By Valmir Santos*
The literary and performing arts are familiarized with nuns, sisters, female monks, or lay sisters in stories about women who have transcended monastic discipline to give vent to their feelings and desires as mere mortals.
They are women who sublimate love or passion following religious mystique and at the same time exhort them with words. Examples include the verse and prose of the Spanish Teresa D'Ávila (1515-1582), the letters of the Portuguese Mariana Alcoforado (1640-1723), and the poems of the Mexican Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695).
The performance Corpos opacos broadens this horizon by using image rather than writing as its base to reflect on the phenomenon of monjas coronadas that took place during the colonial period in countries colonized by Spain, such as Peru and Colombia, and relate it to the power of feminism nowadays.
The term monjas coronadas, or crowned nuns, is used for paintings depicting nuns at the moment of their deaths, as those from the Inés de Montepulciano convent in Bogotá. Their bodies were dressed in a habit and surrounded by flowers. A painter would then register their presumed union with the divine, when the so-called brides of Christ, with their eyes shut, would meet him on another plane.
A collection of these paintings from the 16th and 17th centuries was the basis for Cuerpos opacos: delicias invisibles del erotismo místico (2013), which occupied a room in the basement of the former church of Real Convento de Santa Clara, nowadays a museum, also in Bogotá.
It can be understood by the performance that this exhibit motivated actress Carolina Virgüez to create a work opposing the secular patriarchal guidelines from the Catholic Church and different doctrines, with consequences affecting the contemporary woman.
This stance guides the text crafted by Carolina with her partner onstage, actress Sara Antunes, and with dramaturg Pedro Kosovski, whose occupation borrowed from the German language defines one who feeds the team’s creative and critical work with different sources of research on the topic.
However, the conceptual and philosophical premises that cause the most interest in the audience and led to a crowded premiere in Mirada are yet to be fully translated into this language. Esthetic issues are prominent, despite the solid historiographic and iconographic material.
Márcio Medina’s art direction finds a breeding ground in the dramaturgy to impact using the culture from visual arts, as in his approaches to expository discourse, the function of curatorship or cut-out frames.
Accentuated by the stage lighting, vision acquires features of omnipresence from the very first minutes, as a giant eye that covers the whole stage (the eye of God?) and soon has its effect mitigated because we see the difficulties, the cracked silence of the stage management team trying to resume the action.
Similar tension returns at different moments, also showing disjunctions in the text, which fluctuates between personal accounts, “place of speech”, and the voice of a museum worker.
The joint direction by Marco André Nunes and Yara de Novaes was not able to equalize the size of the formalistic endeavor proposed by the performance, sometimes sabotaging the ritualistic character of decisive passages that confer an ancient quality to speak of death and, by extension, the mystery of life.
A handheld camera used by an actress, one of the interferences from image worship, almost ruins it. Nonetheless, this same procedure produces one of the most provocative syntheses, with a larynx close-up showing its similarity with the female sex in real time.
It is through the image of a face – a living face, not the Christian sudarium – that the female characters claim freedom, identity, and rights. They are evoked by the deep-rooted, diaphanous body of Carolina Virgüez, of Colombian ancestry, and by the sanctified and paradoxically boisterous body of Sara Antunes.
Maybe all elements of this performance could find the perfect rhythm in the spirit of the song of musical director Natalia Mallo. She is the third way in this journey through the deconstruction of seclusion. She floats onstage with her voice, guitar, and other sound devices, overflowing with subtlety, momentum, and Latinity.
*Valmir Santos is a journalist, critic, and scholar. Founder and publisher of the site Teatrojornal – Leituras de Cena Master of performing arts from USP.
