amilton de azevedo writes about “Eruption – The uprising is not over yet” (2022), by coletivA ocupação (São Paulo, Brazil). Originally posted in portuguese as “evocar em corpo-cruzo uma cartografia tectônica” within the context of the archipelago project, with the support of Corpo Rastreado.

“(…) the Seven Crossroads ‘caboclo’ [1] remains as a powerful Brazilian intellectual. I never thought it was a mere coincidence that his unsubmissive roar was heard on the Republic Proclamation anniversary [2]. He shouted his protests in the wind, launched his arrows in the direction of the virgin forest, aiming and hoping for the establishment of a village that recognizes the importance of alterity, the non-normative grammars, the sophisticated ontological dimensions of the bodies available for the trance, the generosity of encounters, the therapeutical and popular technologies of the easing of the soul through the maceration of leaves and the smoke of the pipes of the Congo. It is still the over-centenary roar of the Seven Crossroads ‘caboclo’ that throws in the face of Brazil, as a spell, our most powerful challenge: call the ‘tupinambás’, the ‘aimorés’, the black people, the ‘exus’, the ‘pombagiras’, the gypsies, the ‘bugres’, the shamans, the praying elderly, the canoers, the tiny tiny rocks of Aruanda [3]. Call all the ones slaughtered by the colonial (and everyday more current) project of annihilation. The ‘pembas’ [4] draws the challenging rituals of the affirmation of life.” (Luiz Antonio Simas in O corpo encantado das ruas – The enchanted body of the streets. Free translation by us.)

Spices, dirt and other dust-like materials trace the ground and the air in the same way that ‘pembas’ draw their lines in ‘terreiros’ [5]. Bodies vibrate, summoning from their cores the vital energy that makes the world tremble and move. The coletivA ocupação [6] creates an active volcano from each molecule of their bodies and from every centimetre of the Sesc Avenida Paulista scenic space in Eruption – The uprising is not over yet (2022). Aligned in a chorus, they turn themselves into a lava tide that advances backwards, against the grain of history. From where one would expect destruction emerges Tituba [7], first of the many ancestral voices evoked by the play.

If the watchword in When it breaks it burns (2018), the first work of the collective, was to occupy, Eruption is a vision that starts with history – this prophet who looks back: because of what was, and against what was, it announces what will be, as writes the Uruguayan author  Eduardo Galeano – to launch itself into the process of recapturing.

As well as in the former show, since the beginning, it is the pulsating bodies that say more than the words. In the same way, the coletivA ocupação brings up the emergence of bodies tired from not being listened to; bodies exhausted of their own invisibilization. Bodies that understand that they do not need to ask permission to exist (excerpts from When it breaks it burns review from this author, available in portuguese here). But in Eruption – The uprising is not over yet, their bodies-experiences expand as signs beyond themselves; they become bodies-vessels for forces of nature and historical, mythical and mystical voices.

Under the direction of Martha Kiss Perrone, Eruption is an eminently collective creation, as one can verify in the textures of the scene and confirm by looking at the cast and crew credits organisation: the dramaturgy is credited, in this order, to the coletivA ocupação, Ícaro Pio, Lilith Cristina (both performer-creators) and Perrone. There is also the coletivA band and the creative fronts – Body coletivA, Music coletivA, Dramaturgy coletivA, Visualities coletivA – composed both by performer-creators and collaborators.

Dealing with a myriad of cosmogonies and narratives, Eruption structures itself as an ambitious adventure of  the coletivA. By staging many times, tides and winds, performer-creators are bodies-enchanteds [8], bodies-magma, bodies-oceans, bodies-ancestrals. This yet-to-end uprising seems to develop itself into geological eras, moving depths of  a world in continuous (trans)formation.

If sometimes the apprehension of the totality of the speech can slip through our fingers, the climatic changes of the scenic space can be felt the entire time. Bodies, music, words and the dynamic light design are all earthquakes and storms in this continuous Eruption. Party and war, happiness and anguish, pleasure and pain, apparently binary poles, are tectonic plates in their convergent, divergent and transforming movements.

In this cartography of uprisings, the tremble needed for volcanoes to arise makes the lava a precise representation of the sweat of the wretched of the Earth [9]; of the excluded from the lands. The spiral movement of the coletivA develops itself in the effectiveness of a scenic ‘gira’ [10] where the riots of the past are ancestral pulsations towards possible futures. The winds teach, as says an old proverb from the Congos, that the birds have wings because they were given to them by other birds (Simas and Luiz Rufino in Encantamento: sobre política de vida – Enchantment: about the politics of life, free translation by us).

After occupying everything, the coletivA seems to have made the asphalt streets and the forest glades their territories of excavation and invention. And as Simas says (in The enchanted body of the streets), we need bodies shut to the domesticating project of the colonial dominion, that aren’t adequate or contained for consumption and for the death in life. We need other voices, political because poetical, musicalized; the wisdom of the masters in academies, but also from the streets and their wiles of producers of enchantments in the precarious.

