amilton de azevedo writes about “Desfazenda – Bury me out of this place” (2021), play-film by O Bonde (São Paulo, Brazil). originally posted in portuguese as “todos os olhos sobre eles”.

“In the thin layer between memory and forgetfulness sometimes what reveals itself, astonishing and scary, is the present” (epigraph of the documentary Boy 23 – The Forgotten Boys of Brazil)

All eyes on them: the performance group O Bonde. Four black people (Ailton Barros, Filipe Celestino, Jhonny Salaberg and Marina Esteves), on a black stage, crossed by the white light. When the play-film Bury me out of this place [1] begins, Tupac’s All Eyez On Me sample can be understood as a statement or a prayer. Black lives, in Brazil and in so many other parts of the world, seem to always exist between hypervisibility and invisibility.

When an upper-class white woman from the state of Pernambuco called Sarí Corte Real abandons five-years-old black boy Miguel Otávio de Santana, son of her housemaid, on an elevator and presses the rooftop button it is because, for her, he should vanish: the kid fell off the building and passed away. In the same way, Lucas Matheus, Alexandre and Fernando Henrique, three kids from Rio de Janeiro’s suburban city Belford Roxo, disappeared in December 2020; it was later discovered that they were murdered, their bodies were never found and only two years later those responsibles for the crime are being investigated. Invisibles.

Almost paradoxically, black people are also hypervisible in the racist society we live in. In August 2021, Luiz Carlos was harassed by Assaí supermarket security guards in the countryside of São Paulo state and had to take his clothes off to prove that he did not rob the place. One year before, in November 2020, João Alberto Silveira Freitas was beaten to death by military police officer Giovani Gaspar da Silva and security guard Magno Braz Borges in the parking lot of a Carrefour supermarket in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul’s capital. It was November 19th, the eve of the Black Consciousness Day in Brazil.

A few months earlier, in the USA, George Floyd was seen as a menace for Derek Chauvin, white police officer, during the eight minutes and forty six seconds whilst his knee strangled him on the ground. Years before, Eric Garner said eleven times to Daniel Pantaleo, another white police officer, that he could not breathe while being choked to death by him.

All eyes on them all the time. Or never. It took sixty years for the story that inspired Bury me out of this place to come up. It was only in 1998 that the historian Sidney Aguilar Filho revealed what happened in the countryside of São Paulo during the 1930s: in a farm called Santa Albertina, little kids were turned into numbers and enslaved by the owners of the land – the Rocha Miranda family, members of the Brazilian Integralist Action, a nazi-inspired movement, who “adopted” around fifty children, mostly black, from a Rio de Janeiro orphanage.

The director and screenwriter Belisário Franca based his 2016 documentary Boy 23 – The Forgotten Boys of Brazil on Aguilar Filho’s research, which is the inspiration for Lucas Moura’s playwright of Bury me out of this place. The documentary scrutinises the racist structures that let the case take place – which is one among so many in our sad and violent history. In order to do so, it sheds light on the characters that lived through what happened and, by doing so, talks about the pains of scars that were never healed in such individuals and in our society. What O Bonde collective does in their play-film is to fabulate new senses and meanings through the fictionalisation of what happened, focusing their glance onto the subjectivity of those who lived in such a situation.

In Bury me out of this place, the spoken word is the core of a black and white story. The naked stage is the settlement for three actors, one actress and four microphones. The black box amplifies the feeling of enclosure of those narrated characters, whose lives since the early years were nothing but forced labour and permanence. Directed by Roberta Estrela D’Alva, member of the important Brazilian theatre group Núcleo Bartolomeu de Depoimentos, the synthesis of theatrical elements and the precision between voice, body, light, photography and soundtrack refers back to Vai te Catar! (2008), spoken word solo performance by Estrela D’Alva.

The light design by Matheus Brant (who also is responsible for the play-film photography and, alongside Gabriela Miranda, image direction and editing) becomes a fifth actor in the play-film. Beyond the dynamics established between revelation and concealment, the light design also oscillates in its meanings. We see figures in the blackness of the night, bodies hit by the whiteness of the shine to make blind [2], and their silhouettes are seen with such clear contours in their unitness that one can’t even imagine the looks on their many faces – that are later revealed, by a light change, to have always been covered by an enslaved tin plate mask, a colonial domination instrument.

The only element of nature present in the play’s narrative is the favela tree. The ancestral power that could live there is now a dry branch that gives no more fruits. The White Priest, invisible antagonist of Bury me out of this place, insists on watering the dead tree. As the Angolan author Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida wrote in The Vision of Plants, to the flowers, sprouts and seedlings it does not matter who looks up to them. The protagonist of her book is an old former captain of a slave ship that cultivates a beautiful garden in his yard.

