Founded in 2003, Teatro do Concreto is a group from Brasília that brings together artists interested in the dialog with the city and its symbolic and real meanings through scenic creation. From its origin, it takes diversity and research as principles of management and artistic composition, mobilizing creators from different regions of the Federal District and deepening the interaction with different artists and areas of knowledge. The creations are guided by the perspective of the collaborative process and are characterized mainly by the elaboration of a unique self-dramaturgy, by the radicalization in the use of personal testimonies, by the investigation of the scene in the urban space, by the relation with the practices of performance and the search for different modes of engagement or the spectator.
Throughout his history, the group has debuted 9 shows and scenic interventions, published 3 reference works for the field of theater research, and made several community interaction projects that extrapolate the field of the stage, consolidating itself as a reference for group theater in the Center-West region. The group won national acknowledgment with the Circulation of the Diário do Maldito (2006) - which received the Candango Theater SESC Award in the categories of Best Actress and Best Set Designer - and Entrepartidas (2010) - which received the Candango Theater SESC Award in Best Show, Best Direction, Best Actor and Best Playwriting.
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WE ARE CONCRETO
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6 ENSAYOS CORTOS
As the memory is that what build us as history and continuity, what accelerate us a specie – fascinated by our narrative – to remember is part of our survival instincts. The images, senses and words are, at the same time, the bone marrow of memory and our own way to organize them. Madness is a random and uncontrolled organisation of the memories we gather or loose. The actor speaks to remember. As doing so, try to get closer of it's personal mystic and our mystique as humankind. Exposes and take risks in the attempt of saying or making something particular and interesting, personal and universal. The actor uses it's memory virtuality in it's own body, which is itself memory. There's no memory without life. You have to live, and life isn't precise.
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A group of artists presents a spectacle about love and abandonment. A group of foreign elders dances until the physical burnout of the acting will. A group of refugies cross the ocean in a inflatable boat. A group of nopartisan judges sentence a political prisoner. A group of scientists shows the world the first photography of a black hole. A group is a desire that converges's in time: an audacity. A group is the infinity universe of multiple parts, as each part itself also aa universe of other convergences. A group's time is necessarily the present: it's dilemas, it's reveses, it's impatience, it's success and future desires – until it's not. In a group, I put my hand under your's so we can make together what we can't make alone.
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A group in numbers: how many hours of scene rehearsal? how many pages read and memorized? how many bills overdue by informality? how many late night buses? how many steps walked in Brasilia's outskirts to get home after a rehearse routine? How many times in the bathroom before a premiere or a common spectacle – if that exists? How many heartbeats per minute? How many revolution wishes? How many graphic design approvals? How much water it takes to wash the meetings coffee cups? How many scenes thrown in the garbage? How much of me? How much of the other? How much this spectacle lasts – Could you tell me what time is it? – Wow, it's late. We lost track of time. – We miss the bus. – Can I crash at your place? – Sure. Awake nights.
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La espectadora atleta recorre la escena como en un maratón. Ella se mueve, se desplaza, se incomoda, se permite. Desea ver y oír de cerca, sea dentro de un autobús, de la cocina de alguien o de un teatro que es un taller mecánico. Fuimos testigos del inicio de una revolución en el campo de la percepción de las espectadoras, mediada por el advenimiento de las tecnologías de virtualización y robotización de las realidades – una revolución de orden semejante a aquella provocada por Gutemberg cuando surgió la prensa. La posibilidad de la experiencia habita ahora en la punta de los dedos: el movimiento de pinza nos distinguió como especie. La espectadora atleta va al teatro para expandir sus movimientos y dudar del condicionamiento de su percepción. La generalización de lo femenino es una elección política. (nota de pie de página).
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Glauber Coradesqui is researcher e theatrical author, professor of Instituto Federal Fluminense, in Rio de Janeiro. With a master's degree in Arts by Universidade of Brasilia, and author of "Experiência e Mediação de Espetáculos" and "Canteiro de Obras: notas sobre o teatro candango".
The theatre is a repetition and invention practice, like all other processes in nature. First, the two actresses rehearse. Rehearse is the space in time where the right and the error, the care and the scar challenge each other with the same intensity; is the hole that the director watches what the actresses provide. After that, two actresses express themselves. Expression is what you take from yourself and give to other, in form of gesture and word – although is also word in scene –, the expression has a grand power of regeneration. Following that, the two actresses cried. Their cry is the gland control that supports the eyes and the nose; the nostril feel what watered eyes can't see. By the end, the two actresses exaggerate. Their exaggeration is the latin allegory for precariety and misery. People are not made to starve to death.
