The Multifaceted Body

Multifaceted: having many facets or aspects. Many-sided, like a gemstone… Our bodies are multi-faceted gems, but how many of those facets do we make full use of? Ah, here is LUME’s Ana Cristina Colla to help us shine like a diamond, our many facets polished and gleaming.

Cris’s course offered an intense week of investigation into the body’s potential for physical expression. There was, of course, the intense physical training that LUME is renowned for: we jumped like frogs, coiled into scorpions, stretched to the skies whilst feeling our roots unite, stalked like panthers – and most fun of all, had intense, to-the-death, tiger battles.

Much of Cris’s work has been strongly influence by Butoh in general, and the work of Tadashi Endo in particular. Tadashi directed not only the renowned LUME ensemble work Shi-Zen 7 Cuias/Bowls, but also Cris’s solo work, Voce. So not surprisingly many of Tadashi’s Butoh exercises found their way into our week: we descended with painful slowness to the ground, taking ten minutes to make the journey; we swelled like balloons full of air, taking the outside in, then moving the inside out; we walked in slow-motion, containing worlds of emotion within.

Most of the week’s work focused on the physical expression of each individual body, but there was also work to raise whole-group awareness, as we stopped and started and formed clusters or lines or follow-my-leader snakes. There was also one memorable session where we worked on short improvisations in groups of three or four, aided by a bamboo screen, two stools and three birdcages. In this exercise, we took as our vocabulary a set of sound and movement motifs that we had developed from individual words of our own choice, these then abstracted and combined randomly to create what Augusto Boal would have called a concerto of sound and action. (And can I make a little aside here to say I’m surprised at how rarely I hear Boal’s name mentioned in Brazil – in Europe he is a legend, the most famous and admirable Brazilian theatre-maker, yet in Brazil itself his work seems to be rarely referenced.)

And talking of Boal and his methodologies – which infamously include many devices to blur the boundaries between ‘real life’ and ‘theatre, a session in The Multifaceted Body that I felt rather less comfortable with was a ‘hunter and hunted’ exercise in which a group of six or seven people chase after and restrain one person. For me, the bounds of safety and comfort were pushed too far, and I bowed out of the ‘game’. It did, though raise interesting questions about how much of the material that we use in our theatre-making makes use of ‘real’ physical experiences of the body and how much invites us to imagine how something feels. In this case, people were really being restrained – it was a physical experience which they were invited to then respond to. I suppose we each make our own decisions about whether we feel that is OK or not… 

Another aspect of the week’s work was the learning and singing of a selection of heart-warming songs from many and various homelands. My own contribution from my motherland was the Irish comic song Molly Malone. It was one of the highlights of my week to see and hear a roomful of Brazilians dancing and singing merrily: ‘Alive-alive-oh!  Alive-alive-oh! Crying cockles and mussels, alive-alive-oh!’

All-in-all, an inspirational and truly multi-faceted week!

Abre-Alas in Words and Pictures

All photos by Natacha Muriel Lopez Gallucci and Lucas  de Camargo Magalhaes

So finally the day has dawned. Over the previous week, we had exhausted all possibilities with our blue cloths (see earlier blog!), transformed ourselves into birds of every kind imaginable, sung melancholy songs about peacocks and rivers, cried out in a babble of languages, danced the wind dance, galloped like winged horses, worked the streets in large and small groups, played tug-of-war and tag – not to mention the usual LUME regime of full-on physical training to start each day (roots, panthers, frogs, run-and-jump, explode, freeze – you know the score!).

And now it’s Friday 8 February, the final day of the course, and the day of the Abre-Alas performance which will mark the opening of the Carnival holiday. LUME’s usual Trueque is, as is traditional with these things, a processional event. Last year, we processed with samba band Cupinzeiro in a ‘cortejo’ from the Praca de Coco through the streets of Barao Geraldo – the traditional format broken along the way by a number of performance interventions, including a Dance at the End of the World and an homage to Caravaggio (see last year’s blog for more on that).

This year, for Abre-Alas, the traditional processional format was usurped even further in the creation of a site-responsive promenade performance, in which the audience were led (by a troupe of angels and vagabonds, accompanied by a band of flutists and drummers) from a starting point by the children’s playground in the Praca, past the various cafes (where angels could be spotted upon the balconies or amongst the tables), and across the road to the wooded area beyond – a space that for the purposes of the dramaturgy of the show had been dubbed The Enchanted Forest.

