Mattogrosso: The Postmodernist Stage in Brazil

Mattogrosso: The Postmodemist Stage in Brazil DA VID S. GEORGE Postmodemism in Brazilian theatre coincides with the post-dictatorship period (1985 10 the present), a phenomenon which has received little attention oUlside Brazil. Pan of the problem is this: non-Brazilian scholars appear to have bonded with those anists who fell victim to repression in the 1960s. So pervasive is this trend that a vacuum, an empty stage, has been created, as if there were an unstated assumption that theatre in Brazil thrives only under dictatorship. It is an illusory vacuum, and the stage now resounds with a multitude of voices. The most controversial theatrical voices of the post-dictatorship period, and the subject of this anicle, are the postmodemist encelladores, auteurs in the mold of Robert Wilson. The evolution of modem Brazilian stagecraft under the command of strong directors, culminating in the encenador generation, began in the 19405, when Polish war refugee Zbigniev Ziembinski brought to Brazil the theatrical resources of European expressionism. In the 19505, Italian directors introduced "sophisticated" European stagecraft. In the t960s, director Jose Celso began to move attention away from the written play, deconstructing Brecht, Chekhov and Brazilian modernista playwright Oswald de Andrade. The prototype of the encenador, however, is Antunes Filho, who launched the Grupo Macunarma in t978 with his internationally renowned adaptation of a 1928 narrative text by another modenzista, Mario de Andrade. What all these directors have shared is integration of international artistic currents, producing aesthetic cross-fertilization, creating new fonns of stagecraft and initiating the tendencies attributed today to the encenadol": total control of the theatrical spectacle, careful attention to design and subordination of the verbal text to audiovisual elements. They all, moreover, have been attacked on nationalist grounds at one time or another; they are nOl "Brazilian" enough. The most active, admired and execrated figure in the new generation of internationally inclined directors is Gerald Thomas, whose theatre company - . Modern Drama, 40 (1997) 474 The Postmodernist Stage in Brazil 475 6pera Seca or Dry Opera - is headquartered in Rio, the city where he was raised. He was a resident director at New York's La Mama (1979-1985) and then returned to Rio, where he has directed pieces written or inspired by Beckett , Wagner, Kafka and Heiner Muller, as well as his own original plays, such as Mattogrosso and Flash and Crash Days. He also works in North America and Europe, touring productions he has mounted in Brazil and directing opera. Thomas's universal outlook and his refusal to obey the dictates of the previous generation's knee-jerk nationalism have engendered a gamut of responses to his work. from scorn to veneration. How is onc to define, classify, explicate Thomas's controversial stagings?1 Although he was influenced by Brazilian directors who came before him, his inspiration has sprung equally from European and North American theatrical postmodernism, which, arising from Artaud, was developed by Beckett and by the communal groups of the 1960s and '970S, and culminated in the postmodem apotheosis of Robert Wilson. Artaud planted the seeds for postmodernist deconstruction of the verbal text, theorizing that the "dead" theatre of the word could be replaced by sacred ritual. Subsequently, Theatre of the Absurd supplanted realist dialogue with expressionist discourse and demolished linear dramatic structure. Beckett and lonesco, however, maintained the primacy of the text's verbal structure; they remained, in short, modernists. Gerald Thomas began his directorial career staging Beckett's plays, returning frequently to the dramatist's work - even after his immersion in the postmodemist cosmos - because Beckett privileges the language of the unconscious over the social language of speech. In the 1960s and t970S, Artaud's vision was carried forward by such directors as Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowsky and Julian Beck (who acted in a 1985 La Mama Beckett production directed by Thomas). Groups from the 1960s among them Living Theatre and Open Theatre - attempted to create Artaudian ritual forms in such productions as Paradise Now and Dionysus in 69. As Fred McGlynn puts it, "While these texts reflected a time of ritual practice and communal mythic consciousness, the transference of them into a faithless time ... could not miraculously accomplish the desire to create a new...