THE SONG OF EXILE AND THE BRAZILIAN TIME

By Valmir Santos*

At least 60% of the works gathered in the fifth edition of Mirada, including theater and installations, result from the continued experience of groups, companies, and collectives. This is one of the most common and, as we suspect, ancient forms of working for those who choose performing arts as one of their reasons to live. Team work is inherent to the modes of organization, production, and creation in theater, dance, circus, opera, and performance, regardless of scale: it applies to both monologues and street parades.

In Vou voltar, group culture intimately connects Ponto de Partida to Teatro El Galpón. The artists from Barbacena (Minas Gerais, Brazil), with 38 years of experience, pay homage to their 69-year-old Montevidean peers, going beyond the social and political reflexes of Uruguay’s military dictatorship (1973-1985) and their consequential exile in Mexico (1976-1984). The emotions in this dramaturgy show the reality of those who devote themselves entirely to a craft.

An ideological stance on the world is required by artistic practice and thinking. The two-way street is made visible by the way this performance recollects when the Uruguayan group was declared illegal, its activities suspended, directors tortured, actors forbidden to go on the stage, and assets seized.

From this episode on, we follow their struggle for asylum from the embassy in Mexico, their refuge in this North American country with the decisive support from ambassador Vicente Muñiz Arroyo (1925-1982), the reinvention of the group and their personal lives in a foreign land, without giving up on discipline and research, and, finally, their return to Uruguay in the final years of the civic-military dictatorship.

Music is the group’s quintessential platform. Although the performance cannot be considered a musical, with only two musicians playing guitar and the keyboard, it is music that gives a flesh-like quality (voice and muscles) to the conventional scenes in which actors go in and out of the wings to take up the stage, filled and emptied at the whim of the script.

Technically competent when singing and oscillating when dealing with the actual dramatic dialogue, the nine performers carry objects such as chairs, lighting stands, buckets (alluding to torture), and wheeled trunks that, in addition to reminding us of travelling troupes, have multiple scenic uses. In the second half of the performance, this moving around becomes predictable.

On the other hand, director Regina Bertola maintains the most difficult part, poetry, the soul of this humanist affirmation project that succeeds in affecting the audience by telling this story.

Branches of Uruguayan and Brazilian popular music are mixed, either solo or in chorus: Tom Jobim – the title of the play is a verse from Sabiá –, Milton Nascimento, Ivan Lins, Jorge Drexler, to name a few. Other artists are cited in verse and prose: the theater director Atahualpa del Ciopo, Galpón’s Brechtian compass, and fellow Uruguayan writers Eduardo Galeano and Mario Benedetti, all of them politically persecuted and exiled.

Vou voltar balances historical objectivity and the subjectivity of these people’s fraternal bonds in the not-so-distant past.

The inescapable human condition in a fight reminds us of Murro em ponta de faca (1971), a play written by Augusto Boal in that state of exception decade. In that plot, relationships and family also emerge from the experience of Brazilians exiled in Chile, Argentina, and France, an experience lived by Boal himself.

In authoritarian regimes, artist tend to be more closed linked to their times. Censorship and truculence immediately attack words. Speaking and writing become subversive activities from dictators’ point of view.

Vou voltar opens with a scene from Liberdade, liberdade, by Brazilian authors Flávio Rangel and Millôr Fernandes, staged in Uruguay in 1968 in response to the “Medidas de Seguridad” implemented in July of that same year, six months before the recrudescence of the civic-military regime in Brazil with Institutional Act No. 5, the famous AI-5. The Brazilian production of Liberdade, liberdade – a milestone in our political and resistance theater – was first performed three years earlier, directed by Rangel himself, in partnership with Teatro Opinião and São Paulo’s Teatro de Arena.

Vou voltar was first performed by Ponto de Partida in August 2017, precisely and painfully synchronized with a time of threats to Brazilian democracy, a system re-established 33 years ago, when the group was five years old. This democracy is far from equality, since State crimes have never been punished and torture remains a protocol for police or military brigades throughout the country, discussing violence only. The situation of refugees is also being discussed, by extension.

The final scene, when the Uruguayan artists return and are welcomed by a popular demonstration, has cathartic features and wins the solidarity of the audience, who sees itself inside the protest. The sense of belonging – which would be enough to justify how this experience was welcomed into the festival program schedule – culminates in the cast and director hugging actress and producer Amelia Porteiro, who has been part of the group since 1973 and was invited by the organizers.

Pay attention to our open veins.

 

Valmir Santos is a journalist, critic, and scholar. Founder and publisher of the site Teatrojornal – Leituras de Cena Master of performing arts from USP.