“In the Endless Solitude of this Time and This Place” – 2012
The show “In The Endless Solitude of this Time and this Pace” by Cia. Corpos Nômades directed by João Andreazzi presents a choreographic stage composition that starts from stimuli: Rua Augusta, texts by Bernard-Marie Koltès, and ideas and thoughts by Deleuze and Guattari. These are the sources that feed the corporeality and the vocality of the performers in scenes that build an atmosphere of imperfect reality, arising from the existence of the human species that Rua Augusta (Augusta Street) masterfully captures and absorbs in a poetic form. We may appreciate these stimuli in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and their influences of masochistic, schizophrenic and paranoid bodies and also feel in the images generated by the speech of the characters: Client and Dealer present in the play Na Solidão dos Campos de Algodão (Dans la solitude des Champs de Coton) by Koltès.
It is known that the first references of rua Augusta (Augusta street) date back to 1875, the 70’s in the XIX century, which was initially called Rua Maria Augusta (Maria Augusta Street), and in 1897 it is already referred to as Rua Augusta. It was located in the property of the Portuguese citizen, Manuel Antonio Vieira, owner of the Chácara do Capão since 1880, when several streets were built in the Bela Sintra neighborhood, including Rua da Real Grandeza (Real Grandeza St.), presently known as Avenida Paulista (Paulista Ave.)
The Frenchman Bernard-Marie Koltès (1948-1989), succeeded in producing intensely and left his mark in the history in dramaturgy be it by writing screenplays, novels, and mainly theater plays. His whole work, twenty-two texts were translated into over more than 30 languages and exhibited in approximately 50 countries.
In Mil Platôs (A Thousand Plateaus), Deleuze and Guattari emphasize that the nomad has no points, paths, or land, although he has them. If the nomad may be called par excellence, it is precisely because the repossession is not done later, as the migrant does, neither anything else, as in the case of a sedentary person. For the nomad, on the contrary, is deterritorialization that marks his relationship with the land, so he reterritorializes in the deterritorialization itself. It is the land that deterritorializes itself, so that in it is where the nomad finds a territory. The land is no land anymore, and tends to become plain ground or support.”
On the assembly of the show
The design of this show was heavily influenced by experimental approaches to Rua Augusta (Translator’s Note: a street in the city of São Paulo) backed by thoughts and movements arising from the counter-culture of the Beat Generation, by the manifestos by Oswald de Andrade (who lived next to our Espaço Cênico O LUGAR (Scenic Space “O Lugar”), by prostitutes’ bodies marketed and traded, and by imaginary beings and their fantastic stories that, as night wandering artists, expose themselves through the night.
The foundations that supported the bodies that arose from this were provided by Guattari and Deleuze, in their voluminous A Thousand Plateaus, such as in the chapter How do you Make Yourself a Body without Organs. These bodies proposed new possibilities for existential reflections, and developed a conflictive discussion between madness and rationality, the isolation among the crowd, crime and complicity, inequality, deterritorialization and territorialization, both the purchased and the sold desires. The transient and the idea of nomadic body were also the raw material for producing this intriguing guise that exposes some of essentialities characteristic of both contemporary body and soul.
The ideas expressed in the thoughts of geographer Milton Santos that were the reason for naming the Company headquarters as O LUGAR (THE PLACE), also helped to convey the notion of a “transcreation” that occurs in the place, on earth, in space, and how it affects or transforms the body. The abandonment and rescue of the body, of the building, of the object, the feeling of rising again were also a source of inspiration.
“I’m not here to give pleasure, but to fill the abyss of desire, to remember the desire, oblige the desire to have a name, drag it up to the ground, give it a shape and weight, with the compulsory cruelty that exists in giving desire a shape and a weight. And as I see yours to show as saliva at the corner of your eyes, that flows down your face, and your lips to swallow it, I will wait it to run along your chin or that you spit it before I give you a handkerchief, because if I give it to you too soon, I know you would refuse it, and it is a pain that I definitely do not want to suffer.”
… You know these streets, you know this time, you know your own plans; As to me, I know nothing, I risk everything. In front of you, I’m as if in front of these men masquerading as women who dress as men, in the end one doesn’t know anymore where the sex is. “Bernard-Marie Koltès”.