The Play

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PRETO

It is what we don’t know, but want to affirm as future possibility. Other forms to inhabit the world, where the differences shine.

companhia brasileira de teatro’s new project promotes an investigation about what generates the refusal of differences in our societies, and especially about the possibilities of coexistence and fields of interaction amid differences. It looks into racism in a Brazilian perception and in perspective with the world, and from there, artistically reacts through multiple visions and senses.

The experience aims to expand through art, the perceptions about the other and about coexistence spaces and the formation of sensibilities.

In July 2017, in Salvador, Bahia, the American philosopher and activist writer Angela Davis affirmed in a conference that “When the black woman moves, the entire society structure moves with her, because everything is destabilized from the foundation of the social pyramid where black women are found. It changes the foundation of capitalism”.

We are enlightened by this and so many other speeches and thoughts that go from Brazilian abolitionists from the 19th century to contemporary thinkers as the Cameroonian Achille Mbembe; the writings of Frantz Fanon to the literature of Ana Maria Gonçalves; the sensitive voice of poet and professor Leda Maria Martins; to the many conversations between us, artists and collaborators of this play, and between us and the people in the audience, since we have made public conversations in the diverse creation stages of this project, in several Brazilian cities and also overseas.

The play articulates itself, from the public speech of a black woman, a sort of a conference that unfolds itself into images, word mediations, bodies’ resignification, listening activation and senses’ reverberation in a sequence of dialogue attempts.

In first place, the dialogue with the themes. How to say – artistically react – to the dimensions of racism and the historical perceptions that defines us as social image, voice, active body amidst other bodies? In second place, the concrete challenge to create dialogues between us, artists of the play, since nothing seems to us evident, from the beginning. It has always guided us the question: To whom do we speak right now? What voices do we want to listen? What images do we want describe? How do I see myself? How am I seen? What spaces do we want to occupy? Who talks? Who listens?

 

Marcio Abreu.

Rio, October 2017.