amilton de azevedo writes about “APES” (2022), by Cia. do Sal (São Paulo, Brazil). originally posted in portuguese as “Ícaro preto em pleno voo”

APE. A. PE. A-pe. Ape. APES. The racist slur, repeated in a manner that resembles the chants of the football bleachers, is heard by the public before they can see Clayton Nascimento onstage. His voice repeats and repeats and repeats insistently, roaring each syllable. APES (MACACOS), from Cia. do Sal (Salt Company, literally translating), is a staging of impressive dimensions regarding Nascimento’s work as actor, playwright and director, the depth and importance of its discourse and the connection established with the audience.

The play started to be developed back in 2015 and its dramaturgy-denouncement is painfully open: its text, recently published in Brazil by Cobogó, is structured in a way that new episodes of racism and racial violences in Brazil can be included into its narrative. And there are a lot of them. The rapper Emicida sings that eighty shots reminds you that there is a bleach skin and a target skin (in portuguese, “pele alva” and “pele alvo”, a wordplay connecting skin colour and violences); Nascimento transforms his body-target into a body-map, body-flight, body-life. Throughout the two hours of the show, APES tells about over five hundred years of Brazilian history.

In recent years, it has become more and more common to see autobiographical (or autofictional) monologues on the stages of São Paulo. However, how many of them are being created by black people? How many of these narratives are talking about the violent history of slavery and its cruel legacy onto recreational, structural, everyday racism in first person? Probably close to none. So, when Nascimento talks about his experiences and the aggressions he suffered, he not only inserts himself in the centre of the show, but also calls the entire audience to see themselves in the story being told, motivating a powerful reflection of the heritage of the slavocracy colonialism that founded this Brazil.

The work’s name is the starting point: APES. The absolutely dehumanising and abject racial slur is assumed, in critical perspective, by Nascimento: if we know what the life of the black person in Brazil has been like in the past years, we already know how this play will end. So, let everybody know: the ape has arrived. And he goes on: but the ape, before being a ape, he, at least in this play, the ape will choose who he wants to be (excerpts of the dramaturgy of APES, freely translated by us).

One of the strengths of the spectacle is the epic relation built with the mise-en-scène itself: apart from narrating his own trajectory, pointing out to his contact with theatre classes, at a very young age, as his salvation, Nascimento makes the stage a place for possibilities; a space of infinite creation of encounters. A sun that cannot melt the wings of this black Icarus, yet sheds light at his path.

But there is no romanticization coming from his individual perspective: APES is an agile succession, sometimes rough, sometimes didactic, of denouncements regarding the State violence and the genocide of the black and poor population of Brazil. Alone at the stage, without any scenography, Nascimento turns his body and voice into a vehicle of communication, memory, dream and fight, oscillating between the posture of a teacher in front of his class and a savagery that manifests the brutal reality.

In the single act that composes APES, one can see episodes that: express the function of the theatre as a broadener of horizons; speak about the violences of today; present reckless persecution; and teach a master class on colonisation, slavery, violence, oppression and education. Nascimento, throughout precise and intense movements, conducts his audience through the harshness and the weightlessness needed to support the complex discourse of the show.

Occupying all the spaces on the naked stage, illuminated by the light design of Danielle Meirelles, Nascimento has only one prop: a lipstick, used to turn his body into a blackboard, a map, a territory. The red lines and shapes painted on his black skin are also the blood of history, of the nation, of its countless victims.

Individual and collective tragedies take up the stage. Nascimento interprets and evokes real figures in a scenic pedagogy that transits through representation and didactical narrative aiming to build a crystalline discourse whilst keeping up a dynamic staging. The actor captures his audience without allowing them to leave the critical thinking aside even for a second.

APES historically locates the origins of what we live today and also reminds about the importance of naming things – and people. Nascimento represents a Brazilian woman named Terezinha Maria de Jesus, as well her son, Eduardo de Jesus. The boy was a victim of State violence, being murdered by the military police of the Rio de Janeiro state in the front yard of his house, aged ten. Nascimento and Terezinha became close during the creation of the play, and Cia. do Sal integrates the #JustiçaParaEduardo (#JusticeForEduardo) campaign, denouncing the crime and demanding for justice. It is the voice of this mother that finishes the play, accompanied by a deal proposed by Nascimento: that we will, all of us, arrive well at our houses that night.

Before that, a collective oath: it is the possibility that, in the theatre, a civilising pact can be founded, as we can become aware of where we came from and wish for a less violent tomorrow. We already know how this play will end, Nascimento said. There is a lot to be done, both in the symbolic and the pedagogical field – and fundamentally in our daily lives – so that new futures can be envisioned. APES, by Nascimento, black Icarus, is a beautiful flight towards this horizon.