Bacantes at Liege: Liveweb cast and general info

By Silvana Garcia

José Celso Martinez Corrêa and Teatro Oficina: a brief history

José Celso Martinez Corrêa (1937 – ), better known as Zé Celso, is acclaimed as one of the most creative and provocative artists in the history of Brazilian theater. His artistic career began as a playwright and director when he was a law student in 1958. In 1961 he founded the Teatro Oficina (Oficina means workshop and the symbol of the group is an anvil) , trying to offer an alternative to the theater that prevails at the time: on the one hand, the Teatro Brasileiro de Comédia (Brazilian Comedy Theater), assimilated to European models; on the other, the middle-class political activism of the Teatro de Arena (Arena Theatre). In the first stage of the Teatro Oficina, the repertoire reflects the desire to produce plays of strong realism, by renowned authors marked by a concern of social nature, among them Clifford Odets, Maxim Gorky, Max Frisch and Augusto Boal.

With the intensification of the military dictatorship in Brazil in the late 1960s, the Teatro Oficina undergoes a change of direction, staging a play by the Brazilian modernist Oswald de Andrade, King of Candle (1967), which provides, with irreverent exuberance, a grotesque metaphor for corruption and power relations in Brazil. The piece represented a milestone in the history of Brazilian theater. This was followed by other plays which won for the Oficina the reputation of being the core of most daring and experimental theatre that was produced in Brazil at that moment, with especial enphasis on two productions of Brechts plays: Galileo Galilei (1968) and In the Jungle of the Cities (1969). In 1968, José Celso runs out of the Oficina a piece of Chico Buarque de Holanda (who would later be enshrined as one of the greatest composers of Brazilian popular music), Roda Viva (Hustle and Bustle, 1968), which was also highlighted, this time for a sad reason: one night, after the presentation of the play, the cast gathered backstage suffer a cowardly attack by militant right-wing paramilitaries.

At this stage, the Oficina is visited by the American group Living Theatre, with which they showed a great affinity. José Celso then enacts Gracias, Señor (Thank you, Sir, 1972), a show that could best be described as a great collective ritual, largely improvised, involving the audience – characteristics that will mark the production of Zé Celso permanently.

In 1974, while the countrys political situation became untenable, Zé Celso is arrested and then goes into exile, where he remained until 1978. Between then and 1993, Zé Celso engender several projects and struggles to regain his theater (located in a lower middle-class neighborhood of São Paulo). Finally, in 1993 he opened the new Oficina’s space at the same address as before, now recast in an architecturally bold design (of renowned architect Lina Bo Bardi): a large glass and iron structure, whose playing area resembles a street, flanked by bleachers. Here, the proximity between the actors and the audience is almost intimate and all the space can be converted into playing area. In this new stage of the Oficina, José Celso performs longish and scenically vigorous shows, which ressemble acts of collective celebrations, to which he is entirely dedicated, leaving the mark of its strong presence on the scene and
gathering around them large casts, which include members of the surrounding community, even youth and children. In this context we find The Bacchae (1996), in its first version.

Answering the questions

The first show of the Oficina I attended was The King of Candle, a spectacle that impressed me by the irreverent and daring interpretations, as well as for the blend of circus, vaudeville theater and opera buffa, in a tone strongly grotesque. I follow the production of José Celso since then, always with curiosity and interest, and rarely stopped being surprised by the power of their performances.

José Celso is an artist who merges with the theater itself. His belief that theater should be a great celebration that extends beyond the representation is summarized in the notion of te-ato (the-act), which he adopts in the late 1960 replacing the term theater. The-act means the unmediated dimension of life which became art, the abolition of the border between art and life. This perception makes Zé Celso to favor in his shows the choral condition, which implies large casts, and the involvement of the community people – non actors who stay side by side with the professionals actors.

