Day Two in Rio de Janeiro
Submitted by pigiron on Tue, 08/05/2008 - 6:52pm.
Seems there’s been a mix-up on dates and the first day of work is scheduled for Tuesday, not today.
Last night, to our surprise, an old-fashioned yellow streetcar pulled up in Largo de Guimaraes, the small square down the hill from our guesthouse. “Centro?” we asked, and hopped on. It rattled crazily, and some passengers hung onto the sides. The man who collected the fares went hand over hand along the outside of the streetcar while it trundled along, leaning in to take people’s reais. At one point, the cable car makes its way across a single lane bridge; we look through the chickenwire to the highways and neighborhoods below.
Notice the ticket taker on the right here…
After that we walk around Lapa, the neighborhood where Compania dos Atores is located. Turns out that bridge that we crossed on the Bonde (“bon-jzhay” – the cable car) is actually an old aqueduct, now repurposed for the cablecar.
At one point a couple of Australians grab Dito and me. “Do you know where the colorful stairs are?” We explain this is our first day. “The colorful stairs. From the U2 video.” We have no idea what they are talking about.
Dito and Marina (our interpreter) and I take the opportunity to head
for “Sugarloaf” or “Pão de Açúcar”; Marina knows a path up the first
large rock, but we have to take a gondola to get up to the views;
pretty breathtaking. Those birds – I guess some of them are vultures
and some of them are seagulls, much larger than the ones I’m familiar
with –now circle below us or at the same height.
At 4pm we make our way over to Compania dos Atores’ “house” by taxi. There’s some sort of confusion at the street, but eventually we figure out that the street is actually a set of stairs, a pedestrian street that rises sharply a couple of hundred feet. The stairs are covered with a mosaic of painted and found tiles. I don’t know if its several artists or one artist. A lot of red tile, and paintings of naked women with distended bellies celebrating life in the favelas.
Compania dos Atores is a purple building perched about a quarter of the way up the stairs. To our real surprise, our workshop is prominently advertised on a banner out front. Nice. International communication has been spotty, and it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve shown up in another country to plainly surprised faces (this happened in Poland – a kind of “well, yes, you’re in the schedule, but I completely forgot you were coming!”)
We get buzzed into the black metal gate and come upstairs to an airy kitchen with a large dining table in the center. Turning to the right, we walk into a two-room office. Two women work on desktop computers in the first room, and through the windows into the second room 2 men and a woman work on macintosh laptops. Dito and I later say: “That’s a lot like our office.” There are large posters on the walls from festivals where Compania has performed Rehearsal.Hamlet and other shows (That’s the piece they are most famous for, I think – it came to Mark Russell’s “Under the Radar” Festival last year, but somehow none of us managed to see it there.)
More soon on Day 2 of the trip to Rio….