Here in this kingdom of the birds, the audience were enticed into a space in which the tress were dressed with multi-coloured ribbons, papier-mâché nests, and origami birds – with larger-than-life birds in exotic costume playing hide-and-seek around the space. For yes, all that work throughout the week on developing our bird motifs was now coming into play. For whatever reason, in an early improvisation I’d cast myself as a truculent swan, and that’s what stuck. Queening it over the other birds, I preened and hissed, singing Swan Swam Over the Sea with mock-operatic haughtiness – although my swan got her come-uppance when a particularly persistent male bird trapped her in an awkward embrace for a would-be romantic bolero dance. (Second year in a row I’ve danced a rumba-bolero on the streets of Barao Geraldo with LUME on the opening day of Carnival – this is getting to be a habit.)

The next section sees us transformed into baby birds gathered round one of the largest and most beautiful of the old trees in this wood – serenaded by the lovely Ieda, who is resplendent in multi-coloured plumage, twisting and turning on her aerial silks as she sings, to the accompaniment of Mauro on cello and Mario on violin. Also on the scene at this point, strutting around the ground, is a giant chicken and also a mad birdwoman (Silvia) who is perhaps sounding omens of danger to come. As if to mark the moment, there is a tremendous clap of thunder from above and the sky seen through the canopy of branches is darkening ominously. And here indeed is the danger, in the form of Carlos Simioni’s O Presenca do Ator group who are making their presence felt very strongly as, dark-suited and white-faced, they march with clockwork precision towards the birds, who flee with a flap onto the next stopping point, where we gather in a pack to run on the spot (as the rain sets in making the ground very slippery), fall to the (muddy) ground and lie defeated until revived by the soft touch of angel wings.

The idyll is restored, and the garden of innocence becomes once more the playground for the birds – except by now it is pouring rain. Not just any old rain, but torrential rain, buckets of it. But the show must go on, and so we skip and sing, create carousels with two-person human poles and those ever-useful blue and red cloths, play out a hopscotch motif whilst singing a childhood song in unison, and fracture out into the space with images drawn from blind-man’s-buff.  There is a note of discord, and an uneasy flight to the next station, where gathered in a ‘V’ we sing that melancholy peacock song. And now here come those ‘suits’ again – and this time they are armed with birdcages…

We birds, transformed into winged horses, flee with the speed of Pegasus out from under the trees into open space – at which point we lose most of our audience, as it is now raining so heavily that we are blinded by the force of it, and drenched to the point of being weighed down by our clothes. The brave souls who have accompanied us so far on the journey, now led out into the open, have nothing to provide even the tiniest possibility of shelter, and all other than a die-hard few have to move on. It is, though extraordinary that we have kept so many people for so long in these arduous conditions.

We somehow make it through the intense scene in which beautiful bird-girl Adelaide is tormented to death, branches of paper birds burnt as the funeral cortege walks solemnly by. The angels are no longer intervening in our world; they swoop around or swing in the trees, now separated from the earthly domain – although two descend to enact a burial beneath one of the grand trees.

At this point, the funeral cortege becomes a Carnival cortejo, as the birds turn the moment of death and destruction into a scene of rebellion and political action as slogans to ‘save the trees’ are shouted and the birds dance merrily in the street. Well, dance as merrily as is possible in the rivers of rain – and samba band Cupinzeiro have had to abandon ship as their instruments would be ruined, although the flautists and drummers play on. Yet here we all still are – a bedraggled flock of birds, angels, vagabonds and musicians, but not just still standing, but dancing and dancing and dancing on… singing, and dancing, in the rain!

Rhapsody in Blue

The Abre-Alas blue cloths get an airing. Photo by Marcelo Sousa Brito

I was going to call this post The Secret Life of Objects, and then I remembered someone else had already filched that title (could it be Naomi Silman and Yael Karavan, do you suppose? Their workshop with that title starts at LUME late February).

So anyway, this post is called something else, but it is about the secret life of objects – specifically, it is about that box of blue cloths tucked away in the LUME cupboard. And we are in the middle of the Abre-Alas February workshop, so of course the box has appeared, and the cloths have been allowed out to play.

It didn’t take long. They arrived in our space on the second day of the course, and the first encounter was a session of free play. Reflecting on my own choices, and watching other people in their play, triggered some thoughts on object manipulation and animation, and on the relationship between costume and prop. A simple blue cloth can be used in so many different ways and can become so many different things…

It can, for example, be used purely as a choreographic prop, its movement an extension of the body’s movement – so if I am holding the cloth in my hand and I move my arm, the cloth ripples. Or I can throw the cloth in the air and catch it, or throw it to the ground and lie on it.

This choreographic intention can be developed in numerous separate but inter-related ways. If, say, I place the cloth around my shoulders and run, it flies behind me like a cloak. If I extend my arms, it becomes less cloak-like and more like wings. If I wrap it round my torso and legs, my movement becomes Geisha-like, restricted. If I immerse myself in it totally I move as if blind, slowly and cautiously, feeling my way. In all the above examples, choreography and theatrical intention are intrinsically linked: I don’t need to pretend to be a Geisha – no acting required – the cloth binding my legs make my movements ‘Geisha’.

