*This text was originally produced to the site “Globo Teatro”:http://redeglobo.globo.com/globoteatro/boca-de-cena/noticia/2014/07/camila-mota-e-sylvia-prado-quatro-perguntas-para-duas-cacildas.html.*
Actresses live Cacilda Becker in “A Rainha Decapitada” (The Decapitaded Queen), fifth play of the saga “ODISSEIA das CACILDAS!!!!!!!!!”, from Teat(r)o Oficina Uzyna Uzona
Camila Mota and Sylvia Prado are responsible for giving life to Cacilda Becker in “Cacilda!!!!! A Rainha Decapitada” (Cacilda!!!!! The Decapitaded Queen), that Teat(r)o Oficina premières this Saturday, 26. At the fifth show of the series by José Celso Martinez Corrêa, Sylvia incarnates Cacilda from Antígone and Camila Mota embodies Cacilda from The Lady of the Camellas. We asked for the actresses to talk about the experience of being Cacilda!!!!! The outcome of this delicious chat you may check now:
*Camila Mota: Where does your endless energy come from? I believe it’s part of your psychophysical constitution, of course, but do you cultivate this state? Do you train it? Do you have a conscious relation with this talent of potentiating?*
*Sylvia Prado:* (laughs) The eneeergy, as Renée Guimel used to say, comes from many poles. One of them, certainly, is the genetic pole, in the Euclidean sense of the physical constitution of men, as the very line of Tônia Carrero about Cacilda suggests: “the hardships which she went through as a child…”. I haven’t gone through starvation, but I’ve been through a lot of things. The first one of them was my premature birth and my “aggressiveness” already in the incubator, plucking off the electrodes, my fight to live. Later, my desire for the world, for the creation. I used to work in one extreme end of the house and study in another. There was no time for weakness, we urged for action. And the energy would come. It was worked out by the necessity. Another matter is the inspiration. Inspiration products energy. Like in the last dress rehearsal that we did. I was exhausted! Worried about reminding the lines. But you doing Camila-Cacilda-Lady of the Camellias was so inspiring that it refilled me with energy. It transported me towards the emotion of Cacilda-Antígone. It also comes from the passion for art, for the other, for what we do, this generates energy. I don’t train it, but with time I came to learn to be more perceptive, to spend energy with what’s important – something I’ve learned with you a lot! But to say that makes me remember some things I said for a german love, once, about sticky people and the stealing of energy. I said in my poorly English: “I have energy to give for everyone, for him, for you, for me and more: the more I give it, the more I have it”! I think that’s it. I cede the energy and it bounces back, transforms itself and comes back.
*CM: What was the greatest interference of the character in your life and in your way of acting?*
*SP:* The staging of “Six Characters in Search of an Author” brings us a more concrete vision of this transformation channel which is a role. It makes us dive even more into the “thea(c)trical” dramaturgy of Zé (Celso) that brings, through the trajectory of Cacilda, this inseparable fusion with life, inside and out of the scene. I think the characters started bringing qualities for the real life. And then I understand even more the proposal of the Universidade Antropófaga (Anthropophagic University) that we already practice and will found in our land: each play is a semester full of subjects, where you will be learning things, acquiring methods, speech, gesture, soul! Like this, through daily practice. I first entered in Oficina living Dul-ci-ná. To be able to live her, I already had to mould myself internal and externally. Her pronouncing. Her apparel. Her “umbrelaa”. In this exchange between the living character and the dead one, everything is transformed. The life, the artwork. Or else, as Cacilda says at the end of the rehearsal of “Antigone”: “Why would I do it? I must be really boring this path which, I believe, many actors take when they decide, for necessity or not, to work in things they are not passionate about- and this way they lend their equipment only momentarily to their craft. Retaking… All the characters have interfered profoundly in my life. But I think the process of “Os Sertões” (The Backlands) may have been the most shattering of all, because as opposed to the other ones that gave us the “evolution” techniques, it made us reduce ourselves to our core, our gene; it brought to light all the repressed savagery, all slaughtered ancestry. The worst of us all. And dealing with one’s own abysses is always very tough. But it is important. Without knowing oneself deeply, one cannot give space to the “other”.
*CM: How do you deal with the difficulties of the actress’ work during the process? In this year and a half (until now) of this ‘Cacilda’ phase, which were the toughest moments, the ones that looked like you’ve arrived in a knot? And how did you undo it?*
*SP:* Theater is a sacred space. That urges to be recognized with its importance. To be treated, cultivated, prestiged, to have paid the royalty which it deserves. The other medias and arts have come, others will come. And it’s wonderful that they come, but it can’t always be the birth of the slaughter, as it was some sort of fight of species. We need to equalize. Coexist, together, in a balanced way. I think the greatest difficulty to be faced in the process as an actress is, undoubtedly, the one of living daily in the capitalist profusion. The birth of my first child intensified this. But, curiously, it was in theater, in the collective human strenght that I was able to survive. To reborn. This is why it is necessary to take care of this magic with lucidity, wisdom, generosity, financial freedom. The Art of Giving Oneself live is worth much more than seven thousand publicities. But it doesn’t happen like this. “Barriers, I beat them with bravery, distributing to all people distraction and culture…” In the process, everything becomes subtext, specially the hardship. I decide at that point to bathe myself in it or to laugh of myself drowned in it. I think the greatest dificulty lived by me in this one year and a half of “Cacildic” wonders was the fusion between mother and actress. The necessities of these two children, these two passions. How to conciliate the two. The times of a baby and the times of a creation, which is also a baby. The knots, both in the throat and in the reality, were undone with the confrontation of everything. With no mask. Sometimes the knot was undone without traces. Sometimes it was needed to use a scissor. But, like I said, in theater and in the thea(c)ter practiced by us, by the Oficina, it is easier to undo the knots. Because we quit crying over them, we take them in our hands and try to undo them.
