“Aurora” takes on the difficult task of translating the poet and writer Paulo Mendes Campos onto the stage. Instead of focusing on the story, director Rodrigo Penna focuses on the atmosphere, materializing on stage the essence of the Brazilian chronicle: this perfect meeting between literary elegance and the simplicity of everyday life.
The show is organized like a mosaic of voices. Fragments of texts on love that cools, childhood in Belo Horizonte, the bohemia of Rio, domestic boredom are skillfully sewn on stage. The famous chronicle “O Amor Acaba” unfolds in short, almost static scenes that map the disappearance of affection like a species cataloguer. The effect is atmospheric.
The three actors – Gustavo Damasceno, Kadu Garcia and Julia Konrad – play the role of mediators. They do not “interpret” Campos nor do they create solid fictions around his texts. Rather, they move through words, sometimes narrating, sometimes embodying an image, sometimes observing from the outside, like readers aloud. Julia Konrad, in particular, moves women from being lyrical objects to being subjects of discourse, giving depth to characters who, in the originals, are often muses or shadows.
Visually, the show rejects a possible period reconstruction. The scenography and projections of Batman Zavareze create an abstract environment, where flat areas of color – deep blues, earthy reds – define areas of meaning. The projected images refer to contemporary urban aesthetics: graffiti, digital collages and visual interference. It’s an intelligent choice: instead of embalming Campos in the 1950s, the staging suggests that his view of the city, time and desire finds an echo in the visuality of today’s streets.
The soundtrack follows the same logic. Far from the cliché of nostalgic bossa nova, the electronic rhythms and layers of sound create a current auditory landscape, which dialogues with the internal rhythm of the prose. The words are treated with the precision of a score: the actors decline it, lengthen it, syncopate it. At certain moments, speech almost becomes speech, at others, an intimate conversation. The sound does not accompany the conversation.
There is an obvious risk in this type of enterprise: that respect for the text generates a static and overly literary theater. “Aurora” escapes this because of the physicality of the cast and the almost musical dynamic that Penna imposes on the ensemble. The actors move for a choreographic purpose; their bodies punctuate, counterpoint, silence.
In the end, what remains is the rare feeling of having had access to a thought mechanism. “Aurora” wants us to understand how Campos’ writing organizes the world – and how this organization always has meaning. It is a theater of emotional intelligence, where feelings are constructed word by word.
Three questions to…
…Rodrigo Penna
The script process involved many revisions and versions. How did this work unfold to distill a life and work on stage? How did Adriana Falcão participate in this process?
I’ve been studying the work of Paulo and the other 3 horsemen of the apocalypse for years. It wasn’t until I realized that I had already read everything he published that I started to see the selections. We start with version 43 of the script. And I admit that it is already the 44th.
Paulo has children’s books, poetry books, thematic collections, on football and bars, for example. It was a great adventure to get to know the man and his work, without rushing. I had the privilege of meeting Joan, Paulo’s widow, who is also deceased today.
Adriana is our godmother! It was she who introduced me to Paulo’s work, around fifteen years ago. It is important to remember that I also made an adaptation for the theater in 2005 of the chronicles of Adriana Falcão and Luciana Pessanha, another writer I love from Rio, entitled “I never said I was good”.
Adriana and I, in addition to being great friends, always exchange beauties that delight us. And Adriana helped me, more than just a script, to find the tone, the look of my choice of texts. Let’s say she helped me find “my Paulo”
The word is the driving force of the work. How is the materiality of the literary text translated into the scene, involving other artistic languages, without losing this essence?
Our raw material is also our final product; speech is pronounced, told, read, projected, sampled, repeated, exacerbated, contained, silent and gestural. Without conflicts, without intrigue and without dramatic curve, our piece presents, offers, the texts and words of Paulo like delicacies, shared “little tendernesses”.
What, in the work and life of the honored writer, struck you the most and gave the initial impetus to this project?
His gentle outlook on life, on others, on cities, always so humanly urban; in this Minas-Rio back and forth. I also carry the mountains of Minas Gerais and the sea air of Rio in my blood.
CCSP – Rua Vergueiro, 1.000, Liberdade, Central region. Thursday to Saturday 8 p.m. Sunday, 7 p.m. Until 12/14. Duration: 80 minutes. Free. Tickets available directly on the CCSP website and in person.
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