Krum – Project
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In Creation Process
For two years approximately, the actress Renata Sorrah, the director and dramaturge Marcio Abreu and companhia brasileira de teatro, made together a research about the work of Joël Pommerat, a French author that was until that moment unprecedented in Brazil. From this work resulted the montage of the play Esta Criança (This Child) that premiered in Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Rio de Janeiro, October 2012, and received several awards and indications.
This was the first partnership between the actress, the director and the company. The creative coexistence and the numerous actions that involved the project, like public readings, debates and the exchange with other artists from Rio de Janeiro, motivated the desire for a new project that would give sequence to the artistic and ideological questions worked previously. The choice was, equally, by a contemporary text still unprecedented in the country. Our second partnership is sealed, therefore, with the project that we now present: KRUM, of the Israeli author HANOCH LEVIN.
The option to assembly this play is based in the continuity of the dramaturgic research of companhia brasileira. Besides staging texts of own authorship, that are simultaneously written within the creation process of the spectacles, the company brought to scene, as well as did the actress Renata Sorrah in diverse actions, works of important authors of the global theater, still unprecedented in our country. This research relates the actor and scene’s work with the structures of theatric writing, aiming to potencialize the relation between actors and audience, intensifying the unique moment of encounter that theater is. What is the place of theater today? For whom? Which actor to which dramaturgy? How to build pieces of art, sensitive to the perception of a plural, diverse or in formation audience, without giving up of a high level of ethic and aesthetic elaboration? These are some of the many questions of this work.
Levin’s text dialogues directly with these issues, serving well to the guiding purposes of our research that will be the base of our creative process. It is popular, speaks directly to the people of our time, without a prioris, without judging perceptions or sensitivities, but that at the same time has a formal and sophisticated finish, permeable, suggesting a powerful language, in which shape and content are indissociable. It is aligned with debates about the relativizations of drama and the expansion of the senses in contemporary theater.
A succession of short scenes, of intense rhythm, shows a son that after leaving to “gain the world”, returns with nothing to his mother’s house, to the neighborhood where he grow up, and reencounters the people and the circumstances that he had left behind, without great changes. With an acid humor and pungent lyricism, the play presents a list of ordinary and median beings, engaged in matters apparently unimportant and invested in immutable social roles, despite the attempts of displacement and transformation. The characters inhabit any neighborhood, like the others, to the image of the world, in the periphery of a big city, trapped to the own conditions, in a quotidian struggle for existence. This conflict illustrates the tragic side of their destinies, but also their comic dimension.
The play is full with prosaic situations elevated to the level of the absurd. It is about failure and the precariousness of minimum lives turned to small desires forged by a society of consumption. Levin invites us to recognize ourselves in this, to love the part of humankind, of dream, of fragility and abandonment that exist in his characters that exist in us. A unique mixture of triviality and violence, but also of affection, of compassion and of a thought that is far from any conformism.
The project justifies itself by the proposal’s uniqueness and originality, presenting for the first time the text of the Israeli author Hanoch Levin in Brazil and for uprighting the artistic encounter between Renata Sorrah, the director Marcio Abreu and companhia brasileira de teatro.
It is still justified by presenting a language development to the largest diversity of audience possible, combining conceptual and artistic refinement with popular aspects.
The nature of the research and the risk of this work makes it fundamental the necessity of public investment and stimuli for the development of the art theater, that doesn’t envisage profit in a first instance, but yes professional improvement, social and critical dimension, expansion of sensitivity and strengthening of its bounds with the audience.
The play approaches with humor, violence and lyricism, themes that are in consonance with the concerns and gaps of our time, providing reflection and fruition about ordinary life, about common people.
The project still brings the exchange character between professionals of different cities, stimulating the improvement through the contact with distinct realities, providing boundaries and the expansion of its reach as an artistic project.
The execution of this project is favored therefore, by the circumstances demonstrated in the awarded trajectories of companhia brasileira de teatro that has many years of continue activities in national and international level, and the actress Renata Sorrah, an important part of the recent history of our theater, that is direct or indirect responsible by anthological montages of unprecedented contemporary authors and classics of the global dramaturgy.
These circumstances revel recognized artistic quality, innovation, social commitment, permanent contact with the community and continuous artistic actions established.
HANOCH LEVIN was born in Tel-Aviv in 1943, died prematurely of cancer in 1999. He is the author of a considerable work that includes sketches, songs, prose, poesy and more than fifty theater plays, translated and assembled in many countries. Co-founder of the Association of Israeli dramatic authors, militated for the improvement of the statute and the dramaturge’s rights in his country.
Grow up in a modest neighborhood. His father, owner of a grocery store, died when he was twelve years old. That’s why he was obliged to leave school. Finished his studies working as delivery boy. Grow up in the Israel of the 60’s, marked by the differences between those that were born in the country and the immigrants, the rich and the poor, the Jews and the Arabs.