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Interviews
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LUME Teatro Brazil - An 'Ethical-Aesthetic' Approach to Performance. Jackie Fletcher talks to Naomi Silman and Jessner de Souza at AuroraNova@St Stephens in Edinburgh after a performance of Shi-Zen, 7 Bowls. LUME is a company of international renown dedicated to exploring the actor's craft at their Centre for Theatre Research in collaboration with the University of Campinas. Founder Luis Burnier was one of those rare luminaries who surface from time to time in the theatre world. Burnier spent many years in Europe engaging in the explorations that would become his life's work with a variety of practitioners, all of whom now constitute the alumni of movement training. Starting off with Etienne Decroux's Corporeal Mime he went on to train with figures such as Jerzy Grotowski, Eugenio Barba and Jacques Lecoq. Furthering his eclectic search for the essence of the actor, he trained with masters of Noh, Kabuki and Kathakali. On his return to Brazil in 1985 he founded LUME together with Carlos Simioni and Ricardo Pucetti, each of whom brought a personal approach to the work. As the company grew to become seven strong, it became clear that two aspects of the work were paramount: an utmost dedication to rigorous physical exploration combined with the personal interests of each individual member. It is this characteristic duality of commitment that is their strength. As Jessner explained to me, each company member has their own field of investigation alongside the company work. His own particular field of expertise is traditional Brazilian songs, while Naomi's specific interest is clowning. Others have their own area of expertise which they research with their own groups of students and professionals. It all feeds back into the company facilitating a staggering range and diversity of work. "It keeps the company alive and we are still doing what we want. It brings freshness into work." I ask Naomi for some details concerning their training regime. As ever, she talks of the work with a characteristic clarity and eloquence: "Everything is always developing and changing, because if it crystallises, it's not good for the creative process. Our main priority is to find out what this actor's body can do. At first we used Grotowski's exercises to come close to physical exhaustion. When you are younger it is possible to work very long hours, and we tried some training in the middle of the night. Now we vary the training a good deal. Some people have been in the company for 20 years, others for 8 or 10; our individual needs are different now. We have exercises that we have devised over the years and we are accustomed to these now. You need to keep on stretching yourself. The essential question is how do you keep a company alive for a long time? You have to change the focus: for example, say let's just work with music for a while, expand our repertoire of song. We have eight shows in the repertoire at the moment and we continually teach. While creating a new piece we will focus only on that. Tadashi brought some new exercises from his own work and we have other guest directors. So the training is a continuously evolving process." While the focus remains on exploring ways to train the actor's body, to develop physical and vocal techniques, the company do not see the actor's body merely as his/her 'instrument', a concept favoured from the sixties onwards and common among those practitioners who regarded the actor's body as a finely tuned medium, a vessel, through which flowed some greater art. Rather, they see the body as the person. As Barba would put it, it is the "body in life" that constitutes the performer's instrument. LUME's training is not an end in its own right, it is simply a means to discover ways in which the performer can manage to reveal something from within and communicate that with an audience with generosity. Unifying the techniques with the interiority of the actor is the essential point of contact with the audience. As Jessner rightly points out, the classification of theatre into various genres, such as physical and visual theatre, is absurd. All theatre is physical. While LUME train as a means to explore and enhance all forms of expression, they are proud of the diversity of their repertoire. They have a wide range of performance styles from clowning to naturalistic theatre. One of characteristics of the company throughout its twenty year's existence is that it's very hard to classify. They create different varieties of work to have lots of different experiences. They often work under basic conditions like street theatre, or do a naturalistic play in a traditional space, or something like 7 bowls, or music and dance. In keeping with their ongoing research, they are always looking for relationships with audiences on different levels. On the street it is predominantly physical. With 7 bowls the relationship is subliminal and you don't always understand it immediately. The relationship between audience and performer is deeply affected by space. The first performance back in 1985 was for just 21 people, and for a while the performances remained more intimate. Since then they have performed in huge spaces seating as many as 1,200 spectators. Naomi wonders what the person at the back sees: "Tadashi has bought elements to our work that has allowed us to expand into bigger space, but detail is still important for us. And it is important to go back to performing on the street, so that you don't become institutionalized." Burnier died tragically young in 1995, just ten years into his directorship with LUME. The company then decided to carry on without a permanent director. Guest directors bring a new dynamic into their work and over the years they have worked with directors from a variety of artistic and performance disciplines. The list of illustrious practitioners from all over the globe is staggering. Equally, with their commitment to teaching, LUME pass on their acquired knowledge and expertise to students. They have made a contribution to theatre anthropology, explored site-specific work, collected endangered musical traditions and tales from the peoples of the Amazon, and worked with street people. Their 'ethical-aesthetics' is inspiring. There is something thoroughly genuine and unpretentious about their work and their commitment to the research. I was still fascinated with the relationship between LUME and Tadashi Endo who, besides performing and directing, runs his own Butoh-Centrum Mamu at the University of Göttingen. Shi-Zen, 7 Bowls is such a remarkable and unique merging of Latin 'oomph' and Japanese minimalism. Naomi said, "The collaboration with Tadashi works