By VITOR MORAIS GRAZIANI*
Commentary on the show conceived by Nuno Ramos and Eduardo Climachauska
The show The Song of Maldoror: Earth in a trance, conceived by Nuno Ramos and Eduardo Climachauska (Clima), shown in October of this year at the Theatro Municipal de São Paulo, should initially be hailed as a unique event in a dying scene like that of culture, solely because it makes those who watch it think.
A consideration that, in its own way, also makes explicit the entire web of meanings that has been tormenting the duo of designers for quite some time now, and which perhaps could be said to have begun with the short films. Black Light (ParaNelson1) e Two Hours (ParaNelson2), from 2002. Since then, the assumption that elaborates the presence of something less and less contemporary to us, as well as the evident psychic sufferings derived from it, has been valid as a place to be reached by the works of Nuno Ramos and Clima. All of this done from the point of view of the enlightened intellectual who, from the periphery, carries with him the weight of having to intervene in what he thinks, giving uniqueness to the presented proposal and enabling the rare exercise of criticism - also immersed in all the trance of Earth in trance.
That said, it is worth pointing out that the film by Glauber Rocha on which the show focuses (1967) — a true open trauma — was already the subject of Nuno Ramos in 2018, on the eve of the second round of the presidential election, in work carried out at the Instituto Moreira Salles as the concluding act of the “lives” series. At that time, the country was watching the gran finale rough of a decisive decade, in which the trance was rekindled in the country that in the previous decade took off on the cover of The Economist,.
Even with predictions that time has made come true, there, the future still seemed open, no matter which way it leaned. An accumulation was taking place, and the imposition of working through this accumulation while it was still hot, from within the decade in trance, set the tone for the 2018 spectacle. Along with the scenes from Glauber Rocha's feature film, there were excerpts from National Journal (given the cancellation of the debate between the presidential candidates that was supposed to take place at the same time as the show), which were torpedoed directly into the actors' ears, creating a cacophony of voices that emitted from within the chaos.
The same cannot perhaps be said of the show being presented here. Since then, the decade has closed and the long road of the 2018st century is already here, announced and ticking on the clock. The events that took place between the two Octobers, that of 2024 and that of XNUMX, need no further comment, if not the one that concerns precisely the loss of trance in the present. What we are witnessing today is, rather, the decomposition of the accumulations of the past decade dear to the sector from which the show speaks, than the elaboration of something new; something capable of producing a new accumulation.
The tone, for progressives — in which leftist identity and belief in progress mix and become confused — is above all one of melancholy and disillusionment. This perpetual motion has long haunted the production of Ramos and Clima, giving their work a distinctive value, due to the anticipation of melancholy in past hours of general positivity, as in White flag (2010)
It is clear that this process, close to a renunciation of direct intervention in the contemporary world, has its explanations due to the ethical limits of the march of history, with the fascist mutations of our formation showing their faces. A refusal to fight the Herculean battle against “absolute evil” because it is internal to our space, and without a geographical neighborhood willing to save us — even because it is immersed in similar conditions in many cases. In this sense, earth in trance in a trance, since 1967, he has been speaking from outside 2024, compared to what was staged in 2018.
In the statements given to support this year's work, the expression “loss of reference” was omnipresent. The “reference”, here, can be understood as everything that formed us, and, formed, illustrates the world that runs outside. As far as I can see, the work of Nuno Ramos and Clima has as its mark this non-place in place, based on the observation that the advance of time has not allowed the construction of new references capable of composing the plot that explains this advance. From then on, the great object becomes the passage of time — its irreversible passing, as if sucking up what remains of what preceded it.
It becomes important, therefore, to ask what is the actual relevance of earth in trance — and to whom she says. Saying, what is the next step to be taken. The proposal, then, of The Song of Maldoror: Earth in a trance is, from this framework, to try to access this current situation. A current situation for which, as Lorenzo Mammì analyzes in the show's booklet, the sphinx that is offered is rather repulsive and chaotic — and not majestic and circumspect like the machine of the Drummondian world. A chaos, however, that is internal, to a very specific sector of the public, that is, those who are interested in the proposal precisely in search of new references to tell them about what is happening in the present. A present that is imminently repulsive, keeping in mind the old references that have formed it up until now.
Therefore, it is possible to say more clearly that the show aims to close, within the heroic and fruitful possibilities of art, these formative references whose basis is simply in a becoming that does not come from Modern Brazil. This objective appears in a melancholic way only to those truly melancholic people present at the Theatro Municipal; that is, those who can no longer bet on the wreckage of these specific references.
In general, the tone of those who still believe in this entire formative universe will tend more towards mockery, made possible by the profanation of the sacred space of high culture represented by the Theatro Municipal de São Paulo — whose openness to something as unusual as what is narrated here also deserves to be welcomed. There is still a last possibility, more difficult to access, which is that, having noted the melancholy, one feels the vibrating fruitful mockery of the irresolute ruins, of the “construction that is already a ruin”, and that remains as the final horizon — and from whose apocalyptic-messianic potentialities the last art is expected, just as in earth in trance.
Everything is expressed throughout the hour and a half of the presentation through the tragic tension (with comic possibilities) of three places, whose importance is also ordered in Glauber Rocha's film: the intellectual; the left; the people. The first group, symbolized by Paulo Martins, a poet who begins by flattering the right-wing leader Diaz, then leans towards the invention of the left-wing populist Vieira and ends up committing suicide as a hero of his own, is marked by speaking in the name of something he despises.
