By Amilton de Azevedo*
Before beginning her series of seven lecture-performances, which will last around five and a half hours, Joana Craveiro (who, in addition to performing, is also responsible for the concept, research, script, and direction) welcomes the audience to a foyer, in a sort of prologue. There, in front of an image of the Swiss Alps, she starts sharing memories from her childhood.
Turning a small lamp on, she reveals a picture of a child, taken in a Portuguese school, with the same scenery in the background. Revisiting personal memories is a recurring act in this journey through the vast collection of Um museu vivo de memórias pequenas e esquecidas, by Teatro do Vestido. At first, bringing back her first political reminiscence is the trigger for the performance.
Later, the actress says she is very curious about book prefaces and introductions. According to her, this is where authors present their motives for conducting their research. Therefore, understanding that her childhood was surrounded by Chinese works and that she was part of political campaigns at age six creates an unrestricted relationship between her personal history and what the performance proposes. Her parents were what she calls “invisible characters” in the revolution that took place in April 25th, 1974.
With a lecture-like structure, the performance demands a lot from the audience. In addition to being long, the amount of information is enormous. Craveiro states she is not a historian, but the research conducted by her and by Teatro do Vestido is incredibly deep. Those able to stay with her until the end are granted not only a radical esthetic experience, but also in-depth immersion into the history of Portugal.
From the Salazarian dictatorship until now, Museu Vivo alternates between panoramic overflying through years and minutely describing one single night. In this way, the play aims to build a complex cobweb that is not a puzzle solved at the end of seven lectures, but as a fragmented kaleidoscope. By denying the possibility of pure objectiveness, this work fearlessly walks through a myriad of voices. Craveiro’s personal and family memoirs are complemented by interviewees, authors, musicians, and historical figures.
The radical esthetic is in the manner the performance deals with procedures from documentary theater. Cameras, record players, and cassette players are used to insert add the material quality of real documents – pictures, books, records, cassettes, diaries, letters, an incredible diversity – to the ephemerality of a theater act. The defense of the importance of memory expands concretely to the defense of the need for historical records. And this is evidently not about reporting facts from official history. Although this work does not deny the bias in its discourse, there are many sides within a side.
They are hard and beautiful accounts of difficult and hopeful moments in a country. From the great Portugal, with its African colonies, going through its moment as the “European Cuba” and the battle to avoid becoming the “European Chile”, until recent celebrations of the Carnation Revolution, what we see is historical time and individual time frequently clashing.
Craveiro seems to focus on the latter to tell us about the former through the perspective and experiences of common people. The revolution, which the actress’ mother considers not effective because it was not cultural and failed to transform social organization structures after the revolutionary process was over, should have an effect on everyone’s daily lives. Maybe this is why she decided to base the play on these invisible characters.
Um museu vivo de memórias pequenas e esquecidas leads the audience through these narratives of those unmentioned by history books, but whose invisible acts of resistance deserve a place in the historical process. They are accounts of subjects, not objects, of their times. We understand the circumstances that have molded those men and women, but also their actions that have transformed, little by little – maybe too slowly for individual time – those circumstances, in a two-way street.
The aim of this work is crystal clear and exposed effectively by the illustrative – or processual – nature of the process of revealing documents onstage, skillfully put together by the dramatic structure. The performance, varying according to what each lecture demands, consolidates the power of the movement from the core of the actress’ history and family ties to the experiences of other people with their invisible revolutionary actions and, sometimes, of the protagonists of great events.
Craveiro is a very charismatic interpreter, with momentum enough to endure the performance demands and keep the audience engaged and interested. Naturally and confidently, she alternates between different registers and intonations. A resourceful actress, she also proves to be a clever director by using different atmospheres for each lecture. If the night of the revolutionary act is dark and mysterious, the period of the revolutionary process is, in her words, a party; her movements and costume show a lot more liberty, for example.
In the Mirada setting, however, the choice of performing certain actions in the proscenium becomes an issue for those sitting in the back. These moments are rare, but the delicacy of what seems to be presented deserves to be seen by the whole audience.
For the performances in Brazil, Craveiro – who allows herself to digress from the text, as she points out in the beginning – has added, in addition to comments pertinent to the context of the work, a mention to the fire in Museu Nacional. For this Museu vivo, a memory loss is a humanity loss. As our former colonizers, our country also has a memory problem. If in Portugal the dictator Salazar was elected “best Portuguese in history” in 2000 in a popular poll, in Brazil we are dealing with people nostalgic for the military regime.
The population’s relationship with the armed forces’ historical actions, however, constitutes a great difference between both countries. There is a sort of distorted mirroring in this, with the journey through kaleidoscopic accounts of Portugal over the last hundred years being at the same time a reflex and a question on our country’s paths. Both countries are related not only as nations, but as lands of people with dreams, ambitions, and memories even of what they have never lived.
Um museu vivo de memórias pequenas e esquecidas praises the relevance of small things and the importance of making visible – and registered – what is usually buried. Its collection is dynamic and in permanent expansion; every person born has the possibility of being part of History. In the relationship between oral traditions and documenting, let us continue seeking to remember what has been forgotten.
*Amilton de Azevedo is an artist, researcher, critic, and teacher. He writes for Folha de S. Paulo and for his own website, ruína acesa. He teaches the course “Studies on education in theater” for the undergraduate program at Célia Helena Centro de Artes e Educação.