I have for a long time been interested in the relationship between choreography and costume – in the intrinsic qualities of cloth (or other materials that surround the body) and how they these can add or take away flow. I’m thinking, as a few examples, of the work of Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer with his extraordinary dancers clad in glass dresses; of Pina Bausch/Tanztheater Wuppertal’s work, where cloth is often used as an extension of the body’s movement; and of Mummenschanz and their ‘whole body mask’ that creates images through containment; What all these very different companies share is an interested in how a movement of the body can be extended or restricted by the physical material that envelops it. The Belgian movement theatre company Mossoux Bonte, French visual theatre supreme Philippe Genty, and the Russian company BlackSkyWhite also use objects in general, and costume in particular, in interesting choreographic ways – often creating illusion and confusion, so that we struggle to understand what we are actually seeing. Is this person moving forwards or backwards? And, actually, is it one person or two? Of course, much of the illusion is created and maintained by the physical skill of the performer – that is a given – but it is interesting to note how the fabric plays its part.

And so, back to Abre-Alas. What else could these blue cloths be and do? In the honourable tradition of ‘poor theatre’ a simple piece of cloth can of course dress a king, a priest or a goddess – so it wasn’t long before the LUME garden was full of high-ranking folk sporting togas, turbans, cassocks, ball gowns, veils, and Vivienne Westwood style puff-ball skirts. Some of us chose the other end of the social spectrum: I spent quite a while dragging myself around the space as a one-eyed beggar woman, and out of the corner of that one good eye I saw a street-dweller huddled in a bundle of rags.

As earlier in the day we had been working on bird motifs, I also saw a whole flock of feathered creatures strutting and flying round the LUME studio and garden: long-legged cranes and herons, preening flamingos, comical chickens, and cheeky little sparrows. Probably a whole load of Brazilian species I wouldn’t recognise, too. My bird was a swan – who knows why, that’s the beauty of improvising, these things appear and you have no idea why you picked them. My swan is rather vain and very bad-tempered. Do they have swans in Brazil, I ask Naomi later. Probably one or two she says, although she doesn’t sound too convinced. Oh well, they have them in fairy-tales so that’ll have to do. I’ll be a mythical swan.

I then became interested in the ‘whole body mask’ possibilities, hiding inside the cloth with just one hand or foot extending, or moving round the space as a ghostly almost-formless swathe of blue, or stretching the cloth across the face and biting a big section to create a grotesque mask face. Bored with that game (after getting tangled and half-blinded in some bushes in the garden – perhaps the fact that I’m reading Jose Saramago’s Blindness at the moment was having an influence), I felt I wanted the cloth as far away from me as possible, although I knew that I couldn’t take a break  – remembering from last year Ricardo’s maxim on seeing anyone looking like they are about to give up: ‘now is not an interval’. Solution: keep the cloth at arm’s length, dragged along the floor. At this point, the cloth is somewhere between choreographic tool, costume and prop – it’s somehow simultaneously an extension of the arm, perhaps clothed in an elaborate sleeve; a tail; a dead body dragged across the ground; or a dog on a lead. After a while, I found myself occasionally using it as a whip to beat on the ground – aha you dastardly cloth, blind me and strangle me, would you? I get my revenge!

So now we are talking about the power of objects in general (and these pieces of blue cloth in particular) to take on theatrical rather than purely choreographic values in a way that we could call ‘puppetesque’. We are not using the cloths as puppets per se: they are not modelled into obvious figures, but they are being animated by our movements to create forms that tell theatrical stories. Some have ambivalent meaning – the dog/sleeve/dead body above – but some are simpler and read (probably, anyway!) as the same image to everyone viewing. For example, at one point I roll the cloth into a bundle which I hold and rock in my arms. It would be hard to view it as anything other than a baby…

A tool for movement, a neutral costume item, a character costume, a fantasy creature, a prop, a puppetesque animation. Is there more a blue cloth can be? There is – a set. At a one point, a number of us our hold the cloths up in what becomes a forbidding wall. Oh and as percussive instruments, as the cloths are whipped on the floor

Over the next few days, these blue-cloth figures and forms are developed in different ways, and on Tuesday (we are now around two-thirds of the way through the course) we get to play in public in a small square just off Barão Geraldo’s main drag, the Avenida Santa Isabel – creating a short scene that makes use of all the above methods as the ensemble weave from a procession to a circle, cloths transforming from fluttering abstract objects to cloaks to walls to whips and more. Only three more days and they will be ready to play their part in the Abre-Alas cortejo – as costume, props, set, instruments and even characters… Look out, the Blue Meanies are coming your way…