The Priest waters a dry tree. How many power relations can be represented in such an image? This favela [3], maybe, can be seen as a completely broken white christian patriarchy project that can’t accept the end of its blood legacy.

Bury me out of this place is about colonial heritages and their diverse manifestations, including the white saviour complex that can be perceived in modern times activism. So, what is this war the show’s characters are afraid of? What are the cages? The fears? Both the fear of those who hold, the fear of those being held. The opposite of fear is movement, says the playwright. Word by word, verse by verse, those four narrated kids put themselves into motion until they get to the point where they can exist.

The musical direction by Dani Nega makes the soundtrack the sixth actor of Bury me out of this place. The spoken word sometimes is turned into song, and it is its rhythm (designed by Estrela D’Alva) that coordinates the atmospheres of the scenes. In the play, dialogues become battles and monologues are painful poetries put into action.

In the spoken words between beats and silences, each one of the characters, in their own way, turns their look into their own lives and try to find, somewhere, other possibilities of being. Twelve (Salaberg) is the one who invites in the direction of the “what if…” – but it is only when something beyond ordinary comes up that the self discovery process is unveiled.

The black and white is ripped by red. Vermelho e preto, preta criança (Red and black, black kid), sings the Saci song. It is this figure, this Brazilian mythical force [4], that appears, running from the forests, to open up the doors of the real world – and of all others. Freedom presents itself in the play-film throughout this imp-entity and their mischievous actions. It is them that ignites thoughts and memories, presented in the form of testimonies from the four characters. 

Thirteen (Esteves), the only woman on the stage, becomes a multitude whilst denouncing the oppressions suffered by black women. Forty (Barros) talks about love, sexuality and affection amongst black men. Twenty Three (Celestino) comes up as some sort of witness of the times. Twelve is dream and rebellion. But there are other important numbers on Bury me out of this place.

First, the one. Speaking as a choir in a litany text, the black silhouettes in front of the white background appear in the video as an unique figure. They pray as one body. The scene repeats itself and, bit by bit, that oneness is broken and can be seen as, effectively, the multiple parts that form the whole. It is individuals, in their complex subjectivities, that can compose a collectivity.

Then, the Zero. Quantification and representation of nothingness. There is a possible parallel with a character from Boy 23, called Two within the farm – as his age was close to one of the Rocha Miranda family’s kids, he was raised as the house slave. By the time of the production of Franca’s Boy 23, he was already deceased, but the words from their family about him in the documentary can reveal the complex and contradictory context of the foundation of his identity, mostly because of his childhood.

Zero, in Bury me out of this place, is the first of the many boys and girls that would live on the farm. His relation with the White Priest was unique in such a way that he could not perceive himself in the same condition as those who would later arrive there as his equals. When his diary is revealed, it is not by chance that O Bonde chooses to divide his voice between their four artists. 

There is nothing simple about an existence, especially when one loses the reference around who one is. Zero forgets that he is black not in denial, but for perceiving race only as an oppression system and he, being the house slave, would mostly be sidelined with the White Priest. Throughout his latter actions, an arc of redemption can be drawn – hopefully, the first impulse towards a better future to come. 
From the prologue’s sea in the sky to the epilogue’s dive and everything in between: navigations. Que caminho tão escuro. E tão cheio de areia (Such a dark path. And filled with sand – excerpt from the soundtrack). In the moving waters, the tears that can’t be seen but that are there, piling up for so long. O Bonde collective sends out to the future their manifestos of today, before everything has ended. And what comes up after the end? All eyes on them.

Notes

[1] The original title of the show, Desfazenda, is a wordplay in portuguese, where the word for “to do” and “farm” (noun; similar to “plantation”) are written in the same way. The prefix “des” relates to English “un”. So, Desfazenda can be translated both as Undoing and Unplantation, considering also that the background of the farm where the show takes place can relate to the slavery background of the plantation system in the USA.

[2] “Blackness of the night” and “shine to make blind” are references to a song called Todos Os Olhos em Nóiz, by Brazilian artists Emicida and Karol Conká, that not only uses samples from Tupac’s All Eyez On Me but also translates exactly to All Eyes On Us.

[3] Common name of a Brazilian endemic tree (Cnidoscolus quercifolius), favela also means slum.

[4] Saci is a character of Brazilian folklore, with Indigenous origins and transformation throughout the years under the influence of afro-diasporic elements. Normally represented as an one-legged black kid with a red cap.