He is represented throughout the show by Marat Descartes and Georgette Fadel, in different ways, and who represent his dual role. In Descartes, his voice appears extremely close to the sound used by police news programs when interviewing someone who requests anonymity due to their fragility. It is possible, however, to point out traces of President Lula's diction, a mix of a northeastern accent and a worn-out voice, reinforcing a guttural character of expression. In Fadel, the vocal perception is that of a parrot, repeating a given prescription.
On the one hand, there is the shadowy place of the intellectual leader, a condition that is inescapable today even for a leader of popular origin like Lula, but whose last historical task has been precisely to hold the 20th century reference point from which Paulo Martins emanates. On the other hand, the characterization of the second place, the left, also summarized by Martins, but in Fadel's diction, genuinely demonstrating the cancellation of the latter by the accumulation regime. In this botched operation, the left stops proclaiming ways of being in the world, in the name of general liberation, so that these same goals become exhaustively repeated commandments, so that they lose the meaning in themselves of what is said.
A communicative action devoid of emancipatory value, corroded by the emptiness of grandiloquence, from which nothing remains but the mechanical repetition of something that is passed on. In the midst of this, the people speak, through the choir — by definition powerful due to the number of voices it brings together — and the questionable solos of Marcela Lucatelli, in which a popular tradition is elaborated, also distant from the contemporary urban trance, but whose ritualistic power in rural social organization cannot be disregarded.
The musical material, in turn, based on the orchestration of Piero Schlochauer and Rodrigo Morte, is divided into four pitches, whose frequency varies according to the thematic identification of the track, divided between “extended present” (- 12), “Vieira past” (- 16), “delirium” (normal) and “Diaz past” (+ 12), and which can be identified by the four pendulums of Laura Vinci's stage. The choice of heights for each pitch, certainly, demonstrates Diaz's statement regarding Vieira's dissolution in the horizons of the present — in which Paulo Martins' delirium continues as it is.
The voice of the people, in turn, appears as present, which implies a questioning of which popular we are talking about — in pitch “extended present”. On the other hand, in the orchestration, the procedures result in emphasis of the strings in the dissolving moments, via glisandos, while the brass instruments announce the typical public celebration of archaic Brazil in 1967 and the percussion imposes the strength of the masses, leaving no space for the lyricism of wind instruments such as flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons.
Spinning overhead, the pendulums, carrying inverted lightning rods, seek to suck up the sound energy in search of a greater force capable of explaining what is happening — on stage and outside. Marcelo Cabral's double bass reinforces the tension, acting as an element of dramatization in the performances of Descartes and Fadel, who also play the other characters in the film. In general, from the beginning of the long ellipse that opens earth in trance with a point of candomblé — and which reappears throughout the work —, until Diaz's manifest destiny that ends it, the fidelity of the show to the unfolding of the film is almost complete — a single scene is left out, about negotiations with Explint.
The original proposal, therefore, is to listen to the film stripped of its images, allowing an imaginary to be formed from the sound power of the orchestra, choir and soloists. The presentation, however, as I have been trying to demonstrate, is not limited to this, as it represents something greater, including in terms of exploring other languages beyond concert music and its traditional space in large theaters.
The idea of subjecting the material to sound distortion, in itself, represents an attempt to manipulate the film's current events, which is the core of any possible interpretation of the listening proposal that Nuno Ramos and Clima propose. In pitch In Diaz's work, the ritualization of its sound events is reinforced — as in Vieira's work everything melts away. These processes are reflected in the direction of the soloists, who in their own way also replicate the demonstration of current events through distortions of speech. Thus, Nuno Ramos and Clima's bet that resides in the soundtrack of earth in trance the high point of the film, presents a diagnosis of the present that points to the consolidation of pitch “past Diaz” and imposes a new horizon of perceptions.
O jazz The intellectual orgies seem lukewarm; the Candomblé venues have been demonstrating the confrontational nature that is dear to them, within, of course, their schemes of bastions of tradition; and the great art dear to Diaz's characterization — from Verdi to Carlos Gomes — appears quite visible, between the tackiness of the dated and the disgust of the real. Which, by the way, can be reiterated by keeping in mind that several scenes starring Diaz were filmed at the Theatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro and that, in the São Paulo theater where the show is being held, a sculpture by Carlos Gomes watches over the stage from the ceiling. Villa-Lobos is, here, the point of tension, between Candomblé and samba in the face of high culture, functioning almost as a sound terrain of the common.
No wonder they are yours Brazilian Bachianas No. 9 the soundtrack of the party on the terrace of the Alecrim palace, where the famous scene takes place in which Paulo Martins covers the mouth of the trade unionist Jerônimo — who is referred to as the “people”. (A scene that, it is worth mentioning, has the most contemporary moment in the film regarding the enlightened in search of the redeeming people: I am talking about the man who takes Jerônimo’s place and says that he, who has seven children and has nowhere to live, is the people. He ends up dead shouting “leftist”. It is in this brief but fundamental passage of the scoundrel from Alecrim that lies the strength and fear of the next step, yet to be taken, “in search of the Brazilian people”).
In this appeal, in which traditional culture appears as a poison and a remedy (in José Miguel Wisnik’s interpretation of the country), the show by Nuno Ramos and Clima still seems to bet on a “people’s” strength. This bet is made through Marcela Lucatelli, whose improvisations, some with a tone of contempt for the characters in the film played by Descartes and Fadel, function as a “counter-film”, that is, as the only external entity that repudiates everything and questions its place, originally without a voice, in that whole apparatus.
A slap in the face to the class position of the film, of the audience, which, in a certain way, is reflected in the old cinematographic exhibition machine projected towards the audience, which, turning, asks us, the objects of the entire film: what to do? Perhaps the most appropriate question is: is there anything to do? “No. The only thing to do is play an Argentine tango”, Manuel Bandeira would say.
*Vitor Morais Graziani is an art critic.
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