The aggregating project materialised in Eruption seeks to evoke these other voices and to converge the wisdoms and the wiles towards the choice to work in the direction of the reenchantment of the world, by proposing simultaneously a dialetheic discourse that does not ignore the greater dimensions of life, that goes way beyond our contemporary society tends to see it, bringing back community values that empower the relation between humanity and the non-human structures and beings of our planet. And the enchantment as manifestation of the vivacity expressed in the ‘cruzo’ [11] between natures and languages is implied in the dimension of the community and the rituals (Simas and Rufino in Enchantment: about the politics of life). Thus, maybe, the decision of the coletivA to operate precisely in this ‘cruzo’.

The ‘encruzilhadas’ [12] pedagogy is elaborated as a counter strike, a political/epistemological/educative project with the main goal to disobey the curses of racism/colonialism through the transgression of the western canon. This project comprehends a series of tactical actions that we call ‘cruzos’. This tactic, founded on syncopal cultures, operates by fumbling all standardisations. The ‘cruzos’ cross through and demarcate frontier zones. These crossed zones, these borderlines, are spaces of emptiness to be fulfilled by bodies, sounds and words. From this fulfilment emerges another possibilities of the invention of life, firmed in the tones of the diversity of knowledges, of the radical transformations and cognitive justice. (Simas and Rufino in Fogo no Mato: a ciência encantada das macumbas – Fire in the Woods: the enchanted science of ‘macumbas’, free translation by us).

When the coletivA ocupação makes their performers bodies-intersections in the act of evoking forces that draw a tectonic cartography in Eruption, their staging presents some sort of mystical-dialetheic power, where the presence of entities and ‘encantados’ does not detach the work’s discourse from the historic materiality, as they are understanding the rite in its communitary dimension and function as organiser of plural societies.

Way beyond the real names mentioned in the scene, from riot leaders to grandparents of the performer-creators, the Eruption is fundamentally collective and collectivising. In the mise-en-scène, the chorus is a constant. In choreographies, the unison movement is contaminated by vibrations in different frequencies that emanate from each pulsating body. In the ‘cruzos’ inhabited by the coletivA, the many possibilities of the invention of life arise.

Throughout all the layers of Eruption a spiral time is settled, a time that does not elide the chronologies, but subverts them (Leda Maria Martins in Performances do tempo espiralar – Performances of the spiral time, free translation by us). The syncopated beat of the drums coexist with the electronic beats of the soundtrack created by the Music coletivA Front and DJ Shaolin. In the costume design by Juan Duarte, the tradition and the everyday can both be seen in ragged clothes that sustain a flow that intersects times and spaces. The light design by Benedito Beatriz creates a sky where different atmospheres dance in the ceiling, at the same time that laser beams draw and cut through the scenes, creating something that lies between the underground party culture of São Paulo and a(n) (afro)futurist perspective.

Running in a circle, the performers build up winds within the scenic space. In the swinging of this ‘gira’, they move the ashes of a past and present dystopia: the civilising process and its colonial projects, with all the oppressions, suppressions, violences. Race, gender, class, culture, society: the coletivA ocupação overflows into lava to go to war, to party, to destroy, to reconstruct and to reenchant worlds. Eruption spreads the ashes as one sows the soil to cultivate futures.

Notes

[1] The word ‘caboclo’ is related to a person of mixed Indigenous Brazilian and European ancestry, but its meanings in the context of Simas’ text are also related to entities and forces from Afro-Brazilian indigenous religions such as the Umbanda.

[2] Reference to November 15th, date of the Republic Proclamation of Brazil in 1899, and also the date considered (although it is not a consensual claim amongst researchers) to be the foundation of Brazilian Umbanda religion, when the Seven Crossroads ‘caboclo’ entity was for the first time incorporated by the medium Zélio Fernandino de Morais in a religious ritual in Rio de Janeiro in 1908.

[3] Tupinambás, aimorés and bugres are Indigenous Brazilian populations; exus and pombagiras are Umbanda’s entities.

[4] Piece of chalk used in Umbanda’s rituals.

[5] Sacred yards of both African and Afro-Brazilian religions.

[6] “coletivA ocupação”, stylised that way reinforcing the choice for a feminine gender, meaning “occupation collective”.

[7] Enslaved woman from Barbados, accused of witchcraft during the 1692-1693 Salem (MA, USA) witch trials.

[8] “Encantados”, enchanted ones, are creatures/entities from brazilian mythology and folklore.

[9] Reference to Frantz Fanon’s book of the same name (The Wretched of the Earth).

[10] Literally, spin. Name given to Umbanda’s ritual that consists, synthetically, in chanting, dancing, praying and summoning entities.

[11] Literally, crossing, intersection. The concept developed by the authors is better explained in the next citation; it refers to the crossing of many cultures, both diasporic and local, in the history of the foundations of Brazilian society regarding a range that reaches from religious aspects to the daily lives.

[12] Literally, crossroad. The concept of encruzilhada is related to cosmogonic aspects of afro Brazilian religions, in opposition to the normal use of the expression as something difficult and/or bad: the encruzilhada is understood, in this context, as a place of creation, a place of endless possibilities.