Dan and Dito go to Brazil: Day 1

Today we arrived in Rio. Turns out that it was Amtrak that was the troublesome part of our trip – both Dito and I were delayed more than an hour on the train from Philadelphia.

We take the redeye from Newark to Sao Paolo and take the 1 hour flight to Rio de Janeiro.

Here’s Dito (van Reigersberg), shrouding himself with a blanket – the airplane AC is freezing him.

As we enter the immigration line, the 40-something man takes my passport, checks my visa. “Use condoms,” he instructs me – ruefully? We can’t tell if it’s with a snarl or a smile.

We are here in Rio on a professional “blind date”: Cláudia Tatinge, a professor at Wesleyan who hosted HELL MEETS HENRY HALFWAY a couple of years back, insisted that we must meet Compania dos Atores – an ensemble of actor-creators from Rio de Janeiro. Cláudia is a Brazilian actress and director. So we fired off a travel grant request to TCG and they supported the request – kind of in advance of our making contact with Cia dos Atores… So we went back and forth on email, added another company from Rio to visit (Compania Lia Rodrigues), and finally, in the waning days of the grant period, as TCG threatened to take the money back if we didn’t use it, we managed to find time in our schedule and their schedule to make the trip.

So now we’re here in Rio de Janeiro, a balmy 70 degrees in winter. As we drive away from the airport, we see enormous birds in the sky – vultures? We ask our taxi driver, Christiane, who looks like a cross between Amy Capommachio and her partner Beth; “Uburú,” she says. In Spanish, we try to get more info? A big bird? It eats meet? Dead meat, she replies. OK, vultures.

Christiane hurtles through the streets towards the heights of Santa Teresa, a steeply inclined neighborhood that overlooks the city. Cesar Agusto, an actor from Compania Dos Atores, has set us up with Denise Milfont, an artist-friendly proprietor of a house here.

And the Ebullient Denise Milfont, exuding welcome as we arrive…

My sink – these blue tiles are frequently seen in Brazil, it seems. The house is from 1923. The lion head spits out water.

Denise plies us with breakfast: brown bread, fresh cheese that squeaks when you bite it, guava paste, and “milk jam” – i.e., dulce de leche. Fantastic. I pour myself a cup of coffee, but I pass it off to Dito (the professional coffee drinker) once I realize it’s the kind of lethal supercondensed brew you’re supposed to cut with water. I make myself a more gentle version.

There’s a French family staying here, as well as several Brazilian actors and directors. Denise runs a kind of artists’ colony, and some of the apartments are used in conjunction with a residency for visual artists. Dito speaks Spanish fluently, and I have some French, and breakfast passes in a mish-mash of all 4 languages. Denise is funny – she forgets which language she’s speaking half the time and switches between French, English, and Spanish mid sentence.

There are tiny monkeys on the tree outside, almost tame. “Very sweet, tres petite! I try not to feed them bananas,” says Denise – “Then you can never get rid of them, they come into the house, the bite everything, eat the passports, you know.” But she breaks the rule and Dito passes one a small piece of banana which is snatched with tiny claws.

Now we’re headed out to meet our translator, Marina, somewhere near Ipanema. Later we’ll plan our workshops and presentation. The plan is to meet Monday-Wednesday: 1 day of ‘sit down meetings’, sharing videos and explanations of artistic methods; then a day each on our feet, each company leading some research and exercises from our theater.

Posted by Dan Rothenberg, 5:27 PM, 7.28.08