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.

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.

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….

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