because he could really see us for what we are and didn't impose anything. The aesthetic was new and interesting to explore, but when he first came to Brazil to see us, he saw us performing in the street. It was very alive and there was lots of energy. It inspired him to invite us to work with him because we are very much a group but also individuals and he wanted to explore that dynamic." Jesser added, "We had done some training with Butoh practitioners before. The thing about Butoh is that the Butoh dancer doesn't dance but must be danced. There's a story about Kazuo Ohno [one of the fathers of Butoh] when he was very old watching a workshop given by his son in which the dancers were doing an improvisation with standing and falling down. Kazuo kept crawling out of his chair to join in, and they kept returning him to his chair. He was already very old. But he kept crawling out again. He couldn't stop himself. Eventually, he sat in his chair and danced with his hands. You see, the Butoh dancer is danced." This reminds me of something Jerzy Grotowski used to say about the actor's impulses to movement: it's not so much that you do something, but rather that you resign from not doing it. I'm curious about the focus of the workshops and way Tadashi Endo creates impulses in the actors. Jessner: "He uses different things: images, for example. Or he would say: I want you to make movements out of work actions. It grew organically as he chose movements and made changes. And there is the music. He is interested in all elements of nature and transformation. He was always looking for something to do with seven individuals with a collective identity." Naomi: "The music relates to the present and the personal thing to me and one of most important things about meeting Tadashi is his sensibility. He can really look at detail and see beauty in simple things. The imagery he gives is so simple, and with everything around us so obscured with so much technology we overlook so much. That's all been important to us. He gave poems and we improvised a lot with the bowls, with music, with dance. For example, for the scene with the song played on the clarinet, the song is traditional and comes from the poorest area of Brazil where there is a lot of drought and poverty. It is called The Blackbird and Tadashi starting giving us images of a blind angel and a blind bird. And we were always watching each other. In rehearsal that is how to I find something to communicate, by doing it for the others in the room and that is important to me." In Shi-Zen it seems to me, that the 'invisible is made visible' as Artaud would have put it; the interior, the unconscious, the metaphysical, all those forms of knowing that exist alongside objective and empirical ways of knowledge, but seem for the most part intangible are revealed. Taken together the words Shi and Zen mean 'Nature'; whereas separately, Shi means 'individual' and Zen means 'as an example'. And this seems appropriate for the company, the seven performers who are the 7 bowls, in Shi-Zen, a unity of individuals, a generous revealing of what lies beyond the mundane, in the soul, the spirit, the unconscious, nature itself. It is the ultimate tribute to Artaud. If the performers give so generously, in return they require only of us that we dust down our habitual means of perception and collaborate in this revelation. I would be inclined to say that Shi-Zen, 7 Bowls is an apotheosis of all they have striven for over the years, but I have a suspicion that all their work is this good, so committed to excellence and generosity in communication. Central to the work of training is the notion that what you have to say is not as important as the way you say it. This would seem to contradict the received wisdom of the Western theatre mainstream, dominated as it is by a literary theatre, in which the playwright's 'message' is paramount, and the actor fleshes out the role with appropriately and readily accessible cultural signifiers. It would also seem to contradict the prevalent belief that meaning is conveyed primarily by words. I dislike this false distinction between the word-bound linear narrative and the physical and visual theatre that is deemed an 'alternative' practice. As Jessner pointed out, all theatre is and always was physical and visual, dating right back to the Greeks. If it were merely 'words, words, words' we wouldn't bother getting on the bus and going to an especially designated spot to fork out a sizeable wad to see a show. We'd take Ben Jonson's advice and stay at home and read a play. And our attachment to a particular form of narrative structure is merely a convention not a universal phenomenon. Theatre is about engaging the senses, all of them, and in this total theatre LUME excels. Theatre can never successfully convey a message or a single meaning. Meaning is never made without the full collaboration of the spectators all of whom bring with them their own unique blend of cultural references and individual experiences and with these they make meaning out of what they see. The spectator is the fourth collaborator in the equation. If I have to discuss what Shi-Zen, 7 Bowls means I will have to say that what it means to me is different to what it means to you. It is an invitation to have your own experience, one which will, hopefully, be enriching and challenging, one which we apprehend with the senses, with the eyes and the ears and the whole body because the bodies on stage are sensual, they speak truths about human experience familiar to us all, but with a complex and fascinatingly agile language independent of the spoken word, a dialogue of bodies. Shi-Zen 7 bowls is an invitation to openness, an encouragement to put all our senses to use and to enjoy, to discover, to be refreshed and endorsed in our own particular truths. It is a celebration of the possible, of human potential, of the triumph of the imagination over the grindingly mundane. Shi-Zen premiered in Germany in January 2004 at the VIII International Mamu Butoh Festival. More information concerning LUME Teatro can be found on their website at www.lumeteatro.com.br . Naomi Silman will be giving a workshop from Sat. 3rd September to Tuesday 6th September for the Theatre Training Initiative in London. Further information can be found at www.theatretraining.org.uk . Tadashi Endo's performance MA is at the Garage Theatre in Edinburgh until the 20 August and in London as part of the Daiwa International Butoh Festival on Friday 30 Sept and Sat 1 October. He will also be giving a workshop on Mon 3rd and Tues 4th October. See www.daiwabutoh.co.uk . For further information about Tadashi Endo's work and the Butoh-Centrum Mamu see www.butoh-ma.de .
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