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The city's landscape is different from the mountain's. The sounds are different – and the light too. The city scratch the sky that the mountain reveals. "Reveal" from the latin "take the veil" – or, in other words, freely chosen by epistemological deduction: "reveal the eyes". Stood in the mountain silence, came the sky's eyes. In the city, they made the sky scratched whilst they walked: they walked like an act of creation. To believe is to notice and give form, then reveal. The hawk is an animal that flies. People are an animal that scratch. They heard that a hawk family made it's nest in a building in Santos. That's when they made a theater to unscratch the sky.
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HISTORY AND THINKING
The “Teatro Concreto” came into the world hand in hand with the 21st century. Engaged in the genuine curiosity of all processes of artistic invention, it made its existence from an affirmative positioning on the issues and, mainly, on the contradictions of the beginning century. They blossomed together. In almost two decades, different notions emerged such as post-dramatic, performative, representativity, place of speech, decolonization, and so many other ideas that would change the course of contemporary theatrical practice (and way of thinking about it) as well as behavior and social interaction practices.
In order to be configured as a collective, Teatro Concreto assumed several of these values and paradigms. We are not necessarily speaking of style, but of intention: the use of the actors' personal testimony as the generator of dramaturgy, the political and aesthetic option through the collaborative process, the questioning of the truism of the spaces formatted in their utilitarian functions, the staging in the urban space as strategy of evoking memories and landscapes lost or buried, destabilization of the traditional supports of the scene. Procedures for an investigation engendered by artists interested in doing theater and learning to do theater together.
Learning, for us as Latinos, is an adventure of resistance. Our remnants of colonization tend to confuse our processes of identity autonomy in a kind of fiction about the nature of power, where the power to act is taken as a capacity outside the will. In this sense, anthropophagy operates as a key device in the research and learning processes of the group, taking its concrete force "to the edges of power or desire" (to quote Gilles Deleuze) and positioning this force "against all importers of canned conscience "(To quote Oswald de Andrade).
The group devoured, in the adventure of learning and resisting, the Teatro da Vertige, the Teatro Oficina, the images of Kazuo Ohno by Pina Bausch, the insistence of José Perdiz, candomblé and so many other warriors, placing their creations at the same time near and far from their ancestry. With each work, the Teatro Concreto exposes its roots: South American, peripheral, mixed, syncretic. It looks at the territory that occupies [Brasil / Brasília] not only in its political dimension, but also in the perception of the seismic waves generated by the dynamics of its people, its relations with the traditions, the collective practices of occupation of the lands and streets. In the mythical group, every creator is both an anthropophagist and a seismographer.
In the field of acting and directing, creating is not exactly an act in its pure action sense, but an attitude. Attitude is an Italian word originally used to designate the posture of a figure in a painting or sculpture. It is, therefore, etymologically associated with the capture of the expressiveness of a body in performance, an engaged body. Whether as a chorus, as a caricature, as a feast, as vertigo or as a hypernaturalist mimesis, to act and direct in Concrete is an attitude - which, in this context, also acquires a sense of political engagement.
In the perspective of the collective imaginary about Brasília, where the monumentality of the city allegorically symbolizes the inertia and lack of this attitude (which overflows in the creations of the group), we understand more clearly why the choice of the name Concreto is an affirmative concept. And why the group led the movement of resistance to the permanence of the Teatro Oficina Perdiz in its territory of origin. Or why they made the first official meeting a dramatic reading of Plinio Marcos's "Unhelpful song and useless mourning for the fallen angels" in the light of the reflectors of the Pantheon of the Motherland, ironically demarcating his desire of belong.
Maybe this is it: The Teatro Concreto makes theater to belong; a belonging that is critical and deterritorializes, which decolonizes the blanks promoted by History and Modernity. The teatro Concreto reveals submerged and ugly marginal beauties. It mobilizes the spectator to put his own body into play, leading the discovery that watching is also an anthropophagic and seismographic attitude. The encounter with the other on the scene is always a revelation: of itself, of the territory and the contradictions that put us together in this space-time century. As long as there is memory, there will be struggle; while there is struggle there will be theater. "Last year I died, but this year I do not die."
Glauber Coradesqui
* Final sentence taken from the song "Sujeito de Sorte" by Belchior.
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PATHS
2019
Several Presentations in the cities of Florianopolis (SC), Salvador (Ba), Curitiba (PR) and Porto Alegre (RS) sponsored by BR Distibuidora/Petrobras. Organization of an Education Programme based on the play and aimed to reach those with limited visual and hearing ability.
Opening of the play “Festa da Inauguracao” in the SESC Ponpeia theatre in collaboration with Joao Dias Turchi, Guilherme Bonfanti and Andre Cortez.
