amilton de azevedo writes about “Study nº 1: Death and Life” (2022), by Magiluth Group (Pernambuco, Brazil). Originally posted in portuguese as “mas isso ainda diz pouco”.

In the same week that Magiluth, a Brazilian theatre group from Recife (Pernambuco), premiered their Study nº 1: Death and Life in São Paulo, a young man named Moïse Mugenyi Kabagambe, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, who came to Brazil as a war refugee in 2011, was brutally murdered in Rio de Janeiro. As brazilian author and poet João Cabral de Melo Neto (1920 – 1999), writes in Morte e Vida Severina (The Death and Life of Severino), there are too many Severinos, all the same in life and destiny (excerpts freely translated by us), who migrate, emigrate and immigrate in endless flows and for so many reasons, going away from the fountain of their own rivers and following the waters until the dreamt seas in which such rivers flows into, as does the narrator of Melo Neto’s story, from the Capibaribe River in the northeastern Brazil up to the Atlantic Ocean. Tragically, in many cases and for a long time, only death has been found / by those who thought they would find life.

The dramatic poem The Death and Life of Severino, by João Cabral de Melo Neto, written between 1954 and 1955, is the inspiration for Magiluth’s Study nº 1. But, as the artists attempt to organise and reorganise their misé-en-scene, they insist: still this doesn’t tell much about their work. The Death and Life of Severino is considered a christmas play, in which the author depicts, in a singular way, the migrational movement of the retreatant that left behind the drought, the hunger and the misery of the state of Pernambuco’s hinterlands, crossing through all the biomes of the northeastern part of Brazil until his arrival in the state capital, the city of Recife. Magiluth’s artists, sided by Luiz Fernando Marques Lubi on direction and Rodrigo Mercadante as an assistant director and musical director, start from the power of such narrative to build dialogues, bridges and frictions with contemporanean matters and crises.

But still this doesn’t tell much. The insistence on bringing such affirmation to the stage, referring to the poem’s first movement, when the retreatant explains to the reader who he is and why he is going, operates simultaneously in the structural game of the mise-en-scène and also in the thoughtful way that Magiluth group deals with their discourse. Study nº 1 is a show that moves like a spiral, presenting in its succession of scenes a series of attempts at beginning, ending and restarting: life, death, life, inconstancy and fragility, in a reckless pursuit of that so beautiful as a yes / in a room full of no.

Also still this doesn’t tell much, because Magiluth seems well aware that, even though we can all be Severinos when facing the inequality and precarization intrinsic to late stage capitalism, not everyone is equal in their destinies. In the projection seen onstage, the shared screen of a web browser shows multiple Google search results: in each one, a scenery of crisis. Humanitarian, migratory, climatic, identitarian, economical; this latter seems to cross over, somehow, all the former ones. It is a terrible horizon to gaze upon in this world where only the farms of death / are worth here to cultivate. 

In Study nº 1: Death and Life, Magiluth presents a fragmented journey between many ways to narrate what runs through the river of our times. They also narrate themselves, in past and present tense. Lubi proposes a flowing mise-en-scène, with entrances, exits and passages through the audience, filled with materialities that reorganise themselves in each scene: screens, microphones, shadow images, backlighting compositions and a bicycle.

The show, fulfilled with eminently political crossovers, keeps the artistic signature verified throughout Magiluth’s former works, as it maintains the freshness of their scenic relations, built in a way that resembles boys playing around with their friends and their imagination, with a performative handle regarding the construct of narrators and characters, approaching and implying themselves in their choices in such a way that one can always realise who they are and who they are playing, and a glance cast upon their own trajectory as a possibility of analysis by the optics of Severino’s journey. In that sense, considering the disparity between the Brazilian regions regarding many things, including the theatrical production and recognition, it is curious to reflect on how capital flows, not only financially but also culturally: perhaps Magiluth is the group from the northeast region of Brazil that has been more present in São Paulo’s stages for some years now, premiering their last two works in the biggest city of the country. But still this doesn’t tell much.

All dressed up with denim jeans, the cast directly refers to the city of Toritama, present in The Death and Life of Severino as the place where two men are taking a corpse to be buried. In Study nº 1, Toritama is also the national capital of denim, background of the documentary Waiting for the Carnival (2019), that, according to its director, Marcelo Gomes, is a movie that exposes the farce of neoliberalism: the dream of autonomy is replaced by self exploitation.

