Dan and Dito in RIO ….. DAY FOUR

Day 4 in Rio de Janeiro…

Today as we walked down from Santa Teresa to Compania dos Atores for the workshop, we were intercepted by Selarón. The eccentric and mustachio'ed artist was sitting on the steps (his steps, the “colorful stairs” those tourists were looking for) that lead down to Lapa. He saw we weren't Brazilian and beckoned us over.

He opened a portfolio of dog-eared, laminated press clippings. U2 on the steps. Snoop Dog on the steps (Or “Snoopy dog dog”). Anthony Anderson. He waves us off the street into his small studio. Shows us a studio full of paintings, mostly on ceramic tile. Mostly black lined caricatures - often there are self-portraits of Selarón, and pregnant women from the favelas (slums) are also celebrated.

We are admiring but not interested to buy, so he bustles us back out onto the street gruffly. He hands us some literature, which I later found on the web here.

We begin the day watching videos from Compania dos Atores' history. They have a couple of video reels (one is on VHS) to show. We meet Enrique Diaz, who is very sharp and energetic; we talk about viewpoints. About five years ago, Enrique started studying with Anne Bogart and SITI Company and found that the viewpoints techniques brought his existing vocabulary into focus. I give him my point of view: that I love the idea of viewpoints, but that every time I've tried to work with them in rehearsal I end up with pretentious and self-congratulatory material that has to be cut. I've liked the SITI company work I've seen, but something, I say, has to be missing from the viewpoints training since it generates so many bad ideas from the younger companies I've seen. We spar a little on this point, and I concede that the TEAM, a company we met at the Orchard Project, does use viewpoints and is a killer ensemble of writers and performers.

Compania's video reel was pretty great stuff, though heavily edited. You can tell the work is robust and physical, and it looks busy to me, full of events and very unashamed to use symbols. We were really taken with this one early work, A Bau a Qu, based on a story by Borges, which was full of puppeting other people and had a very dense physical score. One of their most popular pieces, Melodrama, which they still tour, featured hilarious costumes (by Marcelo Olinto), and hilarious “American” melodramatic characters. Beautiful. A more recent one features a crazy mariachi band fronted by Cesar (a master of the silly dance, it appears - something we talked about yesterday, about Joe Chaikin's work with us on Shuteye and his interest in “silly dances”). This was a piece about money-lending (this banner of money is from that show - their set reminds me of the Mexican/Argentine artist Maximo Gonsales who makes dioramas out of money).

We talked about their methods, and, like Pig Iron, they change radically depending on the piece. Sometimes their sources are literary, other times it is stylistic investigation. Sometimes they commission work from a writer and sometimes there is a dramaturgical team. The focus, as with Pig Iron, is on the actor-creator.

And something which really sticks: They talk about Ensaio.Hamlet, the Hamlet-deconstruction they are currently touring. The questions they ask are very familiar, and they put the questions into the work itself. Take Ophelia. Bel Garcia, the actress, begins Ensaio.Hamlet explaining the audience that Ophelia is a teenager and she doesn't know anything about teenagers; she has a teenage son, and she doesn't want to think about teenagers, and this, they said, was the “way in” to understanding Hamlet - through Ophelia.

Cesar talks about the ghost, Hamlet's father's ghost. And the question they ask: “What is a ghost? What is immaterial?” “What would Shakespeare think of a ghost if we were alive today?” Dito and I nod vigorously, vigorously — these are the kinds of questions we ask, too. Never about how to respect the classic material, but how to make it alive today, now; how to cut out everything that isn't going to hit, as theater, today.

From the right: Bel Garcia and Enrique Diaz in the studio

Then Dito and I led a workshop for about 2 hours; we went back and forth last night on how to get anything at all accomplished in such a short time. This can be so hard to pitch correctly - you don't want to do stuff which is too “beginner,” but at the same time it's so hard to dive into the later vocabulary without all the other concepts present as a base.

We thought about working with these concepts of “ordinary and extraordinary,” vocabulary which formed the basis of Shut Eye and then came back in other ways for Pay Up and Love Unpunished. But in the end we discarded that idea - having just arrived in Brazil 3 days ago, we felt that our sense of the “ordinary” here was going to be distorted. This stuff is pretty culturally specific - how close you can stand to a stranger, where you look when you pay for something. A recent trip to Japan double-underlined this for me (I kept trying to hand money over when the salesperson keeps trying to catch the money in a small tray… a comic dance).

So we decided to attack the “Three Brains” work we explored to dive into Chekhov Lizardbrain. We explained that this vocabulary is still very much an inquiry and a provocation - we tried to put all 3 “brainstates” into Chekhov Lizardbrain but ended up following a side-story about a character inspired by Temple Grandin (and Solyony from Three Sisters). But I still am in love with the acting research into these simple states.

We only were able to get through a couple of exercises - taking the actors through “lizardbrain” and “dogbrain.” This work is all about failure, trying many things that don't work in the search for something which does.

Enrique and I have a small back-and-forth about “emotion”; the dogbrain, I'm explaining, has one emotion at a time, and I take these actors through a gamut of emotions as part of the exercise. Enrique distrusts this word, “emotion”; with so much fake emotion, don't we need to wait for something real to arrive? For the purposes of the exercise, I say, “real emotion” doesn't interest me. It's ok if there are “signals” and “fakes” - right now the focus is on rhythm, this rhythm of switching which comes from the dogbrain. Going completely from one to the other.

This is such a fascinating exchange, I wish we had more time to explore it. It's something that every theatrical style has to grapple with: what's an emotion? What's a real emotion? Does it matter if I really “feel it”?

Enrique tells me that he focuses on “tasks” much more than emotions, because this word seems like such a trap to him. Which makes sense to me; but I've become suspicious of tasks, myself, as a basis for acting training, because I want people to be able to create in stillness, in quiet, with the minimum. But it's funny, looking at the videos of Compania's work, I now see how many tasks were in there, and they were beautiful, musical things.

In the end, there was provocation, confusion, and some success at the first workshop. The best you can hope for in 2 hours I would say.

I leave the Compania's studio thinking hard about “the artistic project” versus “taste.” I've had a couple of opportunities this summer to query people about what their artistic project is - I recently spent a couple of confounding and delightful weeks in Japan with Toshiki Okada, a playwright-choreographer who pairs a very specific kind of text with a very unusual, “unconscious” and awkward style of movement.

There were so many things in his work that seemed cohesive to me, but when I asked him about certain details, he insisted “That's not important.” That is, the artistic project, what he's trying to do, that's one thing - the other stuff is just to his taste. It's not necessary to the work.

But it's funny - in thinking about Enrique speaking about his work, about Dito and me talking about Pig Iron - for the first time I'm starting to see how we both know and don't know how our work hits the world. Or how the stuff we think of as ornament may in fact be what is most salient to our audience. (I suppose an obvious example is how baffled I would be talking to people who admired the “writing” in Pig Iron's early work, when the writing, the words people said, was the last thing on our minds when we made those pieces).

More on this another time.