billboards. The blown-up images appear on a big screen behind her.

But the artist doesn’t stay there the whole time. She walks around other parts of the stage. She puts a vinyl record in a record player and arranges miniature vehicles on the ground, acting out the movements of troops. Suddenly, the teacher describing the stories of the dictatorship is replaced with a character that actually experienced it. The tone of voice becomes much more spirited. She utters a furious speech against the colonial war (when Portugal fought against independence movements in African colonies) and against those in Portuguese society who supported it.

Joana starts running and grabs a chair over which a military suit is hanging. She slams the chair against the floor. She then does the same thing with three other chairs. The chairs represent enemy soldiers. The artist continues switching the whole time, alternating between the character in present time, the teacher in class, and the characters from the story being told.

On the other side of the stage, still unscathed by the horrors of war, a beautiful piece of furniture with 12 square drawers, arranged in two columns of six drawers each, held by four feet rising 40 cm each, slightly bent. Over the furniture is a portrait, a lamp and a green rotary dial phone. These small details invite us to dig into our own memories, remember where we were and what we were doing when democracy was still a distant dream in our own country.

With such a rich scenario, a long historical period, and a varied narrative device, the performance just had to be long as well. And no review about it would ever be short either. So, let’s continue and leave this short-sentence thing for Twitter.

Joana Craveiro evidently speaks in her native tongue, Portuguese from Portugal, which many Brazilians have a tough time understanding – I have no idea why, but it’s true. The big screen shows electronic subtitles in Spanish and some of the spectators can’t take their eyes off of them. The subtitling technician loses track many times, because the artist talks a lot and speaks fast, besides improvising.

Due to some setbacks, the presentation on Friday, September 7, ended up lasting for 6 hours. And the supper break wasn’t included in the show’s duration. The audience entered the room assembled in C.A.I.S. Vila Mathias shortly after 7 p.m. and left only at 2 a.m.

A few people left before the ending, but most of them sat through the entire marathon. And that includes Mrs. Izabel, who struggled with the language at first, but later got used to it and said that she loved the experience.

Rightly so. The amount of file records Joana compiled for the show is simply amazing. As she tells her stories, she piles one photo over the next, then a book over the photos, and then a piece of cardboard paper with an important phrase, an acronym. We see it all in the big screen and it makes time go by faster, in a well-balanced mix of information and entertainment.

The most frequent acronym that Joana places countless times in the projector is PIDE (International and State Defense Police). It was a sort of Portuguese secret police, in charge of preserving the order and keeping naysayers under control, torturing and even killing them if necessary.

By insistently repeating the name of the political police department, the artist seems to be trying to hammer into our heads something that must not be forgotten in the past. The underlying theme of the performance is clear: Portuguese society has a way of brushing the memories of dictatorship under the rug, because of a kind of “identity construct that we are gentle people,” as the artist explains. “Therefore, we could never have done all of these things.”

What things? There are many examples, but I will only mention sleep torture, where they used torture methods to keep people from sleeping: shoving a pencil up the nose, pouring ice-cold water, playing sounds of voices in loudspeakers. The main goal, according to her, was to undermine the political subjectivity of political prisoners. Joana tells about how activist Aurora Rodrigues, who suffered this torture for 16 days straight, managed to keep her sanity and wrote a book about it. The book is also part of the living museum, of course.

Spectators may even be tempted to doze off because of the performance’s length, especially after the diverse menu served during the break, which included codfish cakes, green broth and a dish made of rice, beans and farofa. Some rest their heads on the shoulders of the person beside them. Others rest their elbows over their thighs (their own thighs, I mean) to hold up their chins with their hands. But hearing stories like Aurora’s is like taking a triple shot of espresso.

The comedy also helps. Joana, who was the daughter of left-wing activists, tells that her mother was adept of the Maoist line and her father wasn’t. As a child, she heard her father calling her mother a Maoist and she thought it was a swear word. Did her mother do something “Mao”? She only understood what the word meant many years later.

But the role of family in the narrative is not restricted to her parents. To illustrate what she considers to be contradictions of the regime, Joana talks about a fascist uncle who had a record with speeches from “Lenine”. For a split second, perhaps distracted by the fatigue that was starting to affect my focus, I thought she referred to the Brazilian singer from Pernambuco. But she then shows the record cover with the unmistakable picture of Lenin. The Portuguese call him Lenine.

According to the artist, this probably explains why the list of books banned by the dictatorship included the name of French writer Jean Racine. “It must be because it has the same suffix as Lenine,” says Joana, mocking the fact that the list also included Petite Planet from the Larousse collection. “It must be because the French publisher’s name almost sounds like “The Russia.”

The play is filled with comic relief to soothe the memories of a bitter time, which the Portuguese prefer to forget. In this sense, perhaps they’re even less developed than us. Joana remembers that Brazil created a Truth Commission to investigate crimes committed during the dictatorship, something that has never existed and, according to her, will never exist in Portugal.

Joana makes several links to Brazil. One of them is playing an excerpt of the song Tanto Mar by Chico Buarque, which mentions the flower that symbolized the 1974 Revolution. “Sei que está em festa, pá; Fico contente; E enquanto estou ausente; Guarda um cravo para mim.” The other one is a chronicle version of Aquele Abraço by Gilberto Gil, whose lyrics talk about how Portuguese dictators fled to Rio de Janeiro. After all, in 1974, our dictatorship was at its peak and welcomed them with open arms.

The artist realizes that sitting around on a plastic chair for six hours is no easy task, so she proposes interactions to take people away from the position of mere spectators. But the reaction is shy. She asks people to sing along with the chorus of Portuguese songs. No one does. It seems like no one knows them, not even Grândola Vila Morena. She does the same in Tanto Mar. A few of them sing along and she teases: “You don’t even know this one?” She hands out books and suggests that people read them out loud, discussing with the person sitting beside them. I was given FBI - Abuse of Power. The person sitting to my left got Lenin’s The Collapse of the Second International. The one to my right got The Sexual Struggle of Youth, by Reich. But only mumbling was heard.

The audience’s apathy reminds me of German congressman Martin Schulz who, in a recent interview to Folha de S. Paulo, called for Brazil’s “silent majority” to raise their voices against the progress of fascist ideas, in reference to philosopher Edmund Burke, who said back in the 18th century: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Right then and there, it was clear to me how current and modern Joana Craveiro’s monologue was; the urgency of echoing the playwright’s despair in the face of silence. If at times she may seem too verbal, perhaps that’s because we are too silent and indifferent. She is our mirror with a will of its own, reflecting everything that we should do before it is too late.

When he wrote Tanto Mar, Chico asked the Portuguese to “urgently send a scent of rosemary,” because things were really dark in Brazil (forgive my derogatory racial reference, but it is necessary to refer to another of his songs.) In my opinion, besides the impressive collection of her living museum, Joana Craveiro also brought in her luggage some rosemary, whose scent serves as a warning: Brazilians, don’t be as foolish as the Portuguese, otherwise democracy will surely set sail away from here.

 

Julio Adamor, journalist and coordinator of Ponto Digital Mirada 2018