The presentation of the Oficina’s performances lasts for many hours – in Os Sertões (The Backlands), his last major production of the homonyn classic book (1902) by journalist and Brazilian writer Euclides da Cunha was divided into five parts, the first produced in 2002, the last in 2006, and, all parts added, would totalize more than 30 hours of show. Because it is a collective celebration, his shows always include long periods of interaction with the audience, some of them beginning as opening parades in the street (one of Zé Celso’s great ambition has always been to open the theatre space to incorporate the surrounding areas as to create an huge agora for the celebration of popular culture).

His shows are extensively prepared as they are essentially collective processes, as they are dreams that Zé Celso cherishes with devotion, on topics that allows him to cover all dimensions of his artistic and political existence. Even when working on texts previously written – as Hamlet and The Bacchae – Zé Celso performs a meticulous process of appropriation of the contents of the texts, expanding them to encompass other “texts” that include, at a metalinguistic level, the former experience of the group, facts related to the countrys political life, references to other shows of the group, manifestos and calls for causes he considers important.

This hybridity also happens in terms of language since his shows combine songs and video footage, alternating moments of representation with moments of communion with the audience, which may include the sharing of food and drinks, with the physical involvement of spectators, who descend from the rows of seats to mingle with the actors. The notion of “carnivalization” is suitable to the procedures adopted by Zé Celso: parodic inversions, profanity, de-sacralization, sensuality, shamelessness, joy and exaltation of the body. Zé Celso has always been a libertarian, who stripped himself of the shackle of self-censorship and hypocritical modesty. It does not take away from the sight of the audience nudity or sexuality.

The theatre produced by Teatro Oficina has a great fascination because it is always of an exuberant theatricality, it stands a scenic freedom and offers a ritual of communal harmonizing that represents a break from the traditional practices of the Italian stage. Spectators, especially young people, take part of the show with joy and sometimes with a certain reverence, and it is not uncommon to find people who return two, three, several times to watch the same show.

The Bacchae is a show that somehow brings together all the major constituents of the theater of José Celso Martinez Correa in what is held as a celebration of the theater itself and of popular party. As in other shows, The Bacchae mixes the Euripides’ Greek text with echoes of other realms of reality and actuality. However, his shows are never fixed, frozen, in the first version. His work is always in progress. Every place where he is, he reverts to the stage elements of the new reality. Therefore, the new seasons of each play by Oficina always hold surprises. When performed in Moscow in 2005, with the play by Nelson Rodrigues, Boca de Ouro (Mouth of Gold)– which I witnessed – the show won nearly two additional hours and developed aspects of the original performance which added to it new dimensions in a original and unusual way.

To attend to The Bacchae – like watching any show by Oficina – means coming into contact with the power of ritual theater, with its presential potency, which takes place at that time and which is unique because it exudes the loving, desiring availability, of joining in communion audience and actors.

Ive always attended to the shows of Oficina with the expectation of being enchanted – as always – by moments of pure theatricality, of being part of an act of collective energy that invigorates and excites us. And that somehow renews our love for the theater.

Who I am

Silvana Garcia holds a PhD in Performing Arts, teaches theater theory at the School of Dramatic Arts in the University of Sao Paulo, and has published numerous books and texts;
On José Celso Martinez Corrêa and Teatro Oficina has written the followings essais: “Das entranhas d’Os Sertões, o Oficina. Uma viagem pela encenação de Os Sertões, pelo Teatro Oficina, São Paulo”, in Latin American Theatre Review (no. 43 / 2, Spring 2010, pp.. 55-68), and “… Yet there is method int. Ham-let. José Celso Martinez Corrêa”, “in Gestus (University of California / Irvine, no. 19, april 1995, pp. 85-99); she is also responsible for the entry on “José Celso Martinez Corrêa and Teatro Oficina” for The Cambridge Encyclopedia of World Actors and Acting (to be published next year);
Dramaturg and director, artistic director of Lasnoias Company;
Belongs to the CIELA – Catedra Itinerante de la Escena Latinoamericana (Itinerant Chair of Latin American Scene) which gather intellectuals and scholars from several Latin American countries.