*Sylvia Prado: Once, you’ve commented with a common friend about the diferences that complete us. What are the differences in our acting that complete us as Cacilda-Sylvia / Cacilda-Camila? What in Cacilda-Sylvia inspires Cacilda-Camila?*
*Camila Mota:* I will start the answer with the similarities, because tracing the trajectory of us acting alongside with each other, starting in 1998, the first memory is of the creation of the chorus of “Cacilda!”. This is our actresse’s DNA- a very difficult process, very cruel and of a lot of richness, which beat us up hard. We weren’t pampered by Zé, who seemed to give us no concessions and that made us stronger. Of course we have always been different but for me, for many years, the inspiration came mainly from the affinity, from the common perception of the work. I remember Aury Porto saying many years ago that he didn’t feel competition between us and that was a disadvantage. With the assemble of the “Cacildic” cicle which started in 2013, with the third exclamation of the Odissey, I realized that I needed to discover you in the differences, because that was in the rules of the game since the casting of the Cacilda roles made by the director. That already was the staging of our opposite qualities. What astonishes me the most about you is the endless energy – a monster that irradiates potency. Another important difference is the relation with the conflicts. I perceive you feeding from them, they excite you. I see you many times triggering a conflict in the scene, as if that was the combustion to detonate the continuous line of action. That inspires me a lot, because my detonator is almost opposite to yours, it is like I would act from the moment in which I would find the balance point between me and the other actor/actress. And there’s nothing psychological about this, on the contrary! I am talking concretely about the different qualities of our bodies in the scene.
*SP: What changes in the search for Cacilda with the study of Dance?*
*CM:* Everything! By the way, my whole life has changed with it. I’m in my early childhood with dance, with everything to do, to experiment yet, but I already have another relationship with the body. Cacilda Becker is just so much that I needed to open space in my body to incarnate the entity. It is a glory to start acting with the whole body, to look with the column, to hear with the knees… When we did “The Bacchae” in Portugal, I went to that huge aquarium from Lisbon and stood observing an octopus for a long while – I realized it had conscience of the movement of each one of those eight tentacles. I’ve been searching for this, a presence in my whole body while in scene – and the dance is for this. I have always acted doing music, I’m not only talking about speech or singing, but about movement, rhythm of walking, stopping, dealing with objects, costumes… But the body would always lack musical perception. That has already started to change.
*SP: How do you interpret and use all the material we read about Cacilda in the creation of the characters?*
*CM:* It depends a lot on what which material offers. The books are all very different from each other, and have provoked diverse perceptions of Cacilda, and I kept measuring the findings. Besides that, there is the direction – because there is the Cacilda Becker that had existed in real life and the Cacilda from Robespierre’s delirium (Zé Celso used to be called Araraquara’s Robespierre, and in the ‘Cacildas’!!!!!!!!! Odyssey’ this character is Zé Celso himself) which is Cacilda interpreted by Zé. The Cacilda who is the whole theater, who’s the very conflict in Gaza at this moment. But I have been listening a lot to the interviews that we have in audio. To listen to Cacilda many times is very inspiring, because by listening to the same words for several times, I have many different interpretations – and then it becomes unquestionable that Cacilda is Theater, because Theater is interpreting.
*SP: You have a huge trajectory in Oficina. Which “Cacilda” made blossom the woman Camila, in its most radiant state? How do you see this inside the Oficina’ process: the transformation of life through the character?*
*CM:* We did seven years of “The Backlands”, where I played a lot of men’s roles. It started in a rehearsal of “The Earth” in which I was playing Jurema with a skirt, as a backlander, and Zé saw me as Diadorim – also because of my hick origins from the North of Minas. Besides this starting point, I will confess I played some roles in the army because I preferred to be part of the men’s team. Especially in “The Fight 1”, I thought it was unbearable to be part of the women’s team – most of them would talk too much, would want to make too many arrangements… I don’t have much patience for all that talking. In theater, I rather come to accordance through telepathy. Both of us have this communication between each other and it was easier for me with men. I used to definitely reject this side of the woman-animal that needs to impose herself over other women, keep exalting herself in a permanent state of vanity… Cacilda changed it all! She is a generous character. She gives a lot, interferes indeed in life. To make the woman blossom was an internal and external transformation process. One of the first things I had to learn playing Cacilda was to be beautiful. Not that I thought I was ugly, but I had to discover my beauty and transform it in to acting. I loved it! Nowadays I love to have long red nails, to wear lipstick, perfume… But the most radical transformation was the swift of the point of view. No, not of view, of action! I think the woman Camila began to blossom playing Pagú in “Macumba Antropófaga”, I discovered the pleasure on the triangle Tarsila-Oswald-Pagú, I started to have fun with that rivalry, it was fertile! At that time I was completely in love with a man, in a very likely situation, my life was synchronically fused with art! I was able to live in scene all the matter that life would give me and that is so “Cacildic”…
All the sessions of “Cacilda!!!!! A Rainha Decapitada” will be transmitted live through TV Uzyna Uzona, at the this website.