DAY THREE in Rio de Janeiro

Day 3 in Rio (JULY 29, 2008):

We walk down the steep cobblestone streets of Santa Teresa into Lapa to meet up with Compania dos Atores.

It's strange to be in the southern hemisphere in July. I guess Rio is far enough North that it's quite warm in the Brazilian “winter,” but Dito points out that both of us are always wrong when we try to guess the time. The temperature makes us think it's summer, but then the sun feels low at 9:30 am and then we're surprised when the warm days end suddenly at 6.

They've put out quite a spread at Compania. Juice, coffee, bread, cheese, ham, fruits. We meet a number of actors from Compania dos Atores, as well as some younger actors (their students and performers who have worked with them in other shows, or worked with the director, Enrique Diaz). Enrique (or Kike, they call him) probably won't be joining us today.

Marina has been studying specialized terminology for the workshops. “Wings.” “Cues.” “Stage Business” (it's a 5-minute lecture-dem to explain what it is, “stage business”). But to our surprise, most of the people here speak a lot of English. It seems like three-quarters of the actors spent 2 or 3 years in New York City at one point in time. Susana Ribeiro lived in the States for 4 years, working first as a babysitter, then singing Brazilian music in bars, then working for a contemporary composer.

A tall, warm-eyed man enters; he embraces each person tightly, kissing them heartily. His name is Fernando. Apparently he has just been nominated for Best Actor in the first (?) Portuguese production of “The Sound of Music.” He's playing Uncle Max. He pooh-poohs his work in the production to us, but does admit he loves the music. Marina's eyes light up - she's one of those musical theater fanatics. She finagles some tickets out of Fernando.

After about an hour of meet-and-greet, we head downstairs to Compania's studio to look at some videos.

Dito and I end up taking the entire morning talking about Pig Iron. We begin with video of CAFETERIA, explaining the company's early work with physical character, how we focused on silhouette and complete physical transformation. Then we show some of HELL MEETS HENRY HALFWAY, to give them a sense of a piece with much more text but that still has this physical approach to character at its core.

Almost everything we say is greeted with a nod - they understand where we are coming from. We relax and go into more detail about the things that matter, the small jokes, the larger issues that are hidden beneath the surface.

We show some of the Lucia Joyce Cabaret, about our interest in the rhythms of madness, how we researched the characters as rhythm rather than trying to learn about the diagnoses and work from that. I talk about this musicality as a fundamental part of our project - Cesar interjects that this term, musicality, is something that critics always single out about Compania's work as well. We talk about the inspirations for Lucia, about how much we all loved Hedwig and the Angry Inch when it came out on film that year. Susana jumps in: “That's crazy - we talk about Hedwig, the feeling of Hedwig, in our company a lot too, as a source of inspiration, too.”

We show some of Isabella and Pay Up; now both parties are hungry for “coincidences,” and we find enough to get us all repeatedly startled and fired up. Compania made a piece which focused on “puppeting” other bodies, just as Pig Iron did with Isabella. Compania made a piece about money, just as we did in Pay Up. They made a piece which tore apart Shakespeare (too). They did an inquiry into melodrama, as we did with Gentlemen Volunteers. They made a piece in a madhouse, as we did with Lucia. Strange, strange, strange…..

But happy-strange. It's pretty rare to meet artists who are really diving in the same waters as you. Five years ago, we went to Minneapolis to meet up with Theatre de la Jeune Lune, who we assumed would be instantly simpatico with our company. But it was an oddly strained encounter, and I came away feeling that both sides were frustrated to discover how we had evolved different kinds of shorthand, and seemingly quite different goals, despite the similarities in where we had begun. Pig Iron's collaborations since then have most often been with people who do something very different: David Brick of Headlong, for instance, or Daniel Rudholm of Teater Sláva.

But this video showing, which I had kind of dreaded (I almost never, ever watch the videos of the shows again; first of all, the videos usually get shot before I am happy with the piece, and, second, the very thing we train so hard to do, this complicity and breathing with the audience, this is totally lost in a video) - this video showing and all the subsequent probing of each other's vocabulary leaves Dito and me kind of dazzled. How weird and, well, wonderful that two groups of people in opposite hemispheres, with absolutely no knowledge of one another, would end up treading these similar paths, for years…

One thing we agree on today: for each of us, there is no one “style,” and hence no one “method.” It's a process of inquiry, and each piece means that, in some way, we start over. We admire groups like Wooster Group and Richard Maxwell terrifically, but for us, the search for what we want to do and how we want to voice it, it's a process of tacking one way and then another. The discoveries become part of the vocabulary of the ensemble, and part of the training we've undergone together, but we aim not to repeat ourselves.

Part of the task I've set for myself this year is to boil down the Pig Iron project some more: maybe it's a virtue that I can't say it, in two sentences, what it is that we do; but this year, I am going to try to simplify and see what can be articulated in a short, clear way.

To close: A photo of a man, crushing cans.