Festlip 2009 (review)

Navigate to FESTLIP’s website and you will see a rose-colored world map in which moving arrows direct your gaze from South America, to Africa, to Europe, and back, where they converge on Rio de Janeiro. Beyond tracing Portuguese colonial history across three continents, the arrows invoke festival artistic director Tânia Pires’s aspiration of forging a global network of Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) theatre artists. The digitized map, projected onto a wall for this second annual FESTLIP’s opening ceremony, designates Brazil—a former Portuguese colony with a marked African cultural presence—as the logical venue for this intercultural gathering. In her salutation, Pires spoke ardently about linguistic “fraternity” among participating countries: Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Portugal.

These nations’ linked histories proved a recurring theme in the festival’s eleven main-stage productions, which encompassed roughly two theatre troupes from each country and drew nearly 17,000 spectators in total. Performances spaces were divided among a large auditorium in downtown Rio (Sesc Ginástico), a theatre-in-the-round venue and separate black-box space near Copacabana beach (Espaço Sesc arena and mezanino), and a small proscenium stage in the inland neighborhood of Tijuca (Sesc Tijuca). Fostering constant interaction among the eighty participating artists, the festival featured a three-day acting workshop led by Portuguese director Miguel Seabra, an evening showcasing street theatre from Rio, a multicultural music concert, and roundtable debates. FESTLIP’s assorted activities made it clear that intercâmbio (cultural exchange), not artistic one-upmanship, was the festival’s raison d’être. This collaborative spirit seemed a promising way for mutual learning to supersede old colonial hierarchies, since productions revealed disparate themes and aesthetic trends emerging from each country. Yet festival events also highlighted the ambiguities that arise when language becomes the primary basis for solidifying a global theatre community.

Graça Silva and Elliot Alex in Mar Me Quer. (Photo: Rogério Resende, courtesy of Talu Produções.)

Main-stage entries from Mozambique and Angola proposed various methods that Lusophone African theatre troupes adopt to redress sparse canons of national drama, the result of a Portuguese colonial history that failed to nurture playwriting traditions. These three methods encompass adaptations of literary texts, theatre directors trying their hands at writing scripts themselves, and the use of colonial histories as dramatic sources. Renowned Mozambican novelist Mia Couto exemplified the first method. As Couto’s works have been widely adapted for performance in his country, FESTLIP awarded him its annual theatre prize. Gracing the Sesc Ginástico stage, Couto deflected praise from himself to the Mozambican actors with whom he has worked for twenty years, applauding their fortitude at erecting a vibrant theatre scene from the ashes of a violent civil war. Some of these actors then took the stage for the festival’s inaugural show, a collaboration with TIJAC—a Reunion Island theatre company—of an adaptation of Couto’s short story “Mar Me Quer” (The sea loves me).

Depicting a twilight courtship between the aged Luarmina and Zeca, an ailing neighbor who adores her, Mar Me Quer relied upon staggered white scrims that alternated as projection screens for seaside imagery and translucent façades for the characters’ mimed memories of Zeca’s fisherman father sailing

Anabela Vandiane (Kimpa-Vita) in Kimpa-Vita: A Profetisa Ardente. (Photo: Rogério Resende, courtesy of Talu Produções.)

Cláudio Dias (João Romão) in Cortiços. (Photo: Rogério Resende, courtesy of Talu Produções.)

out to distant waters in search of his lost mistress, later revealed to be Luarmina. While the production featured stellar performances by Graça Silva and Elliot Alex (the latter a last-minute substitute), the bulky screens cluttered the playing space and a gratuitous onstage narrator signaled the sometimes-rocky transition that accompanies literature...