As pointed out by the South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, teacher at the Berlin University of the Arts, in Germany, in his work The Burnout Society, the 21st century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but an achievement society, the inhabitants of which have become entrepreneurs of themselves. The author advances towards an instigating socio-comportamental diagnosis, but still this doesn’t tell much about Magiluth’s work.

At the same time that Han’s thoughts dialogue with the contemporaneity, there is more data that must be taken into account regarding such approximation with Study nº 1. While it is true that part of the population adopts, somehow voluntarily, such ways of production – and, in consequence, of life – there is also a huge crowd that sees themselves sidelined, with no choices, to the neoliberal subjection that transforms misery into a profit opportunity.

The contemporary Severinos, amongst others pointed out by the show, are these many people that, because of simple and tragic necessity, apply for app-based delivery and transportation jobs. Among them, that one, the most famous case, whose name was used for the rebranding of work precarity, updated to late stage capitalism: the uberization of work, mark of the gig economy.

When Thiago de Jesus Dias, aged 33, suffered a stroke in the evening of July 8, 2019, and died waiting for rescue, he had been working over twelve hours a day delivering groceries for an app. An Uber driver refused to take him to the hospital because he was dirty and wet. As the teacher Dennis de Oliveira pointed out in an interview for Ponte Jornalismo about the murder of Moïse Kabagambe, there are no more fellow workers in the same situation, now everybody is a competitor.

Maybe that is why Magiluth ends their Study nº 1 with a dead body laid on the floor. The actor, playing a delivery man, does not get up for applause and he does not get any help from his colleagues. It is a strong image – because it highlights the impossibility of finding life in the end of that journey, differentiating themselves from that Severino from Melo Neto’s text, who migrates and witnesses a childbirth – which is beautiful because it is a door / opening itself in more paths.

It is hard to point out paths for today’s and yesterday’s Brazil. It is also hard to envision futures. To spiral their attempts upon the horizon seems to be the pursuit of Magiluth, who finds moments of pure poetry in their own movements. The fragments of Study nº1 jump through time and space between micro and macro approaches around this Severine peregrination. From the city of Toritama to the Kiribatian Ioane Teitiota and his family’s struggle to be recognized as climate refugees, the water of rivers and oceans around the globe flows in diverse manners but its paths are drawn almost every time in a sad way; the river drowns in the swell / and suffocates in the low tide. And behind the tides and the droughts and the misery there is the gears of capitalism. The machinery of the commodity world, from which no one can escape.

Still, it seems that this text doesn’t tell much about the show. Because Magiluth opens and closes curtains and, with them, provides diverse layers of meanings on the relation between what there is of the Severino character in each actor – and also what there is of each actor in the Severino they play. When Bruno Parmera insists on searching – in Google – his own identity, the results, far away from being representative to the actor, evoke the northeastern region imaginary so imbricated in the minds of a huge part of the Brazilian southeastern region population, filled with stereotypes and prejudices.

And then, we see the video clip of Cane Field’s Michael Jackson. It is not possible to apprehend the precise context of the video: a rural worker is dancing to Billie Jean in a dusty road that crosses a big plantation. Is he a Severino? Where is this farmer from and where is this soil that he cultivates today? In the projection, the translation of the song lyrics. Beyond the original intention of the composition, in Study nº 1 it seems to echo the paternal abandonment; but the kid is not my son.

When Parmera starts to dance with the man on the screen, the stage is filled by a beauty hard to explain. During the choreography, the actor dresses in costumes and props from the Maracatu Rural, a popular culture manifestation from the Zona da Mata region of Pernambuco state. There he somehow evokes the complexity that exists surrounding the idea of identity, simultaneously singular and plural, inhabiting a tension between tradition and invention.

Towards its final movements, Study nº 1 presents its own troubles when it organises, in an extenuating dialogue, the contemporary deadlock regarding imagining and proposing futures. In the intertwining of ideas and discourses, little by little the logic that sustains inequality, misery and its many tragedies is revealed: the logic of the capital, which is the logic of the war – the death craft where it is not needed to wait / for the crop: one receives / in the same moment one sows. 

The conflict is interrupted by an ex machina intervention: at the same time that we see billionaires investing fortunes in scapisms and fetishes disguised as space exploration, a Severino astronaut falls from the sky. If it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (the Brazilian subtitle for Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism), maybe the part that fits us in this plantation is to narrate ourselves and our times. But still this doesn’t tell much. It is necessary to talk about the bread, the rock and the knife. And also about the pain, the sadness and the melancholy.