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| 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!
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