Via reference to these parts of Black cultural id and immersion in Black ancestral values, the person immersed on this expertise “Blackens” metaphorically and socially—that's, prompts their reference to their Black African descendent id. Straddling the worlds of Candomblé and theatre, I've been creating a deep poetic strategy of eco-reconnection by my scenic follow. Teatro Preto do Candomblé makes use of a theatrical and lyrical method developed by the scenic analysis technique Ativação do Movimento Ancestral (Ancestral Motion Activation). It affords eco-reconnection between the person and the setting.
The actors type a neighborhood incited and impressed by the ethics of Candomblé. The immersion into the terreiro exhibits the actors one other sort of social existence that each the unique peoples of Brazil and the pre-colonial Africans loved: their relationship with nature and their every day life was one and the identical. Eco-reconnection consists of an actor and scenic motion that takes our planet’s environmental actuality as a every day theme for reflection, problematization, and creative creation.
Apart from connecting the actors with their African ancestry, Teatro Preto do Candomblé invitations them to imagine a extra optimistic and fewer harmful angle of their relationship with the setting the place they dwell. This can be a scenic-sensory-spiritual immersion that makes use of ceremonies for the development of the scenic motion. Organized and overseen by the yalorixá Mãe Rosa de Oyá and me, the ceremonies vary from ritual choices to energizing baths and requests for authorization of divinities and/or ancestors to hold out scenic improvisations by the intimate contact of the actors with the 4 important parts of nature.
After organizing the deities based on their predominant nature ingredient, we salute them liturgically and scenically in 4 rituals: hearth ritual (Exu and Xangô), earth ritual (Ogun, Oxossi, Omolú, Ossãe, Obá, Iroko and Logunedé), ritual of air (Oyá, Oxumarê, Ewá and Oxalá), and water ritual (Oxum, Yemanjá, Logunedé, Ibeji and Nanã). The target is to place the actors involved with the energies, colours, music, dances, meals, aromas, textures, sacred indicators and legends of every of those orixás and with the energetic emanations of every primordial ingredient. Via this Afro-scenic-poetic immersion, the performer establishes contact with the divinities and the pictures and sensations derived from it to generate uncooked materials for the scenic building, alongside the reflection on moral, liturgical, historiographical points that yield supplies for the efficiency and staging. The initiation rituals carry the actors into contact with the previous, household and legendary recollections; and lead the ori-ara-emí (head-body-spirit) to the dimension of spirituality, ancestry and nature.
Apart from offering a more in-depth contact with the every day actions of the terreiro, this immersion permits the actors to watch and be taught in regards to the cosmogony of the ancestral African and Afro-Brazilian cultures and set up a contact with the deity in query. The objective is to attach the actors with the energies, colours, music, meals, and legends of every one in every of these orishas, in addition to with the energetic reverberations of the ingredient current within the character of every deity. Via this course of, actors are crammed with photos and sensations which are the uncooked materials for scenic building.
As soon as the priming actions set up the context of the analysis, we are able to them carry it into the rehearsal room, the place we additional focus on moral and liturgical points. These priming rituals served as launch pad within the methodology for the actor’s bodily conditioning that we name bodily temple. This can be a notion of a sacred physique, a divine abode, a residing altar the place the presence of the orishas could be summoned. The elders of the axé launched me to this definition of physique throughout my earlier education into Candomblé. It was academically coined by Ana Claudia Moraes de Carvalho in her article “Corpo-encostado.” The bodily temple, within the spiritual sense, is the physique crammed with the cosmic forces in shut contact with the divine, in deep eco-reconnection. Within the theatrical sense, it's a physique overtaken, related to its ancestral roots, conscious of a cultural id, and in a state of readiness. This varieties the actor’s “scenic self”—or their id on stage—a component additionally current in Eugênio Barba’s Theatre Anthropology. Teatro Preto do Candomblé situates the seek for this scenic self inside Candomblé’s universe to create efficiency workout routines that bolster the actors’ energetic creativity and their performative presence whereas strengthening the connection between Candomblé and Theatre.
I've been creating this work in the hunt for eco-reconnection, Black ancestry, and affirmation of the three necessary fields—Candomblé, theatre, and ecology—for a qualitative change in our societal assemble and rights. This three-pronged consciousness offers coaching and ethics primarily based on these of the unique peoples of Brazil and of these inherited from the African peoples we preserve alive in every ceremony carried out within the axé communities. Might the theatre, our stressed artwork, with its highly effective potentialities for conferences, reflection, and problematization, add to its repertoire such artistic processes and performances that lead us to eco-reconnect.
